What is a Meta-Notebook?

And how does it boost writing and self-knowledge?

Photo by Yellow Cactus on Unsplash

I’m an avid notetaker. And I keep three kinds of notebooks.

The first is the journal for freewriting whenever I feel like untangling my thoughts. I usually don’t know what I’ll arrive at after a period of freewriting. This makes writing, for me, a process of self-discovery.

The second is a huge notebook for research notes. Whenever I find an excellent book, article, document, or artifact, I copiously take notes as though I won’t be able to access it again.

When you’re dealing with loads of research material from various locations, you wouldn’t want to keep on looking for the original material every time you need to consult or cite something. You’d want to have just one notebook for everything you predictably might need.

My huge notebook holds bibliographic information, facts, quotes, and my own paraphrases of the authors’ ideas (usually along with a direct quote, in case I might want, in the future, to check my paraphrase against the author’s wording).

But what occupies the most space in my huge notebook are my own notes. I mark them out prominently where I’ve noted my own developing thoughts, usually beside or around the source ideas that provoked them.