A Scribbler’s Secret Weapon

After three years of earning F’s and D’s in high school, I made it through the next two via constantly taking notes. (Yeah, I did five years of HS. Good times.) Not because I was organized or studious - I was desperate. I finally discovered that filling notebooks kept my ADD brain from flying off into space during algebra class. (I may hold the record for taking Algebra 2 more than any student ever. 4x?) I’d scribble lessons, assignments, doodle, collect fragments of daydreams. Half the time I never even looked at those notes again.

Fast forward twenty-plus years and I’m still at it. My house is filled with notebooks. Mostly composition books from Staples. A few fancy Moleskins I feel guilty scribbling in. Random spirals from CVS. Every scribble room I’ve habitated, from Alias to Lost to Hannibal, I had a notebook open, pen in hand, cranking out whatever my brain was chasing at that moment.

For years, I couldn’t explain why it worked. Then my son got diagnosed with ADD, which led to my own late-in-life diagnosis, and it clarified. My taking notes wasn’t about creating a perfect record. It was about staying engaged, clearing mental clutter, and building a second brain I could reference when my first brain was pondering equal rights for Star Wars droids.

Science up my approach. Some of the best storytellers have been notebooking forever.

Your Brain on Paper

Researchers at Princeton and UCLA ran experiments comparing students who took handwritten notes versus those who typed on laptops. The handwriters crushed it. Better conceptual understanding. Better retention. Better performance even a week later.

The laptop users took more notes and captured more verbatim content, but that turned out to be the problem. When you type fast enough to transcribe word-for-word, your brain doesn’t need to process anything. You’re just a human dictaphone.

Scribbling by hand forces you to summarize and synthesize. You physically can’t keep up with someone talking at full speed, so you have to make choices about what to put down. That act of choosing is where you learn and load your memory.

My ADD brain needs this. In a room full of people pitching ideas at Mach 10, I can’t transcribe it all. So I grab the sparks, the surprising turns, the emotional beats that hit me in the feels. My notebook becomes this living map of what my gray matter thinks is important.

Del Toro’s Leather-Bound Brain

Guillermo del Toro calls his notebooks “idea incubators.“ He buys leather-bound journals from a vendor in Venice and fills them with sketches of creatures, production notes, color palettes, and the questions he’s asking himself during development.

James Cameron compared del Toro’s notebooks to da Vinci’s codices. The comparison isn’t hyperbole - the pages are covered with detailed illustrations and dense handwritten notes in Spanish, this gorgeous mix of precise script and wild imagination trying to capture everything before it vanishes.

Del Toro once left four years of work in the back of a London cab. He ran down the street, jumped in another taxi, yelled “follow that cab!” like he was directing his own movie. The notebooks were eventually returned, but the panic he felt tells you everything about how much these physical objects meant to him.

He published a book of his notebooks called Cabinet of Curiosities, and flipping through it is like getting a direct download of his creative process. You see early sketches of the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth alongside notes about the emotional core of the scene. Creature designs for Hellboy mixed with questions about color theory.

What strikes me is that del Toro isn’t separating “work notes“ from “random thoughts.“ It’s all in there together. The professional stuff lives next to personal observations and half-formed ideas that might turn into something years later.

The One Notebook Rule

One of my ADD coping mechanisms is this: everything goes in one notebook. Notes from a network call. Ideas for a pitch I’m working on. Random observations about a movie I watched. Sketches of how a scene might play out. All of it, chronologically, in the same book.

This sounds chaotic. It is chaotic. But when I let my brain make connections between different arenas of my life, cool things happen. A production meeting sparks an idea for a game I’m designing. A conversation with my son about film school connects to a problem I’m having with a character arc.

Science calls this “cognitive offloading.“ When you write things down, you’re externalizing thoughts and ideas, freeing up mental resources to process new information. Your working memory is limited - both in capacity and duration. By dumping stuff onto paper, you’re creating space for your brain to make new connections and solve problems.

For someone with ADD that goes beyond eleven on the Spinal Tap scale, this is life-changing. My working memory is garbage. I’ll walk into a room and forget why I’m there. But give me a notebook and suddenly I have this external hard drive that doesn’t crash every fifteen minutes.

The Physical Act of Thinking

When I was breaking stories on Hannibal, we’d spend hours in the room chatting about the potential season arc. Bryan Fuller would be dancing his auteurist ballet of visuals, beats, and themes, and I’d be hunched over my notebook, sketching out system maps of the emotional journey and plot mechanics.

