A lonely figure, coat flapping, scribbling frantically in a notebook on a precipitous clifftop, ignoring the rain and the wind, possessed and animated by the creative spirit…

Or on the bus, clamped into the corner seat and muttering like a madman, poetry and prose spilling out into the page…

Or in the middle of the night, leaping from the bed to scribe in the gloaming or the gloom: I must just get this down…

Iconic writer behaviour – and it does happen. In fact, I think it counts as one of the subsidiary (but vital) writing skills to know when you actually need to do it and when it’s just a way of annoying your family and escaping the washing up. Living with a writer isn’t always easy; you owe it to those around you to learn when to use your creative license to behave like a lunatic, and when to let it go.

That’s by the by. The point is: the end product of all these moments is a pile of notebooks, and if you’re like me, they’re just the beginning of the problem… because there are times when you don’t have a notebook. Half of my writing has always been done on the back of till receipts, napkins, paper place-mats and utility bills. It has been written in pencil, pen, crayon, and even eyeliner. It has been written on ferries, at balls, in pubs, on planes, at clubs, on my honeymoon (at Clare’s urging and with her enthusiastic connivance) and yes, in the middle of the night.

I also have a habit of writing on my left arm – note carefully, not just the back of my hand, but all the way around the wrist and up until about two inches from the elbow. The benefit of this last method is that it has to be transcribed as soon as you get the chance or it fades, so it goes onto the computer directly. The other stuff… piles up.

All of which leaves a great pile of stuff, both handwritten and digital, waiting for review.

And beyond the occasional flashes of inspiration, there’s also the moment when I deliberately discard the computer and use a pen. My handwriting is pretty awful, so I do it as little as I can, but there’s a different atmosphere and mood to scribbling with a pen or even a pencil on blank paper compared with working on a keyboard. I read somewhere that you actually use different bits of your brain, and use them to make different brainwaves.

So when I need to plot the big picture, for example, or when I want to interrogate myself about something which isn’t necessarily working, I end up using pen and paper to do it. That goes into the notebook, too.

Because there’s freewheeling implied in the process, the end result usually includes at least one idea for a completely different story, and a lot of doodling.

Incidentally, doodling is par for the course. I saw some of Pushkin’s manuscripts in a museum in Russia a while ago, and around the edges were drawn – exquisitely, I might add – erotic sketches of women playing billiards in the nude and randy satyrs chasing nymphs.

The question is, what then?

Well, okay. For some stuff it’s easy. If I’ve just written a great swathe of text about Gonzo and Jim Hepsobah, that gets typed up and re-written and it goes into the book. Or doesn’t. It gets dealt with. And then there’s the plotting scribbles, the great enthusiastic arrows and detailed flow-charts and the rest. Most of those I absorb or discard and never need to see again. They were a physical thought process, not a reminder or a note. They were about coming to the conclusion, not about noting anything for future reference. I was thinking with my hands. 

But sprinkled through them is gold-dust. Tiny character notes; wayward notions about what might have worked if I hadn’t already done x, and then it turns out that x has to be cut for another reason and lo and behold I need that other plan. And ideas, my God. Treasure trove ideas for other things. Stories about Marlon Agonistes, the main character in my story for The Verb a few weeks ago – I must see about getting that into something or putting it online here. My next novel, or the one after that. The genesis of the piece I’m praying will go into Granta later this year.

So what do you do with your notebooks?

Keep them for ever. Put them in a pile. They are your bank account, to draw on at need. Embrace the fact that you are not the kind of person who can catalogue them and file the bits of random paper which say things like:

Before I tell you about Royden, I should probably mention that I murdered him. 

Or:

Crazy guy, crimson shirt => => terribly afraid of nudity. Why? Evil tattoo? Disease/disfigurement?

You may or may not remember why that was important. It may mean nothing to you today. But it might trip you off tomorrow, set you going down some strange track which resembles or doesn’t remotely touch on the thing you were originally thinking about.

Going through them looking for something in particular is painfully frustrating, but leafing through the weird outpourings of your own brain will always give you something. Don’t fight it. Follow it. The worst that happens is that you burn an hour daydreaming about wonderful notions which don’t deal with whatever you wanted to work on. That’s part of your job. And it may unlock something in your head you didn’t know needed it.

Notebooks are your mind’s footprints. They’re your holiday album from writer-world.

Keep ‘em. And cherish the fact that they’re disorganised and nutso and you can’t find what you’re looking for. If you could, you’d be a different person.