I have always been the kid that loved stationary… like loved it. When I was a kid, I lost my kindergarten spelling bee on purpose because I thought the second-place prize of stickers and a notebook was cooler than the first place prize. I loved doodling on the pages, and writing my name in a bunch of different fonts just to see what it would look like. I had countless notebooks as a kid, that were filled to the brim with random nonsense—diaries, stories, doodles, random notes, you name it. Notebooks were a place where I could put whatever I wanted to. I could just place all of my thoughts in there and allow them to just exist.
As a college student, I still love notebooks. I have many notebooks, each with a different purpose. There’s a watercolor notebook for prayer journaling, a dark green notebook for my marketing notes, a light green one for my English notes, a leather-bound one for poetry and flash fiction; the list goes on. However, my favorite one is a one-subject teal five-star notebook that I got at a Back-To-School Sale my junior year of high school. This notebook houses all of my notes for the Screenplay that I’m writing.
The notebook has a lot of convenient features that I liked when I originally bought it. I was looking for a notebook to use for my theater class when I came across this one. It is an inexpensive, high-quality notebook, in a pretty color. It has a durable vinyl cover, college-ruled paper, and narrow margins— perfect for long-winded writers like myself. Although I originally intended to use it for school, I ended up not needing it. So for months, this perfect notebook sat on my desk, untouched.
Then one night, I was in my bedroom talking to a friend. We were both bored and decided it would be fun to try and plan a short film. So, I ran over to my desk, skimmed through my notebooks until I found one that had not yet been delegated to a purpose, grabbed the first one I saw (the teal one), and immediately began writing. My friend and I were so excited! We just chattered away, filling up page after page. After that night, we decided to forget about writing a short film, and instead write a screenplay! Since then, we’ve put a lot of work into our masterpiece. I write the episodes, and she helps polish them; fixing the flow, filling plot holes, and correcting my grammar. That first night, we filled about ten pages of the notebook. However, now it’s almost completely full with drawings of maps, timelines, plot outlines, and character notes. The margins are crammed with ideas and connections, entire pages are wasted with illegible dialogue ideas that were scrawled in my chicken-scratch handwriting at 2:00 a.m.
The notebook is more than a notebook to me. It’s my brain laid out on paper. It has all of the thoughts that were once in my head, and it will remember my work long after I’ve forgotten it. It has my good ideas, my bad ideas, and my ideas that were just ok. Songs that my loved ones suggested for the soundtrack are written at the top of the random pages. X’s cross over the ideas that I wish I had never wasted time on. It explains the characters, all of which have a little bit of me sprinkled into them. It is not just a notebook, it is an extension of myself.
This screenplay, which through association, this notebook has allowed me to work with my favorite characters that I’ve ever written. It has allowed me to build deeper relationships with friends, and meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise met. This notebook isn’t just paper; it’s creativity, connection, and identity. Whenever I think of my screenplay, I think of this notebook. This notebook with its teal cover and white pages covered in rainbow ink carries a lot of weight for me, and it’s carried this weight well. I only have a few pages left inside of it, and I think its only con is that it isn’t long enough.