It’s important to make sure you own the right kind of blank book to serve as your Scanner Daybook, because this is no ordinary journal. You can carry a spiral notebook to write in when you leave the house, but you need a more impressive book to enter those notes into when you come back home. Get something you like, but more formal than you’re accustomed to using—one of those books you’re almost afraid to write in. (Don’t worry, we’ll get you writing in it!)
Make sure there are no lines on the pages and give yourself a lot of space to write on. The larger each page and the thicker the book, the better it will be. You can usually find something suitable in an art supplies store, sometimes with an old-fashioned leather-look binding of the kind you might find in Scrooge’s office. Run your hand over the paper to be sure you’ll enjoy writing on it and get the kinds of pens that make writing enjoyable to you. If you want to have a really good time, you can put your Daybook on its own stand like one of those huge dictionaries. (If you make notes at the computer or when you’re away from this tome, you can always tape them in later. It’s creative fun to tape a variety of notes and pictures to its pages and write around them, and it makes an interesting Daybook.)
Writing in your Scanner Daybook is more important than you realize yet. As the days go by and the entries add up, you’ll notice that you’re actually taking care of the sides of you that you may have neglected as well as undervalued until now. But the very act of considering your explorations worth keeping track of begins to change everything you ever thought about yourself. In place of those thoughts most Scanners carry around with them about their “flitting” or “dabbling,” without any extra effort you’ll find a growing respect for the way your mind works.
It’s good for you, too. Giving that creative mind of yours a chance to have some fun is like giving a plant sunshine and water.
If you’ve felt under the gun in the past whenever you started something, you’ll enjoy discovering that the act of taking some notes or making a sketch on any old idea is too minor to create any performance pressure you might ordinarily feel, but all the same, writing down these fun ideas in a bound book will subtly teach you to value them. Every time you record your ideas and add drawings and projections and fantasies, the early teaching that made you doubt yourself will get fainter until it becomes second nature to assume it’s okay—better than okay—to be fascinated with anything new.
Your Daybook is also a self-study book: Turned loose without any restrictions, allowed to learn or design or imagine whatever you like, what kind of Scanner emerges? Where does your mind really want to go? Your Daybook gives you a free ticket to create anything you like, so the further you follow your fancy in your Daybook pages, the clearer the answer will be.
In the past you may have seen yourself simply as someone with an inability to stick to things or follow through on projects, but none of that is relevant here. Getting your ideas down on paper isn’t like starting something you should finish; it’s like seeing a good movie-only better because you’re not only watching it but designing it. That freedom will allow you to be as creative as you like. If, for instance, you’re taken by the idea of interviewing your neighbors for their life stories, you’d open the Daybook and write down your idea, and you’d have no hesitation to let it grow. (Maybe you could turn it into a film, or maybe it could be a photo exhibit with audios running of everyone’s voice; you could even start school kids on a project to save the stories of their families; why not some kind of virtual museum that anyone could add to…?)
Your Daybook lets you go into planning of that idea without having to actually produce it. If you decide you actually want to make a film, you’ll find that you’ve captured the idea at its best moment, when you were the most enthused and the most creative. And if you never take another step, you’ve had a good time and risked nothing.
Little by little, the process of writing your ideas in your Daybook will change the way you feel about not following up on every one of your good ideas, because it becomes so clear that planning, designing, and making a record of your ideas in something called a Scanner Daybook isn’t making a promise; it’s the way inventive people enjoy themselves.
First entry
Today, I’d like you to do a trial run. So pick a recent idea, a small one you haven’t given much thought to, and do your first Scanner Daybook Writeup.
Open the book wide. You’re going to start on the left-hand page so you have a really big area to write on. Now, put today’s date and your starting time in the upper left-hand corner of the first page. At the top of the page, write a title of any idea you’d enjoy playing with, like “Life Stories of My Neighbors” or “The Autobiography of My Cat, George, for possible use in a Feature Film.” Choose a project that’s interesting and has possibilities, but one that you might never develop much past this first description. Leave very wide margins on both sides of each page for writing any additions that later occur to you.
And then, just let yourself go.
