Notebook Tour!
A glimpse inside some of my notebooks and how I use them for writing
Before we get into it, Happy February! Its the month of love and chocolate! So on that note - Festive February download, anyone?
Ok, so! I wanted to do a bit of a behind-the-scenes tour of some of my active notebooks, and share a bit about how I use them to support my writing process! If you've been here a while, then you know - I have a lot of notebooks.
Most of my stories start as a note jotted into my ideas notebook. It can be a couple paragraphs, a couple pages, or a word map or a single sentence! Depends on the idea, but there’s no rules. Long or short, if its an idea for a story, I write it down. There are a lot of ideas in my ideas notebook, not all of them are winners. In fact, a lot of them are downright terrible. But who cares? My ideas notebook is just for me. Part brainstorming, part dream journal, part daily diary, my ideas notebook is deeply personal and slated to be burned promptly after the final page is filled. But some of the ideas, the not so terrible ideas, whisper to me over time and I find myself going back and re-reading them. This can be after a week, a month or years. It takes the time it takes for an idea to marinate before I move on to its next notebook phase.
Which is the WIP notebook.
When I decide an idea is more than just an idea, and there's a story there, I give the story its own notebook. This is not a decision I make lightly. I have to know I'm committed. How do I know I'm committed? The idea won't stop popping into my head and writing the story is the only way to get it out. (You know all those notebooks that are beautiful and lovely that people give you as gifts? USE THEM! I decided long ago that the beauty of a notebook will not scare me out of filling it. Go grab it now, you can do this.)