Journaling Through Life's Plot Twists with Suleika Jaouad

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Speaker 13 One thing that's very important for me is that the journal be a place

Speaker 17 where

Speaker 19 you abandon any sense of judgment. It can be sentence fragments, it can be lists, it can be doodles.

Speaker 22 There's no right or wrong way to do it.

Speaker 25 I rarely go back and read my journals because I don't want to ignite that pilot light of self-consciousness.

Speaker 21 It's really a place where you come as you are.

Speaker 29 I'm Christine Seyr-Clissette.

Speaker 30 I'm Kyra Blackwell.

Speaker 31 I'm Rosie Guerin. And you're listening to The Wirecutter Show.

Speaker 29 This episode is called Journaling Through Life's Plot Twists.

Speaker 30 Hi guys.

Speaker 32 Hey there.

Speaker 30 So we're doing something a little different.

Speaker 29 Yeah. I mean, you know, I've worked here a long time and we have a lot of coverage on the site that is really supportive of a creative practice, right?

Speaker 29 So we have reviews for musical instruments, for things that can help you become a better cook, art supplies. You obviously don't need to buy gear or new things to be creative.

Speaker 29 Anyone can be creative, watch kids. They'll play around with sticks out in the mud and they're very creative.

Speaker 29 But I do think that if you are approaching a creative practice and you really get into it, having the right tools can, it's the right tool for the right job, right?

Speaker 29 So I think there are some real benefits to having that.

Speaker 31 So whether you find joy in making elaborate meals or working on a novel, playing music, we're going to talk about strategy for unlocking creativity today.

Speaker 24 And our guest is Suleika Juad.

Speaker 31 She's an artist, she's a journalist, she's an author. She writes the substack called The Isolation Journals.
And her most recent book is called The Book of Alchemy.

Speaker 31 And it explores how journaling can help unlock your creative potential. This is going to be a really, really special conversation.

Speaker 32 Oh, yeah. And if you're a New York Times reader, you might recognize Suleka from the column she used to write.
It was a little over a decade ago.

Speaker 32 It was called Life Interrupted, which basically documented her experience with cancer in her early 20s. She also wrote a New York Times bestseller about this experience called Between Two Kingdoms.

Speaker 31 We're going to take a quick break and on the other side, the two of you are going to talk with Suleka about how journaling can unlock creativity.

Speaker 31 And then a little bit later, you're talking with Ariana Vasquez about some unexpected journaling tools. And I'll catch up with you at the end.

Speaker 1 The Wirecutter Show is supported by Rocket Mortgage.

Speaker 4 Your home is an active investment, not a passive one.

Speaker 5 And with Rocket Mortgage, you can put your home equity to work right away. When you unlock your home equity, you unlock new doors for your family.

Speaker 7 Renovations, extensions, even buying your next property.

Speaker 8 Get started today with smarter tools and guidance from real mortgage experts.

Speaker 2 Find out how at rocketmortgage.com.

Speaker 10 Rocket Mortgage LLC, licensed in 50 states, nmls consumeraccess.org, 3030.

Speaker 36 Dell AI PCs are newly designed to help you do more faster. That's the power of Dell AI, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors.
Upgrade today by visiting dell.com slash deals.

Speaker 37 Bon Blanc invites you to use life's quiet moments to pause, reflect, and put pen to paper.

Speaker 2 Chapter one. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 Part one.

Speaker 37 Perfect.

Speaker 38 The mountains are impressive. Oh, I wish you were here to see them.

Speaker 13 Dear Diary, meet my new writing companion, the Meister Stuck.

Speaker 37 For every journey, the perfect companion awaits, Montblanc. Let's write.
Visit Montblanc.com for exquisitely crafted writing instruments, leather goods, and more.

Speaker 30 Welcome back.

Speaker 32 With us now is Suleka Juwad. She writes the popular substack, The Isolation Journals, and her most recent book is called The Book of Alchemy, A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life.

Speaker 32 Today, we're digging into how journaling can really help you become more creative.

Speaker 29 Suleka, welcome to the show.

Speaker 39 Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 29 We are so pumped to have you here. For listeners who aren't familiar with your story, can you tell us a little bit about how you started journaling as a daily practice?