Bury yourself in your idea and start writing. Draw boxes with stick drawings or diagrams of anything that seems relevant. When a tangent comes along, follow it, but not in the same area you were writing in. Instead, draw a line to the farthest right-hand area on the right-hand page, ending at the top of the page (to leave room below it for other tangents that might come along) and continue that arrow a few inches into the next blank page. Then look at your watch or set a clock timer and give yourself up to 20 minutes to make notes on this tangential idea.
And then return to your original idea.
Your tangent idea is safe and ready whenever you want it. Now, return to your original idea. You can get information from the Internet and print out whatever you want to keep. You can cut out the most interesting part and tape it right on the appropriate page (with a note that tells where you got it, in case you ever want to find it again). You might want to draw a box around the excerpt with a good, dark pen and fill the margin with exclamation points if you feel excited about any quotation. If you find something in a book, write a running report on your thoughts, or copy the essential passage by hand. Make diagrams, paste in photos or clips from magazines, or anything else that allows you to enjoy the subject you’re writing about.
Always try to make your descriptions as complete as possible so that if you disappeared and a stranger found this description, she’d be able to complete the project! Why? Because otherwise, once the passion wears off, you’ll forget why you were so excited! Let your thoughts spill out on the page as they come to you, instead of making a list or an outline you won’t understand or appreciate later. You don’t ever want to look back on an idea and think it was boring or worthless. You’ve probably done that many times in the past, but the Scanner Daybook is supposed to help you respect your ideas. All of them.
Here’s a brief example.
A Great Way to Study Botany!
How about a series of detective novels about a retired botany teacher who travels all through South America, from the U.S. border all the way to Tierra del Fuego at the very bottom of the continent! She could be looking for new plant species and describe them and draw them-like this: [here you might tape in a botanical illustration clipped from a magazine], but she keeps coming across some evil criminal. Maybe he should be a botanist, too! Developing mind-altering plants so he can take over the world!
So each novel could take place in a different country and could include the detective’s descriptions and drawings of plants and getting stories from the local people about how they’re used. Maybe a cookbook? For some plants. (Look up “poisonous plants for detective mysteries.” There’s gotta be a book about that somewhere.)
Why not make it into a Web site! Oh! A Web blog diary where I write a new little episode every week, with photos too! Maybe I could get some botanists to help me, and we could each write a different episode and link to some really good botanical sites. That would be so much fun! Maybe it could be a teaching tool and classrooms could use it, just clicking on different parts of the page and maybe hearing a voice, the voice of the teacher, like an audio book at the same time! Have to ask some techie friends if this is too hard.
If that’s what you were writing, you could draw a map on the facing page to show where each episode would take place, and you can come up with some fun titles, like “Miss Bennett and the Case of the Hidden Basil.”
Remember: It doesn’t matter if you never do what you’re describing on these pages, because finishing a project is not the issue here. This is about your vision and the free play of ideas for pure enjoyment.
If you have uninterrupted time to continue working on this idea for as long as you like, that would be very helpful for the purpose of researching how your mind deals with a new interest. If you’re not stopped by an outside interruption, the only thing that will stop you will be something internal, and it’s very important that you start getting familiar with what that might be.
When you decide to stop, catch the thought you had that caused that decision, such as: “I’m losing interest in this” or “I wish I could continue, but I have to pick up the kids” or anything in between. Write that thought at the end of your description and write the exact time next to it.
And that’s all for today.
For this exercise, you really must acquire a Scanner Daybook (and a great pen or pens) if you do not already use one. Once you have your Daybook, create your first entry, as Barbara describes. Because the Daybook is such an important tool for any Scanner, do not skip over or skimp on this exercise. In a new comment on this page, tell us about your Daybook and how it felt to write this first entry. Share your idea, too, if you care to. Then read the rest of the comments and see if you would like to reply to any of them.
Please be sure to subscribe to future comments on this exercise or to check back here on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning for new ones. If there are a lot of comments by then, look for an Older Comments link to see any that do not fit on this page.
Use the Next link (up above the title) to continue on to Exercise 2: Your Living Quarters Map after you are done with your comments.