Confessions From the Archive: What My Dead Notebooks Taught Me About Being a Creator

Last month, while looking for my tax documents (which were, naturally, in the least logical place possible), I stumbled onto the box. You know the one. Every creative person has one. Mine is a beat-up plastic bin from Target labeled "OFFICE" in Sharpie that has not contained office supplies since roughly 2018.

Inside: eleven notebooks, three sketchbooks, a manila folder of printed screenplay pages, and a receipt from a lumber yard for a bookshelf I started building and never sanded. I pulled up a chair on my apartment floor and gave myself the tour.

Exhibit A: The Novel That Was Definitely Going to Change My Life

Notebook number one, dated 2016, contains forty-seven pages of outline for a literary novel set in a small coastal town in Maine. I have never been to Maine. The outline is gorgeous — color-coded, with character backstories that go back three generations. The manuscript itself? Eleven pages.

For years, this one stung. I'd see the spine of that notebook on a shelf and feel a little punch of guilt, like I owed it money. But sitting there on the floor, I read those eleven pages and thought: huh, this isn't bad. And more importantly — the woman who wrote this outline learned she loved world-building. That skill shows up in everything I make now, just wearing different clothes.

Exhibit B: The App, the Podcast, and the Candle Empire

Notebook four is where things get chaotic. There's a business plan for a productivity app (2017, peak hustle culture, I owned a blazer specifically for pitch meetings). There's a podcast called Overthinkers Anonymous with two recorded episodes that will never see daylight. There's a margin note that just says "SOY CANDLES???" with three underlines.

Here's the thing I noticed reading all of it: none of these ideas were bad. They were just ideas I wasn't the right person to finish. The app needed a developer. The podcast needed a co-host who didn't dread editing audio. The candles needed... okay, the candles were a bad idea, I'll concede that one.

The Case for the Graceful Exit

We have this cultural narrative — especially in the US, where we're marinated in "finish what you started" from kindergarten onward — that abandoning a project is a failure of character. Quitting is for quitters, etc.

But I've started thinking of unfinished projects differently. Every abandoned notebook is evidence of curiosity. Evidence that I showed up, made something, learned something, and moved on. A novel outline taught me structure. A half-built bookshelf taught me I don't enjoy woodworking at the skill level I demand of myself (yet — the lumber yard receipt stays).

If you're a fellow multi-hyphenate with your own plastic bin of might-have-beens, here's my gentle challenge: open it. Not to finish anything. Just to take inventory of who you were when you started each one. You might be surprised how much of that person you still like.

The box goes back under the bed now. But I kept one notebook out — the novel one. Not to finish the novel. To remind myself that the ideas never really die. They just wait for the version of you that's ready.