One piece of my own writing that I have lost and would do a lot to get back was written in a notebook. In August before my freshman year at college I participated in a school sponsored wildlife trek in Killarney Park, Ontario for three weeks. At the end we each had to spend 36 hours alone on the edge of a pond, out of sight of anyone else, without food. I didn’t stray more than 10 feet from my sleeping bag and spent my time writing (we weren’t allowed to read) – it was a writing experience unlike any other I’ve had since. I mostly chronicled the spring and summer before I went off to college and did so with a level of energy and conviction that I never brought to any of my college papers. I put the notebook in a cabinet drawer and sometime after moving out of the dorm and into a new school I lost it. Had I written in a laptop computer instead of a notebook would I still have what I wrote? Probably not. All writing is impermanent in some way. I just wish I could look through it the way you can look through yours.

It has been called to my attention that you are in fact of the male persuasion. Please accept my sheepish apology.

Agree completely. And I think we’re pretty close. I suspect that some form of the classic rules of book layout (have you read The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst? I’m always recommending that book to everyone; it’s awesome) will apply to electronic readers, just as they have turned out to apply to web pages. Remember when the Internet used to be, typographically speaking, really ugly? Now it’s only kind of ugly, and getting less ugly every year. Electronic readers can’t be too far behind.

When I think of Facebook or Twitter, I think of social control. Nothing private gets expressed on social networks, except by attention seekers. It’s one great effort at self-presentation, and self-presentation is, by its very nature, not private, and is generally superficial. The notebooks have the advantage of being designed NOT to see the light of day, and in that sense they are more honest, less contrived, and, dare I say, more real.

Having said that, there is no reason that every stray thought which is captured on a laptop needs to be published to Twitter or Facebook, but the ease with which it is possible to pass on the minutiae of daily life to “friends” makes it almost inevitable. At the same time, the presence of social networks tends to dictate the general tenor of discourse available to our imagined audience, which means a sort of preemptive self censorship is at work, which dictates purpose, audience, form and even content. Notebooks don’t do that to us.

I’m sure this says more about me (and perhaps my age—34) than it does something essential about any medium. But when I have a pen in my hand and I’m scribbling on paper, I’m more on: I’m listening harder, the brain is working a little faster to analyze or edit whatever it is I’m doing. I even write a little more cleanly. Which results in a better product, even if I can barely read my handwriting later.

I never look at old notebooks for fiction writing. I think this is mostly to avoid nausea. But I love looking at the notes I took when I was interviewing people (I tend to keep the same notebooks for quite a while, since I don’t do a lot of journalism)—when I look at the scrawled words on the paper, I’m right back there, even if the interview happened years ago.

I do most of my writing long-hand in spiral-bound sketch books (I like the unlined pages and thick paper), and my notebooks are a mishmash of stories, notes, and work: use-case diagrams and pseudocode bumping against prose. I like the immediacy and temporality of these notebooks.

The one thing that makes relying on notebooks difficult, though, is that they’re hard to organize. From the outside, they all look a lot alike, and though I try to scribble an index on the cover of each, that gets muddled up with phone numbers, tracking codes, and deadline dates. When I try to find something in an older notebook, I often get caught up in the things I’m not looking for, like an old operating system trying to read a badly fragmented drive. But I think that’s a fair trade for the notebook’s physicality, flexibility, resilience, and resistance to data rot.