Scattered around my room, various drawers, filing cabinets, cupboards, tabletops, and bookshelves play host to no less than twenty-one paper notebooks, the distilled accumulation of my thoughts for more than a decade. Most of them are filled cover to cover with my handwriting, with the occasional page given over to rough sketches or (far more frequently) maps. A handful of these slim volumes are only partially filled in, and in a very haphazard way as I randomly write down ideas in whichever one was closest at the moment I had a particular epiphany. Some may think that twenty-one notebooks is a little much, but I'm sure there are others reading this who are struggling to imagine such a comparatively small collection.
My first writer's notebook was not a classy, faux-leather bound volume with a woven elastic strap that kept the cover closed and a watermark of Tolkien's map of Middle Earth on the inside cover (Although I did receive that as a birthday present and it was amazing). In fact, it wasn't even a notebook; it was an examination pad. It was a place where I would doodle symbols, scraps of song lyrics, and far too many swords in between notes for my classes.
When exam season began we had to attend school even on days when we weren't writing anything and it's safe to say that I got bored. I began to write to pass the time, and this was the first time that I set myself the task of writing a story. I took my pen and began scratching away at a short story that has since evolved into my most ambitious project to date, and which sparked my entire dream of becoming a published author and having my own novels published.
I had always been a big reader, but it was in that classroom in grade nine that I became a writer. It was also when those doodles and random notes in my exam pad began to take on a theme. Instead of just being song lyrics and pictures out of boredom, they became character names, maps, ideas for plot hooks or events, occasional pages of plot excerpt, and ideas for entirely new stories. I went through numerous exam pads over the next few years and most of them ended up with more of these notes in them than schoolwork. Many of those pages are lost to times, recycled in various bouts of cleaning and organizing, and in the case of many sketches, deliberately thrown out, but a great deal of them are still stored in various flip-files in a drawer on my desk. The story I began writing has grown and evolved over the years into something far grander, to the point that most of those initial pages would be unrecognizable when held up next to my current draft, but there are certain things that have persisted despite all that has changed. There are names in my writing today that first appeared in those school notebooks, places that were thrown onto a rudimentary map that have since become settings for elaborate plot arcs, and a habit of scratching away in a notebook that has persisted to this day.
My more recent notebooks boast better craftsmanship in their binding, and more elegantly decorated covers. They include useful additions such as straps that hold them shut, or loops for a pen or pencil to be carried with them. My handwriting has shifted from high school cursive to print of inconsistent neatness, but the contents remain the same strange mix of thoughts. A list of character names for future use will flow directly into a page covered with an assortment of symbols, with eight consecutive pages of fictional history overleaf, then a map with only half the cities named, then a web of character relationships with some reminder jammed into the bottom right corner, then a single sentence idea for a new story. It's utter chaos, and that's good. These notebooks are not a formal record of any project, they are not a diary, and they are certainly not story drafts, subject to grammar constraints, audience review, editing, or professional standards. These notebooks are my thoughts, taken as they come, in the sporadic, genuine manner that may be nonsensical when read by anybody else (and even when read by me on some occasions). These are not written for anything. They are written to keep me wanting to write.
So, if you keep a notebook of any kind I encourage you to not worry about doing it right but rather to do it in a way that makes you want to do it more. And if you don't have a notebook, what are you waiting for?
Keep creating
Michael #writing #notebook #personal #motivation
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