When archivists at UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library opened the boxes of Susan Sontag’s papers, they found notebooks so stuffed they were straining at the bindings. Telegrams. Pressed leaves. Newspaper clippings. A feather. Lists of adjectives she liked. Lists of films she had seen as a child. A pencil sketch of a man’s face on the same page as a quote about Kafka.
There are more than 100 of these notebooks. Sontag started the first one when she was around 14 and kept going for nearly six decades, until she died in 2004. After her death, her son David Rieff edited two volumes from them: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A third volume is still expected.
I came to Sontag the way most people do, sideways. I read a quote of hers on a friend’s bookshelf, then On Photography, then Reborn. What I expected was a polished writer’s diary. What I found was something messier and, honestly, more useful: a notebook that was never trying to be literature. Sontag wasn’t writing down her days. She was thinking, in real time, on the page.
Sontag had one of the most intimidating intellects of the 20th century. Her notebooks are messier than you would expect. That gap, between the public Sontag and the working Sontag, is the whole lesson of this post. Here are eight things she actually did in those notebooks, and what each one can teach a regular journaler tonight.
1. Start Before You Feel Ready
A handwritten “100 books” list from one of Sontag’s notebooks – the kind of self-assigned reading list she kept from her teens. Source: UCLA Library Special Collections, Susan Sontag Papers.
The first entries in Reborn are written by a teenager. They are ambitious in a way that, at first, is hard to read without wincing. Sontag at 14 is making lists of books she should read, words she does not know, films she ought to see. She is, very visibly, trying to become someone.
In one of the most-quoted passages in the early notebooks, written in 1949 when she was 16, she sets it down in block capitals:
I AM
REBORN IN
THE TIME RETOLD
IN THIS NOTEBOOK.
– Susan Sontag, notebook entry, 1949. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963, ed. David Rieff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
That line gives the first volume its title. It is also a useful corrective. People who admire Sontag often assume she was born finished, fully formed at 14 and just getting more brilliant from there. The notebooks make it obvious she was not. She was rehearsing.
When I started keeping a commonplace book in my twenties, I kept tearing out the first few pages because they embarrassed me. Sontag’s teenage entries are a permission slip. The first pages of any notebook are supposed to be a bit much. That is what they are for.
If you are waiting until you feel ready to journal seriously, look at how Sontag began. She did not have a system. She had a notebook and an appetite. If you want more structure for that first week than one Sontag lesson can give you, my beginner’s guide to journaling walks through it step by step.
2. Write to Think, Not to Record
A line Sontag copied into her notebook from Keats: “The excellence of every Art is its intensity.” Source: UCLA Library Special Collections, Susan Sontag Papers (journal, 1975-1976, Box 127, Folder 10).
This is the lesson that defines Sontag’s notebooks, and the one I would press into the hands of every reader who has ever sat down to journal and gone blank.
One line from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh captures what her notebooks actually were:
“In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather – in many cases – offers an alternative to it.”
– Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, ed. David Rieff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
And then, somewhere in there, the line I keep underlining in everyone else’s copies:
“I can’t talk to myself, but I can write to myself.”
– Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, ed. David Rieff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
When I first read that, I realized half my notebook entries were just weather reports of my mood. “Tired today. Coffee was good. Bad meeting.” Sontag was not doing that. She was using the act of writing to figure out what she actually thought, in real time, with the pen as the instrument of discovery.
If you go blank when you try to journal, unsure what to write in a journal, it is often because you are trying to record a day that does not need recording. Try the Sontag move instead. Pick one question you are stuck on. Write the question at the top of the page. Then write toward an answer until you find one, or until you find a better question.
That is journaling as thinking. Sontag is the patron saint of it.
3. Stuff the Notebook
A pressed leaf mounted on a notebook page – one of the physical objects Sontag glued into her journals. Source: UCLA Library Special Collections, Susan Sontag Papers (Box 126).
Box 123 of the Sontag archive holds pages bulging with material Sontag had glued in: a 1965 telegram, a pressed leaf, a feather, restaurant napkins, ticket stubs from a trip to Hanoi. The bindings were strained. The notebook had become a container as much as a record.
This is not aesthetic. Sontag was not making a scrapbook. She was annexing physical objects into the same space as her thinking, because a clipping or a leaf was part of the texture of the day she wanted to keep.
Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook pages worked the same way, sketches of water turbulence sharing a page with a grocery list and an anatomical study. Different disciplines, same instinct. The page is permission to put unlike things next to each other so you can notice the resemblance.
Here is what I tried for a week. I kept a glue stick on my desk. Anything paper-shaped that crossed my hands, a quote I had printed out, a postcard, a wine label, a receipt with a note on the back, I glued it onto the next blank page of my notebook and wrote one line of context next to it. By Friday the notebook was thicker. By the following Monday I was using it differently. Pages with stuff glued in pulled me back to re-read them.
You do not need to ruin a leather Moleskine to do this. A cheap composition book and a glue stick will do.
4. Make Lists. Lots of Them.
Accumulation was the effect of being intensely interested in everything. Source: UCLA Library Special Collections, Susan Sontag Papers.
The lists in Sontag’s notebooks are the part that scared me most when I first read Reborn. Lists of vocabulary words she did not know yet. A list of 100 favorite books. Lists of films, sorted into “first class” and “second class.” Lists of plays. Lists of adjectives.
Here is the entry where she names what the lists are for, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh:
“I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create – or guarantee – existence. Hence, my compulsion to make ‘lists.’ The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.”
– Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, ed. David Rieff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
Read that twice. Sontag was not making lists to remember. She was making lists to confer existence. To draw a line around a fact and say this matters.
Thomas Edison did something similar in his lab notebooks, dense pages of materials lists, observations, and to-try ideas. The mechanism is the same in both: a list is a low-friction way to capture a thought you do not yet know what to do with.
A list-only entry counts. You do not have to write a paragraph to have journaled. Five books you want to read this year is a journal entry. Ten people whose work you want to study is a journal entry. The most useful list I ever kept was a running list of questions I did not know how to answer, refreshed once a month. If you need a running start on the questions, my 100 journal prompts post is built to be raided for exactly this kind of list.
If you want a starter framework that nudges you toward your own list-keeping and notebook habit, my free 6-Step Guide to Getting Started With Journaling is built around exactly this kind of low-friction practice. Grab it here.
5. Treat Form as a Springboard, Not a Cage
If you want to distinguish your personal style, you would do this primarily through deviations from a norm. Source: UCLA Library Special Collections, Susan Sontag Papers.
One of the late notebooks from 1986, held in Box 130 of the UCLA collection, contains a single line that I have been thinking about for years:
“form is = a springboard to get height from, not a table to which you’re strapped.”
– Susan Sontag, notebook entry, 1986. Susan Sontag Papers, UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Special Collections, Box 130.
Sontag was writing about literary form, but it applies just as well to journaling form. It is really the old structured-versus-free-flow question, and Sontag came down hard on the side of the springboard. People who try journal templates often quit them within a month because the template starts to feel like a cage. They miss a day, then they miss a week, then they stop opening the notebook.
The trick is to use the form like Sontag used hers, as a springboard. Benjamin Franklin’s 13-virtues grid is famous, but Franklin did not stick to it for life. He used the grid until it had done its work on his attention, and then he loosened. A daily template, a bullet journal, a five-minute prompt, these are all springboards. Use them to get off the ground. Do not strap yourself to them.
If you are halfway through a template-based journal that has stopped feeling alive, here is a simple move. Tomorrow, ignore the template. Just write. The next day, go back to it if it serves you. A form should earn its place each day.
6. Go Back Into Old Notebooks and Mine Them
The page Sontag headed “Old notes (from 1970?),” where she copied lines from an earlier notebook forward into a new one. Source: UCLA Library Special Collections, Susan Sontag Papers.
In 1974, Sontag opened a notebook and wrote a heading at the top of a page: “Old Notes (from 1970?).” Underneath, she copied out lines from a four-year-old notebook that she did not want to lose. She was mining her past self.
This is the move most journalers never make. We write in notebooks and then we shelve them, and we treat them like an archive we will revisit in old age. Sontag treated her notebooks like a working library.
Einstein had a related habit of re-deriving old ideas from scratch, partly to test whether they still held up. Sontag was doing the literary cousin of this. She was checking which lines from 1970 still meant something to 1974-her, and copying them forward.
