"Leonardo" Notebooks

I was inspired recently to start a project with a friend, to share a Leonardo-style notebook. Here is my first entry from that shared notebook.

Today, I hatched a crazy idea that will help us both develop our creativity and our writing as well as help us bond.

I've been reading a book called "How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci" by Michael J. Gelb. DaVinci is a fascinating person to me. He was not only a great artist but a great inventor and a talented genius in all sorts of areas, the reason why, today, a multi-talented person is called a "Renaissance man."

 The concept behind the book I'm reading is not that anybody can learn to be a genius on DaVinci's level but that everybody can learn from DaVinci's approach to learning and creativity. The book makes suggestions for exercises and one of those suggestions is to keep a notebook like DaVinci. You may have seen replicas of his drawings, sketches for his inventions and writings

This reminds me of the time when I read "The Journals of Rachel Scott" years ago. Rachel Scott was one of the teen girls who was killed in the Columbine shooting. Like Cassie Bernall, Rachel Scott was a devout Christian, and her journals illustrate her faith. The published journals we direct replicas of the original, showing both her handwriting and all the doodles and sketches with which she illustrated them. At the time, I also learned that Rachel Scott shared journals with several of her friends. She'd make an entry, exchange the journal with a friend who would write her piece and back and forth. This actually inspired me when I wrote about two female friends in my novel, "And the Violin Cried." The two friends share a journal that is a combination of a journal, sketchbook and scrapbook.

The back cover of one of Rachel Scott's last journals



My youth novel


So, my suggestion is that we combine these ideas and share a Leonardo notebook, Rachel Scott style! We can exchange the notebook every time we see each other and make at least a small entry each day we have it in our keeping.

Like Leonardo's notebook, the notebook should have both textual and visual elements.

Ideas for textual elements: a letter to one another, random thoughts, a poem, a story idea or the beginnings of one, a journal entry about happenings in the day, quotes from a song, Scripture or anything inspirational, slice-of-life writing (Look up Wikipedia article on slice-of-life writing or the lyrics to "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega, an example of slice-of-life writing) or basically anything.

Ideas for visual elements: sketches and doodles (They don't have to super artistic,) a comic strip, a candy wrapper, ticket stubs, a short article clipping, pictures cut from catalogs or magazines...endless possibilities.