Like many writers, I have no shortage of notebooks. A glance at my bookcase suggests I have three blank notebooks ready to rock, and I know that in my stationary pile hidden behind doors there are at least five more. On my desk, there’s my week to a page diary that basically dictates my life alongside my google cal, and I have a daily notebook where on the left I write everything I need to do for the week, and on the right, I plot out all those to dos for each day. Then, there’s my writer’s notebook.
In days of old, my writer’s notebook was a mess of scribbled ideas, torn out newspaper articles, images I liked, ideas, arguments with myself and hastily scribbled scraps of conversations overheard on the train, i.e. nothing particularly helpful or useful.
My routine for starting a new novel is always the same: getmyself a gorgeous notebook, usually an a4 visual diary. For each project (and by project, I mean novel) I dedicate a separate journal/notebook. The notebook is where the novel ‘lives’ as I write it. It’s where I do all my planning, all my sketching out of character traits and ideas for plots and conflicts. For many years, it wasn’t a particularly reflective space for me, other than the occasional ‘man, this feels euphoric!’ or, more frequently ‘ugh, this is crap.’
Psst: if you’d like a sneak peek at how other writers keep notebooks, you’ll love Riss from Oz Lit Teacher who has a blog series dedicated to exactly that.
A couple of years ago, I wanted to be more strategic with how I was using my writing time, and before I could be strategic, I needed a sense of what I was actually doing in the pockets I’d scheduled for writing, aka making my dreams come true. I needed some more robust accountability that could describe the gap between what I intended to do, and what I actually did. Around that time, in the most serendipitous of ways, I stumbled upon a blog post by Kate Mildenhall about how she tracked her novel’s progression by way of an online doc that she updated continuously. And so began my tracking.
In my writer’s notebook, I write the date, the time I’m actually sitting my derriere in the chair to write, how I’m feeling about the writing itself and what I’m thinking about. Then, I list what I’m planning on getting done in the writing session. This can be as simple as a word count, or it can be a little more detailed, such as figure out what inthe living hell is happening in the third act. After the writing session, I then list what I actually did, and then my final entry is what I want to do in my next writing session.
Following a structured format at the start of each session helps me keep a record of how the work is progressing beyond word count, and it also gives me a chance to think deeply about the writing as well as my thoughts around it. Unlike a typical diary entry, it’s less about the day to day but is more about keeping my thoughts/ideas/reactions together and organised. And it’s different to how I journal, which is a daily-ish free association writing, brain purging schemozzle that I rarely look back on. Ending it with a similar structure (what I actually achieved, and what to do next) is a nice little closing ritual for the session that sets me up for the next one.
So where do I keep scraps of ideas, inspirations, dialogue, quotes from readings that are inspirational or useful? Well, they’re right there in the notebook squished in between my tracking questions. It’s not particularly pretty, because I have truly appalling handwriting, but my writer’s notebook serves as a place to think deeply and create backstory without clogging up my actual manuscript.
For three or four years now I’ve been scribbling these categories out each time I sit down to write, and I’m increasingly flirting with the idea of moving it to an online doc but I’m on the fence about this. I love the idea of scannability that comes with an online doc, one that never runs out of physical space, but scribbling by hand is a huge part of how I get my ideas and thoughts in my own head clear. I also love the physicality of the experience of turning back through the pages to see where my head was at in a point in time, like the day I wrote over 3000 words while in a grief storm at the loss of my beautiful aunt. Or the entry from a writing retreat at Phillip Island where I wrote the final scene of a novel and burst into tears. While the logical part of my brain tells me documenting such moments will be no different via the keyboard, I can’t deny I love the feeling of pen against paper. That scratchy sound and feel is as much what I love about that part of my writing routine as is capturing the thoughts. Gah, what to do?
Do you keep a writer’s notebook? Is it online, or hard copy?