Joan Didion kept a notebook because, as she wrote in "On Keeping a Notebook," she didn't trust herself to remember accurately. Not facts — she understood that notebooks are terrible for facts. What she didn't trust was her ability to recover the feeling of a moment, the precise texture of an overheard conversation, the particular quality of light on a specific afternoon that made her feel a certain way. She wasn't recording reality. She was parking the experience somewhere she could return to.
Hemingway had a related practice. He ended each writing session mid-sentence, or at least mid-thought, so that when he returned the next morning he would know exactly what came next. The idea was parked at a place he could re-enter. Starting from nothing is hard. Starting from a marked spot is not.
"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next."
— Ernest Hemingway, interview, 1958
Both of these practices are forms of the same behaviour: capturing without elaborating. Hemingway was not finishing the thought — he was leaving a thread. Didion was not writing the essay — she was saving the material. The elaboration happened later, when there was time for it, when the mind was calm enough to do the work.
This is what idea parking is. It is the recognition that inspiration and execution are different activities that rarely happen at the same time. The idea arrives in the wrong moment — you're on the bus, in a meeting, mid-conversation with someone who requires your attention. Trying to develop it fully in that moment is not just impractical; it is often actively damaging. The rushed draft is worse than no draft. But the note taken quickly, the fragment captured before the moment passes — that can be everything.
Fitzgerald, writing in the 1930s, kept a notebook he called the Ledger — decades of fragments, observations, overheard lines, images that arrested him. Many of them ended up in his novels years later. The fragment of dialogue he caught at a party in 1924 appeared, refined and repositioned, in a novel published in 1934. The time between capture and use was ten years. But it was used. It survived because it was written down.
The pocket notebook is not where the work gets done. It is where the raw material gets stored. The work happens elsewhere — at the desk, in the afternoon, when you have two hours and the notebook in front of you and the fragment you caught last Tuesday that was nothing at the time and is now, in a different light, the beginning of something.
The A6 format is sized for parking, not developing. A single page holds enough for a captured thought — a sentence, a handful of lines, a quick diagram, a name you need to remember. It does not hold enough for a full essay, a complete argument, a developed plan. That is correct. The small page is the right tool for this specific job. Write the sentence. Park it. Go back to what you were doing. Come back later, when it's time.
The writers who fill notebooks and produce nothing are usually trying to develop on the spot, making the notebook do more than it should. The writers who fill notebooks and produce a great deal are usually parking — collecting without judging, trusting that the collection will be useful when the time comes to use it.
Park first. Develop later. The time between them is the idea working on itself.