Get a Moleskine and a Fountain Pen…

Buy a notebook with your own money.

Cash, preferably. The small ceremony helps. You hand over something tangible for an object whose pages belong entirely to you. No conference logo on the cover, no pharmaceutical company name printed along the bottom, no annual planner designed by a committee that has already decided how much space Wednesday deserves.

“Moleskine” is my general term for a well-made personal notebook. The actual brand is optional. A leather cover is pleasant. Good paper helps. Simplicity usually ages better than decoration. I also have a soft spot for Muji, where an entire philosophy of restraint appears to have been constructed from beige cardboard and black elastic.

Choose something expensive enough that you notice the purchase, yet affordable enough that you still dare to write badly in it. A notebook that feels too precious will become household furniture. It will sit untouched on a shelf, quietly displaying your excellent taste.

Paying for good stationery creates a minor obligation. You have acquired an object worthy of attention. Now you must supply the attention.

Then buy a fountain pen.

A fortune is unnecessary. Many inexpensive plastic fountain pens are reliable, comfortable and far less temperamental than their aristocratic cousins. A Montblanc is welcome, of course. I have no authority to prevent it. The free promotional ballpoint from your insurance broker should remain near the telephone, where it can perform the modest duties for which it was born.

Try an ink beyond standard blue. Blue-black has the decency of an old civil servant. Burgundy carries a faint suggestion that you may be composing a treaty. Green looks surprisingly good on cream paper. Several colours can coexist, provided the notebook does not begin to resemble an audition for Hello Kitty.

The fountain pen introduces a useful amount of friction. It asks for a slower hand. The nib leaves evidence of hesitation, confidence, pressure and speed. Your handwriting changes with your mood before you have found the words to describe that mood.

Now begin.

The blank notebook may be the most adaptable instrument of self-observation available for the price. It requires no password, subscription, charging cable, software update or agreement to revised terms and conditions. It also lacks an audience. That absence is increasingly rare.

Write your plans in the morning.

Write what actually happened in the evening.

Record the emotions that appeared during the day, especially the ones you would prefer to attribute to somebody else. Write down the best moment of the day. A positive one is preferable, although accuracy has priority over compulsory optimism.

Capture an idea before the internal censor arrives with its clipboard.

Draw something.

Copy a sentence from a book.

Record a conversation you want to remember.

Take notes in class. Write a poem. Attempt lyrics. Invent a tune using a notation system understood only by you. Make a grocery list for the beach-season diet that begins every Monday and develops constitutional problems by Thursday.

Write down a recipe before the person who makes it starts claiming there is no recipe.

Keep a list of films you love. Review the film you watched last night. Record the restaurant where dinner was excellent and the waiter quietly corrected your pronunciation of the wine. Construct a private database of your favourite television programme. List every character, episode, conspiracy and inconsistency. Future scholars may remain indifferent, though you will have enjoyed the work.

Make a list of ten things you want to do.

Then one hundred.

Then one thousand, if you have the stamina and a generous understanding of what counts as an ambition.

List what you want to accomplish before you marry, divorce, retire or die. These events may occur in a different order than expected, so leave sufficient room for amendments.

Copy passages you have underlined in your favourite books. Handwriting another person’s sentence forces you to encounter its structure. You begin to notice where the writer breathes, where the argument turns, and where a word has been placed with almost suspicious precision.

Make lists of health advice, financial advice or self-help advice. A few months later, review the list and observe which items you followed. The notebook will be polite about the results.

Leave every page where it is.

A crossed-out sentence belongs to the record. So does the embarrassing idea, the failed drawing and the plan that seemed brilliant at eleven in the evening. Torn pages produce a dishonest archive. Keep the failures. They provide context for the rare occasions when you were right.

Your notebook requires no internal filing system. One page may contain an erotic fantasy. The next may say:

• Buy milk

• Collect dry cleaning

• Call accountant

Such arrangements are entirely normal. Human consciousness has never respected departmental boundaries. Desire, laundry and taxation frequently occupy the same afternoon.

Write in several directions at once. Abandon themes. Return to them. Start a story and leave it unfinished.

Begin a novel whose characters refuse to cooperate. Record a dream before breakfast reduces it to fragments. Describe somebody you met on the train. Write down a question that has been troubling you. Copy a joke. Sketch the room. Calculate what you owe. Confess something to the page.

The notebook has no requirement for coherence.

A telephone encourages thoughts to become files: named, tagged, synchronized, indexed and eventually buried beneath several thousand photographs. Paper keeps the mark where you made it. The date, pressure of the pen, slant of the handwriting and stain from the coffee all remain part of the entry. Memory acquires a physical location.

Privacy helps. Keep the notebook somewhere safe. Its value comes from sincerity, and sincerity behaves differently when it suspects an audience. You owe nobody an explanation of what appears there.

Fill twenty pages.

Then read them.

Patterns will begin to show themselves: recurring irritations, abandoned plans, people whose names keep appearing, ideas that survive repeated attempts to ignore them. You may discover that your days contain more comedy than you remembered, more anxiety than you admitted, and several ambitions that have been waiting patiently beneath the grocery lists.

The page has been keeping accounts while you were busy.