Why Rowling Wrote Her Best Thing on Sick Bag (scrap paper notes are a writer's best friends)

by Mandira Pattnaik

Felipe Furtado

“The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin.”

In my last column, I borrowed these lines from Arundhati Roy’s book. It felt nice to put them in the column, having written them in a scrap of paper first, then scribbled on a notebook to be used at an opportune context, then inserted in the draft article when it was born as a Word doc., and finally worked into the trampset column. That quote in a scrap paper, in and out of many temporary homes, had become as ‘familiar as the house (I) live in’!

Why do we still hold on to the old-world charm of writing the best scratch notes on tiny pieces of paper? Has it survived indeed, in spite of electronic notes? I think these are able to hold their own due to their very essence — that of impermanence, like the very nature of thoughts, fleeting yet precious, just like life itself. A line or phrase if relegated to the back of our minds will mischievously disappear, as if they never existed, and I bet you’ll hear a magician’s villainous laughter when you’re wracking your brains to find it. They will albeit return to tease you, but only in fragments — snippets, a word, an adjective or a metaphor, but no, never the whole thing, never. Therefore — Cheers to scribbled paper!

J .K. Rowling admitted, all too candidly, “The best thing I ever wrote on was an aeroplane sick bag. Came up with the Hogwarts houses on it.” Joyce, who had an eyesight problem, scrawled on large pieces of cardboard in bright red crayon so that he could more easily see his own writing. Wallace Stevens, Pulitzer-winning poet, carried bits of paper in his pockets to write while on his walks, according to some reports. Ray Bradbury began writing when he was 12, and those were on butcher paper. Faulkner, instead of using paper, scribbled the outline for ‘A Fable’ on the walls of his home in Mississippi. Plotting the chronology on the walls helped him become fully immersed in the novel’s density, and it remains well-preserved to this day (image below).

How valuable then — that hurried, frenzied writing, before they become clouded, before daily affairs have a chance to stain them! Rather precious than the cheap source of paper. A scratch paper, scrap paper, scribbling paper — the practise of quick note-taking is established fairly as unerodable. A writer’s best friend is a bit of paper when that brilliant idea strikes.

However, left to themselves, these loose high-value papers will embark on a journey of their own, and hide in the folds of laundry, or in the library book that needs to be returned, if discovered at all. Or else be found in such unpredictable places as jewelry drawers, years later.

Funny the way they’ll present themselves or not, funnier still the new meanings and completely new contexts the scribbled notes will take on, if and when they happen to be rediscovered. In fact, in recent years, enterprising writers are known to take digital photographs of these notes, and even uploading them to dedicated websites which log them anonymously. How incredible is that!

I’m unaware if still more ingenuous writers are thinking of writing or have already written whole books from ‘found’ bits of paper. That’d be a train of thoughts way too cool — loose, anonymous, free-spirited. Two recent works come close. H.J. Jackson’s Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, is a study of margin notes or marginalia. The word marginalia itself was first used by S. T. Coleridge to refer to the exchange of notes between essayist Charles Lamb and himself, scribbled on library books they borrowed in turns. Ander Monson’s Letter to a Future Lover is an anthology of short essays based on anonymous scribblings on the margins by borrowers of public library books. Monson notes: “What you write in response to the book — how you mark it up or how you take it with you and reproduce it — that’s a part of the book too.” Famous margin-jotters? Ben Jonson, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.

Today it is more common of course to share marginalia by means of comments on public media platforms, and debate a point or two without having to put pen to paper. But pen to paper it is, when a story-title I might use one day lands like a seagull on my mind’s shore, or something like a strange street name that could come handy later, or a vital news-story that could be reframed for a future plot, a fascinating new Japanese art-form that my character might pursue — they’ll all first appear as a scribbled note.

I read somewhere that scrap paper notes are similar to the dead skin we shed — unless it’s out of the way, new ideas will not grow. That’s a funny way to describe it. Either way, scribbled notes are breadcrumb clues to destinations writers are moving toward. It’s a stumble forward for clarity in an otherwise messy enterprise.