How I Use a Pocket Notebook to Slow Down, Copy by Hand, and Find Original Ideas

Most of my best ideas lately have not come from trying to have ideas.

They come from copying someone else’s words slowly, by hand, into a little notebook I keep in my back pocket.

This morning I put on some acoustic music and flipped through my kids’ language arts book. It was written by Emma Serl in the early 1900s, so it’s full of old poems and rich writing. I landed on “The Planting of the Apple Tree” by William Cullen Bryant and started copying it into my Field Notes notebook.

By the time I finished, a verse from Psalm 104 had flown in and landed right under it. That keeps happening. So I want to walk you through the simple process I’ve been using, because I think it’s one of the best ways I know to grow your own thinking.

The setup is small on purpose

You don’t need much for this. Here’s all I use:

• A Field Notes pocket notebook (grid paper) in a leather cover (the cover isn’t necessary, it just helps preserve the notebook)
• A pen, plus a highlighter for words I don’t know
• One good source of old writing, like a poetry book, a classic, or the Bible
• Some quiet music and a little unhurried time

The pocket notebook matters more than you’d think. The pages are small, so I can’t copy a whole chapter. I have to pick one poem or passage. And small pages feel like a sketch, not a final draft, so I don’t worry about getting it perfect.

The process, step by step

1. Copy it by hand

Write out the poem or passage word for word, with the date at the top. Copying slows you down enough to actually notice what you’re reading.

2. Highlight the words you don’t know

Old writing uses words differently. Today I marked “thrush,” “lea,” and “haunt,” then looked them up and wrote the meanings at the bottom of the page. A thrush is a songbird. A lea is an open grassy field. And “haunt” just means to visit a place often. Bryant’s bird isn’t spooky, she just keeps coming back. Knowing what a word meant back then changes how the whole poem reads.

3. Write down what comes to mind

This is the part I didn’t plan, and it’s become my favorite. While I copy, something else almost always pops up: another quote, or a verse. Yesterday it was Romans 2:4 under a poem by Alice Cary about kindness. Today it was Psalm 104 under the apple tree. Whatever shows up, I write it right underneath. Sometimes I even draw a line connecting the two ideas.

4. Snap a photo of the page

I take a picture of the notebook and add it to my digital commonplace book. Now the page has a home where I can find it again, and it sits next to everything else I’ve saved.

5. Talk it out

Then I start a new journal page in my digital commonplace book, add the photo at the top for context, and reflect out loud. I like to use my voice and just think and talk about what I’m noticing and feeling. The paper did the planting. This is where I sit in the shade and see what grew.

Where original thinking comes from

Here’s what I’m learning. Original thinking doesn’t usually start from a blank page. It starts when you slow down with someone else’s words long enough to see something in them that’s yours.

When I read through Bryant’s poem, I saw how one deed, one seed, can have many purposes. Planting an apple tree gives the birds a place to build their nests. In the poem the thrush will “haunt” the boughs, which means she returns to them often. She sings there and hides her nest there. A place you feel free to sing, keep coming back to, and raise your babies? That’s a home.

But the tree doesn’t stop there. It becomes a shadow for the noontide hour, shade in an open meadow where there was none. And when it rains, it becomes a shelter from the summer shower. A home, a shade, and a shelter, all from one tree.

I call these apple tree deeds. Some things we do reach past one person. Planting a tree helps all kinds of animals and people, for years and decades down the road, in ways we can’t even imagine. So what are the other apple tree deeds? What can we do today that keeps giving long after we’re gone?

I didn’t go looking for that. I just copied a poem slowly and left room under it. That’s the whole trick.

You plant the poem, and you wait for the bird.

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