The Writing Notebook: An indispensable tool for Writers

Hi all,

Yep, it’s that time of year again. The holiday season. And while it’s one of my favorite times of the year, it can get even crazier in my household than normal (and that’s saying something!LOL).

Though I read and write romance novels, I am still single. Therefore, I’m in charge with what goes on in my household. Besides decorating, shopping and planning, I have other chores to do like ‘Um, why is the light not working, sigh?’ for example and so I must put my writing aside and deal with the crises at hand.

What’s hard as a writer is to not only find the time to write but to be able to set aside said writing to go deal with running a household, your day job and other things and then, go back to writing again. Yeah, sometimes writing is analogous to making love, I.e., you need to get back into the ‘right’ mood:)

So how does a writing notebook help you toward this? Well, let me give an example. There’s a couple of projects I want to work on but keep getting interrupted. Putting things down on paper will allow you as a writer, to come back to your work at a later time and thus to be able to begin working again more quickly.

Though what’s written in my writing notebook may not be as decipherable as a story or parts of a novel to most. It contains short phrases, descriptions of setting/characters and smatterings of dialogue, just to name a few things of what is written in there. Is everything in a linear order? Most but not all. Yeah, I do have arrows drawn linking ideas to different things because sometimes I write all over the page including in the margins.

Some writers use post it notes and I can understand that in some ways since I used index cards as a student to write my non-fiction research papers (index cards with ideas written on them *are* easier to shuffle) but I have a problem of losing stuff so I tend to prefer the solidness and dependability of keeping everything in one place, that is, the notebook.

I’m almost 40 and didn’t start writing my work on a computer until I was about 20 so my writing notebook is done by hand. I dunno, it’s probably my age but I do like to physically write my ideas down on paper. It somehow lets me plan everything out and feel ’closer’ to my ideas/story than when I type things on a computer. For me, the computer provides a bit of distance, something that physical writing does not. But talking with other writers who are younger than me, the former is not true for them. So yeah, it’s probably my age and therefore, your notebook, I guess can be digital. Though when you’re between writing ideas, you can’t doodle (as easily) on a computer page:)

To sum up then, I think a writing notebook is good for us writers since it acts as a ‘second brain’ as such to provide a safe and a secure place (harder to lose notebook than index cards) to store ideas until future use.

A writing notebook is also good because you can store ideas about your universe, including character descriptions and plot. I’m one of those writers who set up an outline before I write my book/story and so writing a plot in a notebook allows me to physically see if a story or book will ‘work’ before I go in a start writing it. Also, if you have your plot written out in your notebook, you can also see where the plot points are and how ‘balanced’ everything is (that your book/story isn’t lopsided in that everything important doesn’t happen in the last five pages or so while you have nothing interesting for the first couple of hundred).

Finally, if you are involved in writing a universe and plan to write two, three, four, five or even more books about the same characters, keeping a writing notebook will allow you to record minor details. In other words, if you want to look up a specific thing (what present character 1 gave to character 2 on first Christmas for example) you won’t have to reread your entire book or large sections of your books to do this. Though I do suggest that writers do reread their books from time to time, but that is again, the subject of another post. Keeping facts, character traits, etc. in a writing notebook is important because then, you can save time by not rereading entire large sections of your book to find out a single fact that you may have forgotten and get back to doing what you need to be doing, that is, writing another book.


Take care all,
Chris