Tuesday, August 25, 2009 | by nathan
As long as I’ve been alive, as far back as I can remember, I’ve been addicted to art supplies and stationery. As a kid, I loved it when it rained and we had to stay in for recess, because I would get out my markers or my colored pencils and start doodling. I drew intricate maps in which I’d later set the stories I would write. I’d copy drawings from Nintendo Power or comic books, or I’d make up my own NES games or superheroes, draw them out, and then write whole arcs for them. To this day it’s hard for me to pass blank journals or moleskines or nice-looking art supplies and not purchase them. By the time I was in the sixth grade I was never without colored pencils and a sketch pad. When the flimsy cardboard box that my pencils came in came apart, I took to carrying them around in an old Crown Royal bag that I’d found. I can imagine what my teachers thought about the home in which I was being raised, but my teachers in the sixth grade were mean to me, so they can suck it – I was raised in a great home.
Also mean to me in the sixth grade were my fellow students. Once I’d left my lunch card at home and had to sit outside and wait for the bell to go back into class. Some boys stole my sketch pad and started passing it around, making fun of my drawings, and I cried right in front of them like a little girl. When I was 18 and I told my friend Tish that story, she went the next day and bought me some art supplies. It was one of the nicest, sweetest things anyone has ever done for me. But by then I’d given my heart to the written word, and my sketch pad had been replaced by an ever-present journal.
Despite blogging, facebooking, tweeting, writing a novel and a recent flood of short stories, I find that keeping a paper journal keeps me sane. My current one is a beautiful little black-leather bound number I found, of all places, at Restoration Hardware in Dallas:
It’s almost full now, and I am excited to replace it with one I bought at Muckross House in Ireland. Getting a hand-bound leather journal was one of my main objectives for that trip, and I managed to find one on the last day. I find it keeps me sane, having to take the time to craft my thoughts at least semi-legibly. It lacks the sense of urgency, of get-it-out-there rush of freelancing and of blogging, of press releases and polished pieces. It helps me to remember that writing, at its best, should be hard work, but that it should also be fun, that I should be writing stories and characters I like and care about. That’s why I still keep art supplies around, why I sometimes sketch out scenes or maps. I want to succeed as a writer, but more than that I want to make sure I continue to enjoy it as much as I did on those rainy childhood days when I relished getting to stay inside with a white sheet of paper and a universe of possibilities in front of me.
