MY PERFECT NOTEBOOK by Penny Dolan

 Last night I finished a notebook. Today, the first of July, I will start a new one. The empty pages will be a kind of invitation, but how will this new book and I get along?

 

Notebooks meet a variety of needs. They work as a home for ideas and inspiration on the run, for the safe storage for facts and research notes, as canvas to fill with 'morning pages' thoughts, as a creative space for collecting words, memories and images,or simply as lodging for ephemeral everyday needs. 

Many books have lined or - worse - narrow lined pages, which, while being useful, must carry a feeling of restriction for anyone with big handwriting. Some newer designs have squares, like French notebooks, or dots or hearts as markers instead. Plain pages are, to me, a whole other writing experience.

Notebooks also come in different shapes and sizes.  I've used all sorts in my time: cheap school exercise books; hard covers rigid with efficiency; indulgent 'travellers' notebooks with back pockets for tickets & stubs; annoyingly tiny notebooks for tinier fingers; huge wire-bound books, sectioned for subjects;  a couple of those richly embossed notebooks with magnetic closures - and less than rich paper inside, imo - and many other models alongside and inbetween.   

None have brought me the joy of my current model of notebook. The first was a gift from my daughter. The paper was of a pleasing weight and feel, the pages a quiet white in tone and unlined. This was, to me and many, definitely a luxury notebook. What a great gift!

 

Reader, I have to tell you that original notebook lay on the shelf unused for more a year. Though I loved the feel of the unlined blank pages, the pale cover felt intimidating. The thing seemed destined for another kind of life altogether, a clean elegant kind of usage, not one destined for fingers haunted by ghostly inkstains or writing too often like a cat scratching with a stick. 

 

For a long time, I felt this perfect notebook did not fit me and would probably not fit my sort of words and thoughts either. All of these were Illogical feelings, I knew, and I had been given the thing, hadn't I? And I was way way more than grown-up.  

But the book stayed shut. And I felt sad.

                                                                                                                                  

Then, one day, I remembered that artist's 'trick' when facing a blank surface: sweeping across the emptiness with a dull wash to break the stare of the canvas. So I used that trick myself. 

 

I opened the cover, and drew a quick loose scribble across the first page: a wandering unplanned line that took away the fear of that scary page. Then, across that first double spread, I wrote a fast friendly greeting, welcoming myself there.  Those early scribbles also told me that any handwriting inside did not have to be perfect, neither in the making or in the thinking. The page was for me now, not for some other perfect dream. With each small action, my feelings lightened.  Yes, I broke the stare of that notebook.

 

Today's notebook will be the fourth of its kind, all bought during sale periods. Those familiar, kindly pages suit and encourage me, and there are plenty of pages to fill. I can't write in it everyday but I have stopped letting the gaps grieve or shame me. I pick it up when and where I can. 

 

I try to write legibly and well but I don't worry if, writing while squashed awkwardly on a  pillow,my penwork isn't as beautiful as it could be. I've even become care-less in my use of the pages, drawing a curving squiggle down from the end of an entry to the foot of the page, filling the gap, so I can start with a clear, fresh page in front of me next time. 

 

This new - but similar - notebook and I will get along fine. Although I can write with keyboards and create typed and spoken notes on various devices, I still find writing by hand a great pleasure, and my notebook a necessary luxury.

 

How is it with yours? 

 

 

Onwards! 

 

Penny Dolan 

 

 

FINDING THE PERFECT NOTEBOOK by Lynne Benton

 In common with all/most/many other writers, I love notebooks!  Any notebooks.  I use them for so many things, but again, like many others I suspect, I’m very fussy about the right sort of notebooks.

Some years ago a friend (not a fellow-writer) was on holiday in France with her family, and looked for a present to bring home for me.  She went into a stationery shop and bought me two of those beautiful notebooks you can only get in France. 

 

Her family said, "What a funny present!  Why did you buy her those?"  To which my friend replied, "Because I know she'll love them!"  (She was right - I did!)  She is definitely the right sort of friend!

