One way to keep a notebook

 It is my practice to keep a notebook.

That sounds better than, “I have a habit of taking notes,” which sounds better than “I compulsively take notes.”

I standardized the practice in 1999. The calendar was about to flip over into a new era. I would turn 45 in 2000. I was the editor of a daily newspaper, and I had the sense that my life was slipping by like water through a sieve.

And so I began to wake up a little early — just 15 or 30 minutes at first — and think about what had happened the day before. Even the most ordinary day had its moments: an observation by the Wise Woman, a conversation with a friend, a lovely bloom on a plant I couldn’t identify.

Something had happened during that day. Had I been alert enough to notice?

Some people have spiritual awakenings. I started to keep a notebook.

I am now on No. 113.

The notebooks are Mead Composition Books, the kind with speckled black and white covers that are sold in office supply stores and supermarkets. Each has 100 pages. I leave the first page blank, although I don’t recall the original reasoning.

The first thing I do with a new book is to number the pages, 1-99. The last five pages are an index. It’s the only way I can find ideas that I want to reconsider. And so Page 95 is headed “Index” and has listings for pages 1-20. Each page in the notebook has a line in the index. Subjects are limited to a word or two.

The front of the book has 10 pages of lists under these headings:

• Unfinished business — some notes reminding me of what was going on in the last book that needs to be continued.

• Vows & observances — mainly a list of habits I’d like to cultivate, although it includes some firm resolutions: I will finish writing the essay on x by Dec. 31.

• Prayers of the people — a page of notes to jog my memory about friends, their travels, health problems, family events and our conversations. The title is from The Book of Common Prayer.

• Things I noticed today — a page out of William Carlos Williams’s notebook. It’s just a collection of odd observations, mostly on natural history.

• Research topics — a list of things that interested me enough to search for information.

• Books I’d like to read — a list for my next trip to the library. I’ve learned from experience to leave two pages for this because I read book reviews. I go to the library often, looking for books on this list. If I can find a book, I skim through it to see if I really need to read it.

• Essays in an imaginary book — a list of essays I’d like to write. Some samples of essays that I actually did write are at hebertaylor.com.

• Words and images — a page of notes of words that I have to look up in the dictionary, or unusually sharp, catching images. William Carlos Williams, again, started me on this list.

• String too short to be saved — a reference to Donald Hall’s collection of sketches. In my notebook, it’s usually just a sentence, found somewhere, that stands by itself, without comment. Did you know that Yeats’s father said, “Writing is the social act of a solitary man?” (I’m not sure that he did. But somewhere in my reading I ran across that claim. Do you think it could be true?)

The pages between those standing headings and the index are a journal. Each entry has a date and a subhead. Here are ideas for stories, thoughts stirred up by reading, flashes of insight (or of what passed for insight at one inexplicable point in my life). If you’ve been reading, you have an sample of what’s in those 113 notebooks.

I don’t have any excuses for this behavior. After so many years, this habit or practice is just a fact about me.

If I were to try to justify the practice, I couldn’t do better than Paul Theroux: “Some writers struggle to come up with a new idea. Others keep notebooks.”