Creating Art With My Everbook

I don’t like computers. I use them because I have to. But given the choice between a screen and a piece of paper, I take the paper without hesitation, every time.

Everything I write starts by hand. Every first draft, every revision I can manage on paper, every clinical note from a session, every scene that comes to me in an airport or a supermarket or sitting in a car waiting for someone. The digital version of a manuscript exists because my secretary types it out from my handwritten pages. Not because I want to work that way. Because I cannot make myself work any other way.

The system that makes this practical is the Everbook.

The Everbook was designed by pastors Bryan Wolfmueller and Jonathan Fisk as a modular, analog organization tool. The concept is simple enough that you can explain it in two sentences. Loose A4 sheets are folded into small bundles that function as folders. Those folders are held together inside a leather cover by a single rubber or elastic strap. No rings. No binding. No spine. Pages can be added, removed, rearranged, and regrouped without any tools and without touching anything else in the system.

That is the entire product. Most people look at it and cannot understand how something so minimal can be so functional. That reaction usually comes from people who have spent years adding complexity to their organizational systems instead of subtracting it.

I use the Everbook as a file management system for writing. Each project gets its own folder, a single folded A4 sheet that holds the pages for a chapter or a scene. When a chapter is done in draft, I staple the pages together and drop them into the folder. The folders stack in sequence inside the Everbook cover. When the draft is finished and goes to be typed, I pull the folders out in order, keep them in a box, and the Everbook empties for the next project.

The whole system resets in under two minutes. I have never lost a page.

I do not use it for GTD or time management, which was the original intended application. I have no interest in time management systems. I am interested in writing systems, and the Everbook is the best one I have found because it matches how writing actually works: you accumulate pages, you move them around, some chapters get rearranged, some scenes get cut and need a holding place, everything needs to be findable without searching.

For writing, I use yellow legal pads at the desk and blank A4 print paper when I’m away from it. Both go into the same folder system without any adjustment. The Pilot Gravity is the only pen I use. I keep at least twenty of them in every bag, drawer, and briefcase in my house. When one runs dry I don’t refill it. The marginal cost of a pen running out mid-sentence during something important is too high.

The Everbook goes everywhere with me. This is not an affectation. It is a practical requirement.

I watch people whenever I’m waiting somewhere. In airports, at gate areas where every other person is looking at a phone, I am looking at the people. At a supermarket two years ago, a woman in her sixties snapped at her grandson with a voice that had no patience left in it. She told him he would not eat dinner if he kept ignoring her orders. Not her requests. Her orders. The way she used that word told me something specific about where she had spent her life and what kind of authority she had learned to carry in small spaces. I had the Everbook in my hand before she finished the sentence. The character of Luna in The Marksman is built partly from those fifteen seconds in a checkout line.

Arthur from Arthur 9 came the same way. Characters are not invented. They are observed in reality and then written into fiction.

The process from first sight to finished chapter looks like this: I observe something and write it immediately, while the detail is still sharp. The note goes into the Everbook under whatever project it belongs to, or into a general folder if I don’t know yet where it fits. When I sit down to write a scene, I work from those raw notes and whatever else has accumulated. First draft goes straight onto the page without stopping to judge it. I finish the scene, staple the pages, file the folder. When the draft is complete, it goes to my secretary, gets typed into Apple Pages, and I work through the typed version with a red pen for the next pass.

I do the same thing for clinical notes. Observations from sessions, working hypotheses, things I noticed that didn’t fit anywhere obvious: all of it goes into the Everbook during the day and gets filed in the evening.

On the commercial Everbook market: most of what you will find sold as Everbook systems in leather goods stores is overpriced for what it is. Mine cost twelve dollars. A strip of PU leather cut to the right width, a strong rubber band, and a stack of A4 paper. I used a large envelope for a year before I found a leather-bound journal I didn’t want anymore and took the cover off it to build something better. Either works.

The only component of this system worth spending money on is the pen. Not the cover. Not the paper. The pen. If you are writing more than few pages a day by hand, you will know within a week whether the pen is right. The wrong instrument tires your hand and makes the act of writing feel like physical labor. The right one makes writing effortless and enjoyable. You stop noticing you’re holding it. That is the only metric that matters when you create art:

Become undistractable.