Speaker 42 So I have been journaling from the time I was old enough to hold a pen as the kid of two immigrants who showed up on the first day of kindergarten not speaking a word of English, I felt a palpable sense of being a misfit.

Speaker 21 What was so appealing about the journal as a kid is that it was a space where I could fully show up as I was.

Speaker 47 It wasn't beautiful writing.

Speaker 30 It wasn't even grammatical writing.

Speaker 41 It was a place to put all of the thoughts and feelings swirling around in my head that I felt I couldn't really share out loud.

Speaker 42 And so the journal for me really felt like a refuge.

Speaker 51 But it wasn't until I got sick at 22 and was diagnosed with leukemia that the journal really became a kind of lifeline.

Speaker 23 I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that journaling saved my life.

Speaker 27 It was

Speaker 30 a

Speaker 26 container where I could

Speaker 23 write through whatever was happening and use it in whatever way I wanted as a kind of reporter's notebook on some days where I'd record overheard gossip between the nurses, a place where I could vent, a place where I could talk about the things

Speaker 44 that I couldn't say out loud.

Speaker 23 My fears around my illness and my prognosis,

Speaker 39 emotions

Speaker 52 that felt

Speaker 13 somehow unsavory, like envy in watching, you know, my friends on Instagram

Speaker 23 traveling and starting their jobs and going to parties and all the other big and small milestones of young adulthood at a time where I felt profoundly stuck.

Speaker 32 It's just really interesting because usually when people hear journaling, they think it's childish. You know, they think of the little notebook with the lock and the little hearts dotting the eyes.

Speaker 32 The way that you mentioned in your book, like there's scientific research that shows that journaling can have a real impact on your, on, on mental health and the benefit of it.

Speaker 32 So can you just kind of talk a little bit about that? Yeah.

Speaker 64 The history of journaling is a fascinating one.

Speaker 65 People have been looking to the journal since the beginning of time to record historical events, to record personal events. And there is evidence that shows the benefits of journaling.

Speaker 34 Everything

Speaker 56 from reducing anxiety and stress

Speaker 43 to even improving your immune system.

Speaker 66 But I know anecdotally, both in the context of my own life and a sub stack I write called the Isolation Journals, the very real

Speaker 21 and dare I say,

Speaker 34 transformational impacts of the journal on one's life.

Speaker 32 Aaron Powell, and that's why your sub stack is so popular is because people really felt a connection to you and what you were doing, right?

Speaker 25 Yeah, I started it in the early days of the pandemic.

Speaker 21 And the idea was to share this approach to journaling that I had cultivated when I was sick in the form of a hundred-day project, one journal entry a day, with a short passage and prompt for inspiration with a larger community because so much of what we were struggling with in those early days of lockdown felt familiar to me as someone who'd had to be in medical isolation, who couldn't leave my house.

Speaker 30 And to my great surprise, by the end of that first month, we had over 100,000 people from all around the world of all ages, not only journaling individually, but also sharing those journal entries with one another.

Speaker 56 And what was so interesting about

Speaker 42 that project was that journaling didn't always look the way my journaling did.

Speaker 23 I am someone who keeps a kind of traditional journal or has for much of my life a notebook and a pen.

Speaker 21 But one of the very first women we heard from during the early days of that project was a mother from Minnesota who'd lost her 13-year-old daughter.

Speaker 50 And she decided that for her 100-day journaling project, she was going to use her daughter's old art supplies and make a visual journal entry every day of a memory with her daughter.

Speaker 60 And it became a kind of grief journal for her.

Speaker 66 And

Speaker 59 what she said that moved me so much was that it was the first time that alongside, you know, the immense, indescribable pain of losing your child, She, for the first time, was also able to access the joy of remembering her, of being able to commune with her in this kind of creative way.

Speaker 29 That is so beautiful. The isolation journals, this project, this 100-day project at the beginning of the pandemic, this is sort of the genesis of your new book.

Speaker 29 For listeners who maybe aren't familiar with the book, it is filled with these awesome essays from some very, very famous writers.

Speaker 29 You've got people like Gloria Steinem, George Saunders, you have Salman Rushdie, but you also have people that are not famous who have contributed essays to this book.

Speaker 29 And then there are also writing prompts. So can you tell us a little bit about how the book developed from that project?

