The Creativity Project: A New Writer’s Notebook
Updating my idea collection system.
One of the big ideas I got out of Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass on writing was the compost heap. This is basically where ideas go to mix up and become something new in your brain. I’m a sucker for the visual of my brain being the Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock.
The problem is if I don’t write down all of the ideas, they basically go into the void to rarely be seen ever again. Which is unhelpful. So I write them down. Everywhere. It’s ridiculous the sheer number of random notes I find while cleaning.
I got the idea of a writer’s notebook from watching Sarra Cannon set up hers and I thought that it would be a great idea. So I pulled out a dot grid notebook and set up pages for all of my ideas, snippets of dialogue, series bibles, etc. I thought that this would be the best thing for me since sliced bread.
I was wrong.
Quickly, I ran into the problem of not giving myself enough pages for any of my sections. Series bibles didn’t have enough pages to fully work out the characters or they had too many pages set aside for the locations. I ran out of story idea space and now I’m faced with the issue of having to do the bullet journal method of starting a separate page and making a note in my index. And I hate it.
My original “solution” was to just not put any notes in the notebook and keep all of my series notes in a separate notebook for that series until it’s done. Any random notes that I had laying around for other things were just torn out of their respective places and shoved into the writer’s notebook, making it virtually unusable. Things were constantly falling out of it.
With this being another use it up year, I went digging into my collection of notebooks to see if I could find a better solution to my problem. Because I found so many notes that hadn’t made it into the writer’s notebook for books I was currently working on while sorting out what spiral notebook was for what story (they are all labeled now and it is so much easier to find things).
While I am trying to pare down the number of binders I use to keep me organized, sometimes I do need something extra. And I feel like this system is extra, but has actually been very useful in its application.
First, I have my old writer’s notebook which mostly sits on the shelf and looks pretty. I’m not getting rid of it, just cutting out the pages that don’t work. This will be a legacy system to hold the notes for my books and series after I’m done writing them. Mostly the notes on my characters just in case I ever go back to that world.
Second, I have an old zippered case that I slid a Happy Planner mini in that has nothing but lined or dot grid pages in it. This is to carry my top three series or books notes (character info, world info, etc.). I’m usually working on more than one thing at a time, so this will hold what I need for the projects I’m working on. I’ve had this mini and a ton of mini notepaper, so this should use up a lot of that.
Lastly, I have my A5 rings binder. This is where all of my ideas go to wait their turn. This is the biggest change. The different sections can flex as I need them to. The largest section I have is my story ideas. Each idea gets its own page so I can add to it when I get more thoughts on it.
I’m still filtering stuff from my older writer’s notebook into the binder, but all of the random notes that have been laying around are now organized and ready to be used.
I’m more organized and ready to take on the year.
What new systems are you implimenting to reach your goals? Let me know!
