Breathe
By Edmée Pardo
When I started writing professionally, a master writer recommended me to always carry a notebook with me, because ideas look for a place to land and if they don't land in a port, they will land in the one they find available. Having a notebook and writing down the phrase, the word, what we observe, creates a container to keep and mature those seed words that will become something bigger. That teacher, an admirer of Anton Chekhov, commented that he was able to review the Russian author's notebook and there he read the word Seagull, solitary, without any other reference. We know that this great theatrical libretto that marked the lives of the female characters was born. Now, when I read the book Rastro by Margo Glantz, which comments on Mozart's scores and the annotations he made on them; on Roseau, who made a living from passing scores in clean copy... I think again of the notebooks as a record of the creative processes. And there is nothing more joyful for those interested in the subject than to look at loose sheets, notebooks, scores, with annotations made in the author's handwriting. And yes, for many years I carried a small notebook in my bag, along with my paper diary and some folded sheets of paper with a few notes taken at random.
