Text: Solveig Hansen, 2018

When a sentence like this pops into your head: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” you’d better be armed with a napkin or notebook.

On the bridge over the highway, some preschool children were waving at the cars passing by beneath. A truck driver spotted them and honked his horn, and the children jumped up and down in delight. I jotted down the scene in my always-present notebook.

At the grocery store, my eyes caught a young woman clutching a long shopping list, and a story began to spin in my head as I made my way to the milk shelves. I imagined she was hosting a dinner for her picky in-laws, carefully preparing an exact list of ingredients for the three ambitious courses she wasn’t quite qualified to make. Notebook time.

From snippets of everyday moments like these, great stories can be born. Maybe the truck driver is transporting red apples from Italy, and perhaps the young woman with the long list will buy some for her apple pie. There’s a thread running from a family’s apple farm in southern Europe, to a truck driver spending endless hours behind the wheel, honking at children while missing his own, to a rookie cook at a Nordic grocery store, nervously shopping for a dreaded family dinner.

Of course, the true beauty lies in writing the actual stories of the people we meet. Like the man I passed, bent at a 45-degree angle over a garbage bin he used as a stand for his beer cans, hacking and hawking, coughing up a slimy glob that landed a couple of feet away. He gave me a friendly “Hello” as I walked by. I waved back. I wonder what his story is. He’s in the notebook, too.

Great ideas thrive in a great notebook. I’ve checked out five: Hunting for the perfect notebook