"Honor Thy Talese"

Gay Talese likes to tell a story, I think he probably wrote about it in A Writer's Life, about how he takes notes on those pieces of cardboard you get when you buy a new button-down shirt. As I heard it, and as it's recounted here, he'd cut the cardboard up into pieces so that they would all fit into the breast pocket of his blazer/coat. And then when got down to writing a piece or a book based on the reporting he'd hang them all up on pieces of string stretched across his office.

Franny and Zooey, p. 181:

With his face in his hands and his handkerchief headgear dropping low over his brow, Zooey sat at Seymour's old desk, inert, but not asleep, for a good twenty minutes. Then, almost in one movement, he removed the support for his face, picked up his cigar, stowed it in his mouth, opened the left-hand bottom drawer of the desk, and took out, using both hands, a seven-or eight-inch-thick stack of what appeared to be-- and were-- shirt cardboards. He placed the stack before him on the desk and began to turn the cards over, two or three at a time. His hand stayed only once, really, and then quite briefly... The cardboard that he stopped at had been written on in February, 1998. The handwriting, in blue-lead pencil, was his brother Seymour's...

Life imitates art! I'm not saying, I'm just saying.