The act of drawing those connections by hand - literally drawing lines between ideas, sketching little boxes for scenes, questions in the margins - that physical engagement makes the story stick in my brain in a way that staring at a screen doesn’t.

Studies show that handwriting activates different parts of your brain than typing. The visual cortex maps each letter. The motor cortex orchestrates the movement of your hand. Cognitive centers analyze and encode the information. Every stroke becomes a small act of learning.

This is why I created a mnemonic system to manage my ADD - all these storytelling fundamentals I memorized and scribble it by hand every day. J.J. Abrams: “Track the character emotionally.“ Bryan Fuller: “Make it cinematic.“ Anthony Zuiker: “The power of the time cut.“

I needed to externalize what I knew about storytelling because I wasn’t holding it top of mind reliably. So I scribbled it down, over and over, until the process became the act of remembering.

Visible Progress

One thing nobody talks about with digital notes - they disappear. You take notes in Notion or Evernote or whatever, and they’re searchable and organized, but you can’t see them pile up.

Physical notebooks give you this tangible record of work. I can look at my shelf and see months of thinking, stacked up in cheap composition books. Each one represents a period of my creative life. The notebook from the Heroes days. The one from my first VALORANT gig. The stack from breaking five seasons of Alias five.

There’s something about seeing that physical accumulation that reinforces the work you’re doing. It’s proof. Not just proof to other people, but proof to yourself that you’re showing up snf putting in the hours.

Doodles and Diagrams

Some of my best thinking happens when I stop scribbling words and just start drawing. Character relationship maps. Timeline diagrams. Sketches of how a set piece might work spatially. Sometimes it’s just abstract shapes and arrows while I’m thinking through a problem.

Research shows that turning ideas into sketches or symbols creates a second memory track. Visual processing reinforces verbal processing, making the information stick better.

In my ADHD brain, this is critical. I don’t think in linear outlines. I think in webs of connected ideas, in spatial relationships, in visual patterns. Notebooks let me externalize that non-linear thinking in a way that makes sense to me, even if it looks like chaos to anyone else.

When we were building out the mythology for Day One, I had these massive notebook spreads that looked like D&D campaign maps. Character backstories connected to world-building details connected to plot mechanics. It was a mess of arrows and boxes and scribbled notes, but it let me see the whole system at once.

For Scribblers Starting Out

If you’re reading this and thinking “I should probably take more notes,“ here’s my advice: Start cheap. Grab a composition book from the drugstore. Don’t invest in some fancy leather journal that you’ll be afraid to mess up. The goal is to fill the thing, not preserve it for posterity.

Write everything in one place. Don’t separate “work notes“ from “life notes.“ Let your brain make connections across domains. Some of my best story ideas came from random observations about traffic or conversations with my brilliant and creative sons.

Don’t worry about looking at them later. Yeah, sometimes you’ll reference old notebooks to find that perfect line you scribbled six months ago. But mostly, the act of getting it down is what matters. You’re engaging your brain in active processing, which helps you understand and retain the information.

Draw stuff. Even if you think you can’t draw. Especially if you think you can’t draw. Boxes, arrows, stick figures, whatever. Visual thinking unlocks different parts of your creative brain.

Keep it close. I have a notebook within arm’s reach pretty much always. In my backpocket. The car. Next to the bed. In my bag when I’m traveling. Ideas don’t wait for convenient moments.

Date your entries. Future you will thank you for this. Even just month/year in the corner lets you track when ideas hit.

The Long Game

Del Toro talks about pilfering ideas from his younger self, going back through old notebooks and finding sketches and concepts that finally have a home in a current project.

I do the same thing. Some random observation from a notebook six years ago suddenly becomes the key to unlocking a character I’m struggling with today. A half-formed run of a character dialog I scribbled during a flight finally finds its proper context.

Your notebooks become this archive of your creative development. You can see how your thinking evolved, what obsessions kept recurring, which ideas had staying power and which were just shiny objects passing through your pre-frontal cortex.

For someone with ADD who struggles with long-term memory and connecting ideas across time, this external archive is priceless. My notebooks remember what I’ve forgotten. They preserve the thinking I was doing before I understood what I was even thinking about.

Just Crank It Out

I’m not saying notebooks are a magic creativity hack for everybody. I’m saying they’re a tool that works. For me, for del Toro, for a lot of scribblers who need to externalize their creative process. So grab a notebook. Fill it with whatever your brain is chasing. Don’t judge. Don’t edit. Just get it out of your head and onto the page.

Your brain will thank you. Your working memory will thank you. And when you’re digging through old notebooks five years from now, looking for that perfect idea you half-remembered, future you will be grateful.