Speaker 26 Despite being a person who is primed to enjoy journaling, I think like a lot of people who've attempted to journal, there are moments where I either fall off because I'm tired of repeating the same old things and I feel like I'm stuck in my life and therefore I get stuck in my journal entries or other times where I don't journal and it's usually when I need to journal most and that's because there's something I'm that feels too tender to look at.

Speaker 21 It's a little too hot to touch.

Speaker 42 And so I've tried every kind of journaling over the years.

Speaker 44 But what I arrived at with the isolation journals was this notion of being prompted.

Speaker 59 And I am not someone who typically, you know, if someone had instructed me to write to a prompt, thought I would have enjoyed that.

Speaker 68 It would have probably felt like homework to me and a little too directive.

Speaker 33 But the experience of reading a short essay, of reading a prompt, has a kind of kaleidoscopic effect of sort of twisting the chamber and the light falls differently.

Speaker 23 And sometimes I love the prompt and it immediately sparks an idea.

Speaker 26 Sometimes I hate the prompt.

Speaker 59 And that's interesting in and of itself.

Speaker 62 And I write about that.

Speaker 59 Sometimes I ignore the prompt altogether, but there's one sentence I read in the essay that moves me.

Speaker 53 And so the Isolation Journals has continued.

Speaker 22 It's been, it's now a weekly newsletter.

Speaker 23 But in the course of running the isolation journals, I've gotten the privilege of gathering these incredible essays and prompts from the most creative people I know.

Speaker 33 And when I say creative, I say that very broadly because yes, there are the George Saunders, et cetera, of the world, but many of the contributors in this book are not people who you would typically think of as creative.

Speaker 23 Our youngest contributor was six years old at the time, two-time brain cancer survivor named Lou Sullivan.

Speaker 23 We have a man who writes an essay and prompt who's days away from execution in solitary confinement in Texas.

Speaker 54 We have a beautiful prompt from a young mother who is about to become widowed, whose husband is sick and is anticipating a new beginning.

Speaker 42 It's such a wide range of people who, to me, embody that spirit of creative alchemy.

Speaker 29 I want to talk a little bit about something that you talk about in this new book, how the act of journaling has this ability to heal creative wounds.

Speaker 29 Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe some specific examples that you've you've seen, maybe in the people that are involved in the isolation journal community or who've just responded to you personally?

Speaker 66 Yeah.

Speaker 18 So my husband to me is John, who I met at Bandcamp when I was 13.

Speaker 42 But now to the rest of the world, he is John Batiste, who, yeah, I'm obviously biased as a brilliant musician.

Speaker 29 I think there's no dispute that he is a brilliant musical genius.

Speaker 42 Musical genius and brilliant person, full

Speaker 58 And I dedicated this book to him because in some ways I think he was my first teacher in the idea of creative alchemy.

Speaker 55 He's also one of the contributors in the book.

Speaker 50 But when I was 22 years old and I found myself here in New York City stuck in a hospital room for about two months.

Speaker 23 John, who was an old friend from Bandcamp, learned that I was sick and he ended up showing up with his entire band unprompted, unannounced at my hospital room door.

Speaker 43 And right there in my hospital room, he and his band began to play.

Speaker 49 And as the sound of the tuba and the melodica and the saxophone filtered out into the hallway, patients and doctors and nurses started to poke their heads out and to come around my room in curiosity.

Speaker 42 And everyone began to

Speaker 23 clap their hands and to dance and sing.

Speaker 47 Now, oncology wards are not joyous places, I think it's safe to say. They're typically music-less places.

Speaker 22 But in the place of the beeping IV poles and the wheezing of monitors, John transformed what was an incredibly grim and difficult day into the most joyous of second lines.

Speaker 17 And I think witnessing that led me to start to think about how I might enact my own experiences of creative alchemy.

Speaker 23 And for me, that's always taken place in the journal.

Speaker 67 And so I've gotten to witness so many people doing that in their own ways.

Speaker 50 One of my favorite early community members of the Isolation Journals is a man named Charlie Greenman, who was in his 80s, had never journaled before, didn't really think it was for him, and has become one of our most ardent, active members of the community.

Speaker 21 And he loves journaling. He says that the way he described it, he said, it feels like an adventure and I have no idea where it's going.

Speaker 23 But the best thing is I don't need to know.

