Response to Chapter 2, "The Power of the Notebook"

"Whatever the format--private, public, handwritten, or on the computer--the point is to record fleeting ideas and quick impressions as we live our lives. Having done so, we can, in the future, recover what we were thinking and revisit the person we were at another moment in time."
(page 30)

Keeping a notebook, or just the act of recording thoughts and details while they are still fresh on the mind, is the key to good ideas and essentially good writing. What really struck me about this chapter is how it actually seemed to discourage the classic idea of the diary, which is good for history, but not for life. I like the guidelines given to help make your notebook count more. It makes me want to go back to my old journals and re-do some, if not all, of the entries so that their significance will be more clear to me.