Composing with notes

 Jillian Hess, a scholar who is interested in notes and notetaking, says that Susan Sontag used notebooks to compose in two ways.

First, Sontag used her notebooks to compose her essays. She collected and sorted materials on subjects that intrigued her. She collected pages of quotations she wanted to use and lists of points she wanted to make. She had lists of words to use and avoid. (Some writers pay more attention to diction than others.) By the time she sat down at the typewriter, her materials were in hand. At that point, she was almost making a collage.

Second, Sontag used her notebooks to compose herself, to make the personality she wanted to be. Hess says Sontag wanted to be the person who was interested in everything. I think some of us are generalists by temperament. We couldn’t specialize in any one field without doing violence to our psyches.

Sontag liked to read the notes of other writers. In 1949, when she was a student, she noted that reading André Gide’s Journals helped her compose herself.

 

They affect me in the same magical way; for immersion into an order and a discipline is the only thing that can soothe me….

 

Immersing yourself into someone else’s order and discipline is immersing yourself in another person’s mind. I love to do that, tramping around in the mind of someone whose order and disciplines of thinking are not like mine. Like Sontag, I like reading other people’s journals, notebooks, diaries and blogs.

• Source: Jillian Hess’s “Susan Sontag's Playground of Ideas” is in her Noted on Substack, March 2, 2026. It’s here:

https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/susan-sontags-playground-of-ideas?utm_medium=email