Speaker 29 You're also a really creative person in other ways too. You paint, you have other creative practices.
Do you find that journaling kind of speaks to those other creative practices?

Speaker 29 You know, like I find, for instance, if I meditate in the morning, I tend to have a better, calmer day and everything seems to connect a little bit better.

Speaker 29 Do you have a similar experience when you journal?

Speaker 16 Absolutely.

Speaker 52 I feel like I am made of chaos

Speaker 42 until I put pen to paper.

Speaker 19 I'm someone who doesn't quite know what I'm feeling or how to even begin to entangle my thoughts until I start to write them down.

Speaker 14 And like one thing that's very important for me is that the journal be a place

Speaker 18 where you abandon any sense of judgment.

Speaker 19 It can be sentence fragments, it can be lists, it can be doodles.

Speaker 22 There's no right or wrong way to do it.

Speaker 23 I rarely go back and read my journals because I don't want to ignite that pilot light of self-consciousness.

Speaker 21 It's really a place where you come as you are.

Speaker 50 Whatever comes out is great.

Speaker 18 I do it for as long as I want or for 30 seconds if that's all I have as long as I do it consistently.

Speaker 17 And I do think that it has

Speaker 41 informed every aspect of both my creative work and my life.

Speaker 33 I, three years ago,

Speaker 23 found out that the leukemia was back, was going to have another bone marrow transplant, went into the hospital, and I was like, I've got this.

Speaker 46 I brought like six journals.

Speaker 26 I had my medical journal, my reporter's notebook.

Speaker 50 I had my personal journal.

Speaker 42 And my vision was temporarily impaired for a couple of weeks and I wasn't able to journal.

Speaker 25 And so I started keeping a visual journal.

Speaker 19 I'm not a trained painter, and started using watercolor.

Speaker 61 And I have become obsessed with painting.

Speaker 23 It is a whole new creative language that I certainly would never have stumbled across without the act of keeping a journal.

Speaker 61 And I think that to me is what keeps it endlessly enlivening and interesting:

Speaker 18 the ability

Speaker 57 to write

Speaker 26 without any goal or outcome in mind, where you get to follow the thread of your intuition without knowing where it's going to lead.

Speaker 44 And that kind of stream of consciousness to me is so important

Speaker 66 in getting to the truth beneath the truth, beneath the truth, and just taking a small moment to take a deep breath, to sit down and to write my way back to myself.

Speaker 49 myself.

Speaker 32 I feel like a lot of people will read your book or hear your story, listen to this podcast, and feel inspired. And then there's so much freedom that you can do whatever you want.
And that's awesome.

Speaker 32 But sometimes it could also be a little bit daunting, you know, just the idea of you could do anything you want, but like, where do you start and how do you keep going?

Speaker 32 Do you have any advice to help people who want to start this continue doing it consistently?

Speaker 67 Yeah.

Speaker 58 I mean I think that's one of the hardest things because lots of people buy a journal,

Speaker 21 fill out the first couple of pages, leave the rest blank.

Speaker 32 Guilty as charged.

Speaker 14 Then buy another journal because that one's ruined.

Speaker 30 Is the aesthetic contains the evidence of your failure to commit?

Speaker 27 So for me, what's always helped is some kind of accountability.

Speaker 50 I love the 100-day container and the book is designed as a kind of 100-day project with 100 essays and prompts, but maybe start with 10, maybe start with 30.

Speaker 21 I love doing it in community.

Speaker 17 I have,

Speaker 68 I guess it's unofficially called a sort of journaling club where we read an essay prompt right for 10 minutes and We don't share the journal entry because that's private, but we talk about what came up.

Speaker 29 Do you do this together in the same room? Are you doing this virtually?

Speaker 33 I've done it both by

Speaker 29 the same time together in community with a group of people.

Speaker 20 It could be friends.

Speaker 69 It could be, I actually know someone who's doing it with her daughter.

Speaker 22 It could be a two-person journaling club.

Speaker 42 I find that having some set number of days that you aim for to begin with, because the consistency to me is important.

Speaker 30 It's a little bit like going to the gym.

Speaker 24 You don't really reap the rewards of it unless you keep doing it.

Speaker 49 Yeah.

