Sandwiches, Piles, Collages & My Notes

A look at my creative process

Hello, Friends of the Skies & Waterways!

This is a long, and very image-heavy post. You will have the best experience reading it in the Substack mobile app or on the web. Your email provider will definitely cut it off.

Today I’m opening up my notebooks and showing you how I collect and process ideas. This post is a follow-up to an article I wrote on Medium (not paywalled if you use the link provided), which itself was an iteration of an earlier Weirdo Poetry newsletter post (paywalled). Usually, I paywall anything about my notebooks. However, I’m making this post available for everyone. Many of the linked posts will be payalled ones from the archives. Even the paywalled ones have a preview portion accessible to everyone. In the links section at the end of this post, I will mark which ones are paywalled.

I fundamentally changed how I use notebooks starting in January of 2023 and have continued to gain inspiration for other notebook uses from other creatives I have discovered on Substack. These changes to my notebook practices have supercharged my creativity and how I produce work.

As you will see below, my notebooks are messy and often ugly. It’s the freedom to be messy and ugly in my notebook pages that allows me to grow artistically and to later produce, what I hope are, beautiful works that help others find ways to “suck the marrow out of life.”

If you are interested in seeing where I get my inspiration, you should subscribe to the newsletters of these excellent creators:

Austin Kleon

Jillian Hess

Sue Clancy

Amy Cowen

Stella Kalaw

Sandwiches, Piles, Collages & My Notes

Have you ever debated with friends about what qualifies as a sandwich? My kids and I categorize all foods as sandwiches, soups, or salads. After much lively debate and serious research, we think these are the basic taxonomic categories for food.

Tacos, burritos, hot dogs, and jiaozis are sandwiches.

Ceral is simply a breakfast soup.

Chicken Alfredo? It’s a salad.

Once you start digging into this idea of creating the simplest taxonomical structure possible for food, it’s stunning how similar the core elements of so many foods are across so many cultures.

This entire thought experiment was started because E, my second oldest, and the one who shares ADHD with me, and I noticed we were both drawn to eating sandwich-type foods.

One thing about people with ADHD is that they tend to love piles. My daughter has stacks of things in her room. It looks like a mess, but those stacks are the organizing principle that allows her to find and keep track of her possessions.

You will often find piles of books on my desk in my studio. Right now, I have a to-be-read-for-pleasure pile, a someone-wants-me-to-read-this-but-I-probably-won’t pile, a client-project-research pile, a Weirdo Poetry-research pile, and a for-structural support pile that keeps everything from crashing down and crowding my workspace.

What is a sandwich if not a pile? No wonder E and I love them!

Of course, the downside of piles is that sometimes people with ADHD create piles of stuff that they didn’t organize and only moved (DOOM piles) because they are too overwhelmed by seeing everything and can’t put anything away.

I’ve also seen many creatives who have ADHD who believe that they also think in piles. If you’ve ever talked to someone with ADHD, you might have noticed they appear to switch subjects rapidly, finding links and segways between seemingly unrelated ideas and topics. Perhaps, what is happening is that this neurodivergent thinker has piles in their brain.

I’ve noticed that I think in piles. My entire life I’ve seen links between things that others haven’t. And while that caused me no end of trouble as a young student, it was extremely helpful as a lawyer and in my career now as a freelance poet, writer, and illustrator.

I even take notes in piles. Here are some pictures from my notebooks of my brainstorming:

You can also see this propensity to pile in my art. I’m primarily a collage artist. I build illustrations one layer at a time, arranging different shapes to form pictures. Here is one of my illustrations of a great blue heron and all the pieces that make up the bird:

Instead of just seeing something like a bird as a basic unit, I see it as a collection, or pile, of smaller, more elemental shapes.

I also see writing poetry and prose as collage activities. I am layering ideas, fitting some concepts into the background, and using others to change the shape of the thesis and supporting arguments. Often, the first thing I see when I start to write a piece is the overall structure. And I do mean see. In my mind, I have an image for the shape of the essay or poem.

My job then becomes finding the right pieces of language to fit the blueprint I have already visualized.

