You should absolutely buy that stupid thing

A couple of years ago, when the Aussie dollar was riding high, I treated myself to a subscription to Field Notes, this American notebook company. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. I think it was because John Gruber used to rave about them on his Daring Fireball podcast, and I have a terrible weakness for notebooks. A terrible, terrible weakness.

That weakness has led to a very large stack of unused notebooks gathering dust on my desk.

But recently, I finally found a use for them. Ever since I bought a Plaud Note pin for my new dictation rig, I’ve been squeezing out an extra couple of thousand words a day just by dictating chapters while I walk the dogs in the morning. What started as a little tweak to my workflow ended up completely re-engineering it — to very good effect.

One minor speed bump, though: when you’re away from your desktop, you can’t check your notes or peek at a map or some other file mid-sentence. If I’m writing a chapter set in Barcelona, as I was today, for example, I can’t just jump onto Google Earth and wander through the old quarters. I need to have all that shit locked in before I hit ‘record’.

If you’re gonna dictate a story, you really need to know what you’re going to say before you say it.

At first, I’d spend the first half of my walk just talking to myself about what was going to happen in the chapter, and then the second half actually dictating it.

Then it hit me: why not block out the chapter beforehand? Just sit down at my desk and jot down seven or eight narrative waypoints—enough to map the shape of the scene—and take that with me. That way, I can spend the whole walk dictating instead of dithering.

So, five or six years after I bought them, I finally tore the wrapping off those pristine Field Notes notebooks and put them to work. They work well! Who would have thought notebooks could be so useful?

Let this be a lesson: you should absolutely buy that stupid thing you want to buy on a whim. It will totally work out.