Try this on a quiet weekend. Open a notebook from a year or two ago. Skim it with a fresh pen in hand. Copy any line that still rings into your current notebook, with the date you wrote it originally. You will be surprised how much of your old thinking is still alive, and how much was just weather.
7. Write Yourself Into the Person You Want to Be
The “REBORN” entry from 1949 is not a description. It is a wish. A 16-year-old declaring, in block capitals, that she is becoming someone new on these pages.
Sontag’s notebooks are full of this kind of self-construction. Reading lists for the person she wants to become. Disciplines she wants to develop. Habits she wants to install. The notebooks are not a record of who Sontag was. They are part of the apparatus by which she became Sontag.
This is the same instinct behind Bruce Lee’s affirmation pages, the famous “definite chief aim” letter to himself, and behind Martin Luther King Jr.’s spiritual self-examination in his seminary notebooks. Different idioms, same act. The notebook is a place to rehearse a self that does not exist yet.
I used to think this was a kind of pretending, and that real journaling meant honest reporting on who you already were. I think that was wrong. Honest reporting has its place, but a journal can also be training. Writing toward the person you want to be is not delusion. It is rehearsal. Sontag rehearsed Sontag for sixty years.
If you have ever felt embarrassed by an aspirational entry in your own notebook, the kind of entry where you wrote down a version of yourself that is not yet true, look at Reborn. Sontag’s whole first volume is that entry.
8. Use Lists as a Foil Against Forgetting
This, she tells us, is the sign of great style: when a work feels inevitable. And yet, Sontag’s works always took many forms before cohering into their published version. Source: UCLA Library Special Collections, Susan Sontag Papers.
Sontag’s lists were a foil against forgetting. That framing named something I had felt but not articulated. They were a way of pinning down the things that mattered before they slipped.
This is different from the “confer value” line in Lesson 4. That was about creating significance. This is about preserving it. Sontag was a working intellectual reading constantly, watching constantly, traveling constantly. Without the lists, the texture would have washed away. The lists held it in place.
Here is the practical exercise. At the end of the month, go back through your last four weeks of notebook pages. Write a list at the top of a new page titled “Things I Want to Keep Thinking About.” Five items. No more. Bullet form. Pick the ideas that, if you forgot them, you would be sorry to lose.
Do that once a month for a year and you will have twelve lists. Together, they will be a portrait of what you actually cared about across that year. Not what you said you cared about. What you reached for when the page was open.
What Every Hero of the Notebook Has in Common
I have written about a lot of working notebooks now. Leonardo’s loose folios with their sketches and grocery lists. Franklin’s 13-virtues grid. Edison’s 3,500 lab notebooks. Einstein’s thought experiments on the back of envelopes. Bruce Lee’s affirmation letters to himself. Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminary self-examination. And now Sontag’s 100 stuffed notebooks of lists, telegrams, and feathers.
What they share is not a form. Their notebooks look nothing alike. What they share is the act of writing as thinking. Each of them used the notebook as a tool to figure something out: a problem, a self, a sentence, a habit, an experiment. None of them was trying to produce a tidy diary.
That is the lesson I keep coming back to across the journals of successful people I’ve studied. The notebook is not a record of your life. It is a workshop where some of your life gets made. Sontag, more than any of them, lived inside that idea.
If you do nothing else after reading this, do one small thing. Pick one quote you read this week, a line from a book, an email, a podcast, anything that made you stop, and copy it into your notebook by hand. Underneath, write one sentence about why it caught you. That is a Sontag entry. That is the start of a notebook that is doing work.
If you are still looking for the habit itself, not just borrowed lessons from someone else’s notebook, my guide on how to build a journaling habit that actually sticks is the practical companion to this one.
If you liked this, I write notes like it, one writer’s notebook at a time. Subscribe here and I will send you the next one.
Notes
- Sontag, Susan. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963. Ed. David Rieff. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
- Sontag, Susan. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980. Ed. David Rieff. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
- Susan Sontag Papers, UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Special Collections (Boxes 123, 126, 130 referenced).
Featured image: A page from one of Sontag’s spiral notebooks, recording her scholarship to the University of Chicago. Source: UCLA Library Special Collections, Susan Sontag Papers.
