Craft of Writing: Writer's Notebook

Pictured to the right is my writing work space. On the desk is the workhorse of it all, my trusty laptop. One of my writing mascots is there in a crochet tea cup - Odin the Elephant. There is the calculator for crunching word count numbers (and if necessary calculating the trajectory for throwing the whole damn project out the window, we haven't hit that point yet, however). The black and white notebook with the assortment of different typefont samples on it is my Writer's Notebook. Piled on top of it is my weekly planner and my writing bullet journal.

The bullet journal will get it's own special post at another time. Today, I want to talk about my Writer's Notebook. In this thing I have a wide array of project ideas, poems, short stories, letters never meant to be sent, and some of my morning pages. It is a catch all for ideas and plot bunnies. This notebook is not dedicated to the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar series or any other book series that I'm working on. It is just for random stuff that my brain comes up with over time.

I started keeping a Writer's Notebook as part of a literature class in college. It was at first a thing that looked like a daily journal until I realized that I could let my hair down and really write anything I wanted in my Writer's Notebook. It doesn't get daily use right now because I've a couple of big projects I'm working on. That said, when I'm not actively working on something like a novel or major therapy writing, I am adding to that notebook on a regular basis. Some of the things that I have in previous volumes of my Writer's Notebook (yes, you did read that correctly, I said volume, this is number ten) have been incorporated into my novels. Other things I just try to forget they exist because of how atrociously bad they are.

Now, I've been keeping a Writer's Notebook since the late 90s. The only reason why I have only ten is because there is a lot of overlap between my Writer's Notebook and my daily journal. In one of my journals, I wrote out a small novella of fan fiction that probably should have gone into my Writer's Notebook. Life was stressful and hard, at that time, however, so I was writing fan fiction in my daily journal to escape the things that were difficult. In the end, my Writer's Notebook is a really useful tool. It is an archive of ideas and snippets of things like plot devices that I can sneak into a book. It is a record of my growth as an author and gives something of a picture of how my life was during that book's period of time.

My Writer's Notebook from college looks completely different from my Writer's Notebook during the era that I was unemployed and living in the middle of nowhere. That, in turn, looks completely different from the volumes from when I got married and had my children, up to present day. The Writer's Notebook can be what ever you choose to make it. Some writers keep snippets of news articles that interest them, records of research findings, and interesting quotes in theirs. (I have a commonplace book for quotes.) All of these things are useful and helpful to the writing process.