Speaker 66 And

Speaker 14 some to prompt you because I don't know about you, but the blank page immediately summons all of the questions, certainly the big question of what is it do I that I possibly have to say.

Speaker 50 And so just having a little directive that might push your train of thought in an unexpected or new direction, I find to be useful. And whatever comes up is great.

Speaker 59 If it's your grocery list, wonderful.

Speaker 64 If it is a petty grievance, fabulous.

Speaker 26 You're no longer carrying that around in your body.

Speaker 68 You've externalized it onto the page.

Speaker 62 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 8 We're going to take a quick break.

Speaker 29 And when we're back, we're going to talk brass tacks of journaling. Suleka, we're going to talk about your favorite tools for journaling.

Speaker 29 And then after that, we're going to bring on one of our colleagues, Ariana Vasquez, to talk about some unexpected digital tools that we've reviewed and recommended.

Speaker 30 We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 The Wirecutter Show is supported by Rocket Mortgage.

Speaker 4 Your home is an active investment, not a passive one.

Speaker 5 And with Rocket Mortgage, you can put your home equity to work right away. When you unlock your home equity, you unlock new doors for your family.

Speaker 7 renovations, extensions, even buying your next property.

Speaker 8 Get started today with smarter tools and guidance from real mortgage experts.

Speaker 2 Find out how at at rocketmortgage.com.

Speaker 10 RocketMortgage LLC, licensed in 50 states, NMLS consumer access.org, 3030.

Speaker 36 Huge savings on Dell AI PCs with Intel Core Ultra processors are here, and they are newly designed to help you do more faster.

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Speaker 37 Mont Blanc invites you to use life's quiet moments to pause, reflect, and put pen to paper.

Speaker 2 Chapter one. Oh, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 Part one.

Speaker 37 Perfect.

Speaker 38 The mountains are impressive. Oh, I wish you were here to see them.

Speaker 13 Dear Diary, meet my new writing companion, the Meister Stuck.

Speaker 37 For every journey, the perfect companion awaits, Montblanc. Let's write.
Visit Montblanc.com for exquisitely crafted writing instruments, leather goods, and more.

Speaker 30 Welcome back.

Speaker 32 We're here with Suleika Juwad, author of the book of alchemy. So earlier, we talked about how adopting a journaling practice can help you unlock creativity.

Speaker 32 And now we're going to get into some of the practical details. So Suleka, because this is a wirecutter podcast, of course, we have to discuss your gear.
So you are a pen and paper person, right?

Speaker 32 You have to handwrite.

Speaker 42 I am a pen and paper person.

Speaker 55 You do whatever works for you.

Speaker 44 I personally can't resist the backspace bar.

Speaker 30 Oh, we can't do that.

Speaker 23 And so in order to not self-edit, the inkier the pen, the better. I actually use a fountain pen, a lammy pen, and I like the feel of palm on paper.

Speaker 46 And I'm less likely to scratch things out or to start over.

Speaker 29 Do you have a favorite paper that you use? Because if you're using a fountain pen, what's your paper?

Speaker 30 A fountain.

Speaker 30 Okay. So like an old wrinkled like scribe.

Speaker 30 Yeah, exactly. I make the paper by hand.

Speaker 32 You mash it up.

Speaker 42 I have a collection of journals.

Speaker 59 I love a drugstore composition book from a country.

Speaker 39 If I'm visiting a new country, I have, you know, my Luke terms and my moleskins.

Speaker 55 I'm really not precious about the actual journal itself.

Speaker 23 Right now I'm using a Luke term and I like the Luke term a lot.

Speaker 29 They have really nice soft paper. I mean it's like very, very, the texture of the paper is really lovely.

Speaker 16 They have like this acid free ink bleed proof paper, which is especially important with the with the fountain pen.

Speaker 43 Sounds like it.

Speaker 32 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Well, I actually want to get back into your ritual of journaling.

Speaker 32 Do you always do it at a specific time? Are you outside? What does your physical setup look like? How do you get into your journaling habit?

Speaker 42 So, you know, we talked about accountability as something that I find to be important in order to do it consistently.

Speaker 42 But I also think folding it into a non-negotiable part of your routine is important. So for me, perhaps the only non-negotiable part of my routine is my first cup of coffee.

Speaker 23 Like nothing else is going to happen until I have that first cup of coffee.