For most of my life, when I used notebooks, I tried to use them as chronological journals or as places to free-write my thoughts and feelings. This is how most people use notebooks and journals, and it works for most people.

But I could never be consistent and carried a lot of guilt over my inability to stay the course. I have abandoned so many notebooks.

I also never made any art in my notebooks, other than an occasional doodle. Up until the pandemic, I didn’t think I had any visual art skills. Then I discovered Lynda Barry’s book, Syllabus. During the lockdown of 2020, free from the constraints of having any client work, I tried her exercises in my notebook.

It was a revelation.

These Barry exercises and her other books Making Comics and What It Is, would send me sprinting into making graphic literature and helped me figure out what my primary creative modality was.

However, it wasn’t until I started reading Austin Kelon and Jillian Hess each week that I realized I needed to reject trying to impose structure on my notebooks, and just use them intuitively.

While in past years I would start a new notebook each year, and then fill a half or two-thirds of it, since January 2023 I’ve completely filled two notebooks and have begun my third notebook today.

I started making collages, planning comics, and just making nonsense. The physical act of cutting and pasting was soothing and opened up new creative pathways. I was able to make these without judging the quality of them, unlike when I tried to sketch something. The collages were pure play. Here are some of the pages from my post-January 2023 notebooks:

I also draw and doodle random, abstract designs:

Sometimes I write poetry and make detailed sketches and collages:

And sometimes, these sketches are made into comics:

Other times, my sketches are rougher, but still recognizable in the final product. I also often create a series of things that seem unrelated until I see some connection:

Most often, my sketches are as crude as can be, and perhaps only visible in the finished product to me.

Here is a sketch and some notes from an outing last week that may someday become something:

These notebooks still also function as my journal, and so sometimes I need to redact portions of the notebooks before sharing them.

But most of the images and notes in my notebooks are only there as a way to capture what I pay attention to so that I can come back later and notice what I notice. This is part of my idea-fermentation process. It allows different concepts from the past, present, and future to react in unpredictable ways. These collisions often produce my most exciting ideas.

Often, an image will only be used years later. This sketch from my 2020 notebook was later used as a building block for several poetry comics:

The best ideas are not solitary atoms, but chemical compounds of atoms that have fused in unusual ways and produced surprising chemical reactions.

In addition to my physical notebooks, I also use the camera roll on my phone as a kind of visual notebook. I take pictures of things I want to create comics or stories about later. Sometimes, I use these as reference photos, but mostly I use them as prompts for poetry, comics, and essays.

Just like all foods are essentially sandwiches, soups, or salads, to me, every essay, poem, and illustration is a collage. My notebooks are the places where I pile up ideas that I can combine later into something else.

Notebook Details:

In case you’re curious, here are the details about my materials.

I use Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebooks. I used to use grid-pattern notebooks, but now prefer dot-pattern ones. I try and get a different color of notebook each time.

Currently, I write my notes with the fine tip of a Tombow dual-tip watercolor brush pen, N25.

I’ve also started experimenting with sketching with a black, Pigma Micron .05 pen. (See the Pringle Creek sketch and the sketch of the windy road).

Most of the coloring is done with either watercolor pencils or my Tombow watercolor brush pens.

I also experiment with watercolor painting and even acrylic painting in the pages of my Leuchtturm1917 notebooks. (I use paper towels on the pages after and before the pages I’m painting when using paints to keep the rest of the notebook from getting soaked, and I give the pages lots of time to dry.)

I use Elmer’s gluesticks for collage stuff and any kind of book, magazine, wrapper, label, scrap, string, or yarn I can get my hands on for my collages.

Selected Links to Other Weirdo Poetry Posts About My Notebooks:

Paper Collage Madness (4/21/23)

Cursive Cigarettes (7/4/23)

Notes, Notebooks, and Notetakers (8/11/23)

Abstract Koi, Concrete Happiness, and Haiku as Travel Literature (paywalled) (8/15/23)

Building a Gentler Life (paywalled) (8/23/23)

Today we Fly (9/1/23)

Using My Attention Machine to Shrink My Focus (paywalled) (10/5/23)

Stories Lurking in the Shadows (paywalled) (10/17/23)

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason