Annotations

One of the best things to happen to me in high school was the English assignment to annotate the books we read. Annotate, as in take notes about the book in the book. At first, my notes weren't super intelligent. No, they were not stupid, they just weren't particularly insightful.

Example, from the first chapter of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered." Next to this, I wrote "forced to be happy? Loving life a ton?" in the margin. Fairly obvious observation and question, younger Elizabeth. Not helpful for much of anything.

Current me thought about the word "ever," and how juvenile it sounds, by the way. Giving the author the benefit of purpose, we see he wants us to see the narrator as young and naive.

But even though they were obvious, those early annotations were helpful -- they were practice. They taught me how to read. And that taught me how to write.

Most of the insights you read on this blog are courtesy of that skill. I began with simple annotations like the one above, marking questions, things I liked, insights into symbols and imagery, and progressed to over-annotating. That wasn't strictly useful except as practice, either.

Do me a favor and rewind memory lane to this post. Look at the pictures I posted; that is what I mean by over-annotating. While this was for a college course, it was a skill I learned toward the end of high school. It is less useful, academically, than it may look, because it is hard to find much of anything. Close reading, interpreting a passage, doing a character analysis, sure. But doing a whole book like this (I didn't go that far, thankfully) would make you lose everything. Plus, when you go back to reread, you won't want to read all those notes, too.

Over-annotating taught me to edit. My husband once looked at a query letter I was editing for someone and was amazed at how much I had written in comments. It may have been longer than the letter itself -- and all I did was annotate. Over-annotating taught me to look at individual words and phrases. It focused on the language itself, while my early attempts focused on story and character.

My current style of annotating incorporates both. I take notes on the side for the general things and write in the book itself for the specifics. I am more interested in how things work than on character or plot analysis -- notice I looked at why Bradbury used "ever" instead of commenting on the subject of the sentence, the smile. I also noticed that the muscles were gripping it -- concrete words with a connotation of force, perhaps even fear. But one value of the first style of annotations is it captures the impressions of a first read. Writers need that info from editors.

If you want to be an editor, learn to annotate. Buy books and read them with pen in hand. Or skip books -- read magazines, newspaper articles, blog posts, speeches, anything you can get your hands on, and annotate it. How could it possibly be improved? Read and reread the same stuff over and over until you have an idea. Then get your hands on more stuff to read and annotate.

The same thing goes for writers. If you want to write, learn to annotate. Buy books (or anything with words) and read them with a pen in hand. It doesn't matter if you read the notes later -- it is about the process of actively thinking about what you read, of learning how to write from an author while they write.

This is note-taking for the sake of note-taking. Think you can handle that? I promise practice will beget mad skills.