Pocket Notebooks · Find a prompt · Read Fresh Pages · Meet the writer
A pen. A page. A little possibility.
A small notebook.
A clearer head.
Ten-minute notebook adventures and things worth stopping to read. From Stuart Lennon, formerly of Nero’s Notes. Bring your curiosity. Any notebook will do.
Here from Instagram or Nero’s? You’re in the right place. Pick either door. There’s no homework.
For your own notebook
I feel like making a page.
Choose a prompt, find a pen and give yourself ten minutes. Your notes can stay entirely your own.
For a few quiet minutes
I feel like reading.
Visit Fresh Pages for notebook experiments, small discoveries and examples of the prompts in action. No homework required.
Three collections · Nine ways into a blank page
Find a prompt for your next page.
01 /
Notice something.
Collect a conversation. Take your pen for a walk. Find something interesting in a place you thought you knew.
A walk without a photograph ↗ · The overheard sentence ↗ · An ordinary object, closely observed ↗
02 /
Untangle something.
A decision that won’t make itself. A project that’s grown tentacles. Get it onto a page and give yourself somewhere to start.
What would “finished” look like? ↗ · Know. Assume. Find out. ↗ · The next small thing ↗
03 /
Say it plainly.
Somewhere beneath the jargon, there might be a useful sentence trying to get out. Let’s give it a hand.
The Bollocks Audit ↗ · Your business in thirty words ↗ · Turn a rule into an instruction ↗
Outside the bakery. 8:20.
A spoon against a cup.
A chair with one foot folded into cardboard.
A sparrow approaching a crumb
in instalments.Things I almost missed.
Illustrative notebook page
From Fresh Pages · An illustrative example
Six things outside
a bakery.
A spoon against a cup. A makeshift chair repair. A sparrow with a cautious approach to breakfast.
See how a few ordinary details can become a notebook page, then try the prompt yourself if you fancy it.
Crossings-out welcome
Pages welcome.
Tried an exercise? I’d love to see what happened. A photograph of your page is welcome. So is a sentence about how it went.
Send only what you’re happy to share. I’ll ask before publishing anything.
From small observations to bigger stories
Like the company? Keep reading.
I’m Stuart: writer, consultant and owner of considerably more notebooks than circumstances require. Pocket Notebooks is my invitation to notice things, ask questions and enjoy putting pen to paper.
At Writer Interrupted, I turn that curiosity into essays, stories and longer work. If something here made you smile, that’s your next stop.
Or let me send you my new public writing as I publish it. The free newsletter comes from Writer Interrupted, with no fixed schedule. Unsubscribe whenever you like.
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Want a little more background? The Nero’s Notes story →
Prefer to listen?
I also co-host Stationery Adjacent with Justin Twyford: a podcast about analogue and digital productivity, and the interesting places the conversation takes us. Notebooks are often involved. Staying on topic is less certain.
New episodes arrive most Wednesdays. Listen at stationeryadjacent.com, or search for Stationery Adjacent wherever you get your podcasts.