Speaker 26 And so that's when I journal.

Speaker 62 Okay.

Speaker 42 Different times I would journal in the five minutes it took for my French press to steep.

Speaker 40 And then I would keep journaling.

Speaker 50 But it's usually around my first cup of coffee.

Speaker 42 My other non-negotiable part of my routine is walking my dogs.

Speaker 24 So I'll do it when I get back from walking my dogs.

Speaker 42 But I think, you know, the most common thing I hear is, I don't have time to journal.

Speaker 45 And to anyone who says that, I would suggest that they look on their phone at the number of hours they've spent on their social media app of choice.

Speaker 54 What I would say is that you make time for the things that you value and that are important to you.

Speaker 58 And so one thing I really try to do for myself is to lower the barrier to entry.

Speaker 40 I don't adhere to a page count or certainly a word count.

Speaker 42 My feeling is if I show up, even if it's a couple of sentences, that is more than enough.

Speaker 44 I'm much more interested in the consistency of it.

Speaker 62 Because in the act of being consistent, especially if I'm not making it too complicated, I'm more likely to return and I'm more likely

Speaker 30 to

Speaker 42 reap the benefits of it in a way that does make me prioritize it.

Speaker 29 Is there anything else that you use in your creative practice beyond pen and paper that helps kind of support your journaling practice?

Speaker 44 So I love ritual and I'm always designing and redesigning little rituals for myself.

Speaker 25 So I love a candle

Speaker 20 or some incense or something.

Speaker 42 Typically when I journal, it's curled up on the couch with my coffee.

Speaker 69 with my dogs and some kind of a candle or something.

Speaker 29 Do you have a favorite candle right now?

Speaker 30 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 30 You're asking my.

Speaker 16 I am obsessed with Lo Labeau's Santal.

Speaker 45 I'm going to get it wrong.

Speaker 17 Santal 26.

Speaker 39 It's woodsy, but it's not overpowering.

Speaker 23 It kind of reminds me of an incense that my parents burned.

Speaker 51 I think that's why I like it so much.

Speaker 27 And it lingers for a long time.

Speaker 59 So I love that candle.

Speaker 69 Other things that I use that kind of get me into a creative mode

Speaker 57 is watercolor.

Speaker 23 I've been keeping a visual journal in addition to a written journal and that can be a doodle.

Speaker 42 It can be one swatch of a color.

Speaker 59 I've been really excited to sort of expand my earlier definitions of journal and to see how that kind of shifts the way that that I think and the way that I then move through my day.

Speaker 27 The other thing I have on my desk are stacks of the journals of some of my very favorite writers.

Speaker 43 And I find that to be really inspiring.

Speaker 29 That's awesome. Do you have any particular ones that you're loving right now?

Speaker 14 Well, I'll tell you the ones that I always have on my desk.

Speaker 65 Susan Zontag's

Speaker 56 journals, Virginia Woolf, Audrey Lorde's The Cancer Journals.

Speaker 22 I love Frida Kahlo's journals because they're a kind of hybrid of writing and painting.

Speaker 16 Sylvia Ploth, because she's actually so delightfully funny and wicked.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I think I'm just fascinated by

Speaker 45 how people write and think when they're not doing it with an audience in mind.

Speaker 32 Thank you so much for joining us, Sulei. Thank you.

Speaker 32 So, now Ariana Vasquez is in the studio with us, and she is Wirecutter's home office writer. She's here to chat about journaling tools that Wirecutter recommends.

Speaker 32 Ariana has tried a lot of these different tools, so we're really excited to chat with her.

Speaker 30 Ariana, welcome. Hey, thank you.

Speaker 63 This is exciting.

Speaker 32 We actually just talked with Suleka about journaling with a paper and pen, but Wirecutter also recommends some digital tools, right, for journaling, specifically like digital notebooks.

Speaker 32 What even is this?

Speaker 63 Imagine your favorite e-reader, like a Kindle or a Kobo. That's the size of a sheet of paper.
You can write on them. You can draw notes.
You can do sketching.

Speaker 63 It's a different feeling than writing on a glass, like a tablet. There's a little bit more friction with the pen on the surface.
It's not an LED screen. It is an e-ink screen.

Speaker 63 So you get that feeling more of like a pencil or a pen on paper.

Speaker 29 And is this device storing your entries in the cloud? Are you able to access them from other devices?

Speaker 63 Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, a lot of all of our pics have like a folder structure inside where you can organize all your notes into different things.

Speaker 63 You can have a journal and a to-do list and various things.

Speaker 63 And then sometimes with the subscription, sometimes buying the device, depending on the model you get, you can have all of that stuff uploaded to a drive, a cloud, your Google Drive, or their personal online servers, whatever you need.

Speaker 63 Okay, great.

Speaker 29 So, Ariana, why choose an e-ink type of notebook over traditional pen and paper? Why do you like to journal on e-ink?

Speaker 63 Aaron Powell, it's best illustrated. So imagine you're a notebook and pen person, right? You've got a notebook dedicated for your bujo or your daily planning.

Speaker 63 You've got a notebook dedicated for maybe a small art book if you do some kind of sketching and some tools. You've got a notebook dedicated to your journal.

Speaker 63 Maybe I know some people who carry those things and also like individual index cards so they can quickly jot down a note and then later transplant that into whatever notebook it goes into.

Speaker 63 That takes up a lot of space and can be kind of heavy.

Speaker 63 And then on top of that, there's also your phone, your tablet or your laptop, whatever other digital devices you're carrying to exist in our digital age.

Speaker 63 On the other hand, you've got one very slender, lightweight device that has folders for your journaling, your to-dos, your big projects and plans.

Speaker 63 All of our pics have an app of sorts that has an art space so you can do your pencil sketches or your arts or do your doodles. While, you know, digital notebooks are not indestructible,

Speaker 63 if your notes are backed up to the cloud and your water bottle opens in your bag, you haven't lost all of that the same way that you would if your notebook got wet and you didn't get a chance to like wipe everything down really quickly.

Speaker 29 Right. You brought one into the studio.
Can we see?

Speaker 63 Yeah. This is the Remarkable, which is a pick.

Speaker 17 I like that name.

Speaker 63 And yeah, it is pretty cool.

Speaker 29 Can you describe what this looks like?

Speaker 63 Imagine a really thin composition notebook, like a notebook where most of the pages have been ripped out and it's maybe only like a quarter of an inch thick.

Speaker 63 And then you just, it's got a lock and an unlock. And then when you unlock it, it's just a really simple user interface with all the notebooks that you have.
You can hit a plus sign and open

Speaker 63 a quick sheet, for example. And it's essentially like a little art space.
So if you wanted to draw on it or...

Speaker 32 It's got a pen attached to it the way that like an iPad would too.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 32 Okay, I'm actually really surprised at the way that this feels to write on i'm also a pen and paper person because i'm very tactile this does feel like it's kind of like writing on a whiteboard with a marker right i'm shocked try it it doesn't feel like i've tried using my ipad to write notes because I like the idea of having some place that is easy to organize my stuff, but I always ended up not doing it because I just didn't like the way that the stylus was gliding over the iPad screen.

Speaker 63 Yeah, I've tried a bunch of different solutions for that for the iPad.

Speaker 63 There are companies that sell alternative pen tips that are slightly more coarse silicone to try to imitate the drag of a pen on glass.

Speaker 63 There are also screen films that you can adhere. It's really hard to replicate pen and paper, but I think this does a pretty good job.

Speaker 29 It does.

Speaker 29 So if I say wrote a journal entry on this, will it somehow magically turn my handwriting into type?

Speaker 63 It does have writing to text recognition.

Speaker 29 Okay, so I could, like, let's say I was working on a novel.

Speaker 30 Yeah. I was at the beach writing my novel.

Speaker 29 I could write it all in hand, and then I wouldn't have to go back and type it up. It would just like go to the magical page.

Speaker 63 I mean, I've tried it a few times, and it's pretty good. Like, my handwriting can put any doctor's handwriting to shame.
It's real chicken scratch.

Speaker 63 But it was able to get most of my barely passable letters into like actual words that I could read, which is nice because my handwriting is so bad when I'm journaling, especially if I'm moving fast and like in a flow and getting things out, it gets really bad.

Speaker 63 And then I go back three days later and I'm like, I can't tell what the heck I wrote.

Speaker 63 So it's a very handy tool.

Speaker 29 Can you tell us what our picks are?

Speaker 63 Yeah, so the primary pick is a

Speaker 63 SuperNote. It's the Nomad.

Speaker 63 And it's smaller, more portable. It's a little bit different writing experience than this is in that you kind of have to press through like old, old tablets, but it's fantastic.

Speaker 63 And if you're someone who really likes a premium pen, the pens that you can get from Supernote are like weighty and they feel like a premium pen. This is another one of our picks.

Speaker 63 This is the Remarkable 2. And then the other pick we have is by a different brand.
It's for people who don't want to necessarily use the Amazon Kindle app.

Speaker 63 It's by Kobo and it's a similar to this one that we have here, the remarkable.

Speaker 63 It also gives you the opportunity to use other third-party stuff if that's what you prefer, if you don't want to use Kindle.

Speaker 29 Okay, great. And what is the ballpark price of these notepads?

Speaker 63 Aaron Powell, Jr.: As far as prices go, this unit here, the Remarkable 2, is $400. And they range in price from $300 to $400.

Speaker 63 And they go up from there if you want more features like color, for example. So the prices are still kind of high.
Definitely way more than a notebook and a pen would be.

Speaker 63 But you're going to have this for a lot longer.

Speaker 32 Thank you, Ari.

Speaker 30 Thanks for coming. That was so great.

Speaker 29 I'm very intrigued by these.

Speaker 30 I'm back. Hello.
Hey, I want to hear how it went. It was great.
What did you all learn about creativity? It was so good. This was so good.

Speaker 29 Well, I was just really into this conversation with Suleka. I loved so much of her advice.
And I am going to take something that she talked about in this episode.

Speaker 29 If you're trying to establish a habit, rolling it into a non-negotiable sort of event that you do in your day anyway. So for her, it was having a cup of coffee.
That's when she journals.

Speaker 29 I feel like that's a really good time for me to pair some writing as well. And then it was also great to talk with Ariana.
I'm really into these digital notepads.

Speaker 30 I think I want one.

Speaker 55 They're kind of expensive. I'd be interested if they cut the price in half.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Is this something I should wait for a sale?

Speaker 24 Maybe, maybe.

Speaker 30 They're $300 to $400.

Speaker 29 So they're not cheap, but I really like that you could also use some of them as an e-reader. So I could find that.

Speaker 30 That's really cool.

Speaker 30 as a way to justify it.

Speaker 32 A tool for the future.

Speaker 32 It's really so futuristic. It's pretty awesome.
Yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 30 What about you?

Speaker 31 How is the conversation for you?

Speaker 32 Oh, I feel inspired. I really liked Suleka's encouragement to not set a solid goal for yourself.
Just kind of go with it. Whatever makes it easiest for you so that it's a very low barrier of entry.

Speaker 34 So you just like roll journaling into your daily routine.

Speaker 32 And I think I'm also going to get a fountain pen.

Speaker 30 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 31 A fountain pen?

Speaker 32 Yeah, she literally writes with a fountain pen.

Speaker 40 Shakespeare did?

Speaker 32 Yes.

Speaker 62 I mean, I think he had a quill.

Speaker 30 No.

Speaker 30 That's

Speaker 30 an old age fountain pen, isn't it?

Speaker 32 But yeah, I also like writing on pen and paper, and I really like a super inky pen. So I'm going to try it.

Speaker 31 That's awesome. I love that.

Speaker 31 If you want to find out more about Suleka, her book is called The Book of Alchemy. We'll link it here in the show notes.
And you can also check out Ariana's recommendations for digital notebooks.

Speaker 31 That's it for us for this week. Talk to you soon.

Speaker 30 Bye.

Speaker 31 The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddie Mazziello and Nick Pittman.
Today's episode was mixed by Rowan Nimisto.

Speaker 31 Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alicia BitYouTube, and Diane Wong.

Speaker 31 Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Freuman is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief.

Speaker 30 I'm Kyra Blackwell.

Speaker 29 I'm Christine Sear Clissette.

Speaker 31 And I'm Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 30 Great. Great.
Great.

Speaker 31 You know, I can't resist.

Speaker 32 I started saying that.

Speaker 30 Now I realize it's just rolled off the tongue. Yeah, it does.

Speaker 32 Rosie always goes grit when we're done.

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