My favourite variety of notebook has always been A5 size, spiral-bound, lines 8mm apart, ideally hard-backed (though I can be flexible on that, as can the notebook).  The big advantage of spiral-bound books is that they stay open when you want them to, and you can leave them open at the page you need, or fold them back and they stay there. I have found that sometimes books with narrow lines, 5mm apart, have their uses too.  So I have a pretty good collection, including some that are so beautiful that I’m still waiting for the perfect occasion to use them!

However, since the advent of Zoom webinars, of which I currently have at least two a week, I now find non-spiral-bound notebooks more useful for note-taking (the spiral binding tends to get in the way if you’re writing quickly on the left hand page)  But they must be hardback, so I don’t need to put something else behind it to provide a solid backing, they must lie flat when open, and essentially they need a built-in ribbon bookmark, so I can easily find where I got to after the previous webinar.  For this purpose I definitely need 8mm lines – when taking notes in a hurry my handwriting is too untidy to fit on narrower ones.  And because I follow two slightly different courses, I need a different notebook for each one – at the moment one book is blue and one is red, both fitting my exacting requirements.

But I am now reaching the end of both of these, and will very shortly need replacements.  Which was why, last week, I decided that time had come to go shopping for them!  This in itself felt amazing – going shopping, in real shops, for notebooks?  What’s not to like?

I started in my favourite shop for these things, a large store which sells everything, including, usually, a huge selection of perfect notebooks – only to find that at the moment their stock is greatly diminished, for obvious reasons, so they didn’t have their usual range.  And of those that were there, most seemed to have narrow lines, so no good for note-taking.  Some didn’t even have lines at all, but little dots in box formation, and I couldn’t work out what those would be for – maybe someone here can enlighten me?

Then I remembered my favourite card shop, an independent one which also happens to sell the most beautiful notebooks – maybe on this occasion I might treat myself?  Unfortunately I discovered it has closed down – again, for obvious reasons, but I couldn’t help a sinking of the heart at this discovery.

On down through the town, to discover that another shop I like, a small shop in a Danish chain which sells all sorts of unusual things, was, rather surprisingly, still open.  I went in and found one notebook that wasn’t quite what I needed at the moment, but not far off.  At least the lines were the right distance apart.  Then, as I walked round the shop, I found two more – one reduced to 50p so too good to leave behind – as well as a small notebook with a built-in electronic calculator on the front cover!  How useful is that?  So I came out with four notebooks, even if none of them was exactly right.

Next to the big, well-known nationwide stationery store, where I discovered that narrow lines seem to be the thing these days, so I had to dismiss most of their notebooks at once.  However, on a different shelf I found two which actually fulfilled all my requirements, one reddish which can replace the red one, and one blueish to replace the blue one.  Hooray!  So I bought them.

Now I had six new notebooks!

Of course, on my way home I passed another favourite stationery shop, and was sorely tempted to go in, just to see what they had to offer…  However, there was a big sign outside saying “Limited number of customers allowed in the shop at once - Please wait for a member of staff to let you in”.

So, since there was no member of staff in sight, I decided (with some reluctance) that maybe I should just go home.  Maybe I’ve got enough notebooks – at least for the time being.

Until I need another one, of course.

Visit my website: www.lynnebenton.com

Latest book:

Hansel and Gretel, publ. Hachette

Six tips for using notebooks, by Dan Metcalf

1. I love notebooks – they are the bedrock of the writing profession and the reason so many books come into being. I don't mind what shape or form they come in: high quality, expensive moleskines; earthy, organic field notes; or home-made pocket books. They all have the same, basic function – serving as my outboard brain.

2. Writers the world over rely on them as the starting points for their stories. Neil Gaiman writes all his first drafts in them, filling decorative tomes with his flowing script. David Almond scribbles his ideas and thoughts down in a notebook and describes his job as having to translate those notes into a fully-formed story. Paul Magrs uses school exercise books to write his novels.

3. The purpose of the notebook is whatever you make it. It can be a place for ideas, scribbles, doodles, cuttings, poems, photos, first drafts or a combination of them all. It is, most importantly, your own space, and a stranger looking into it should feel as though they are gazing on your pure, raw thoughts. A tidy notebook is a reflection of the owner's mind. A messy one, more so.

4. They are a way of capturing your thoughts, of trapping them in ink so they don't float away into the night. You won't use a lot of what goes into them, but that's okay. Eighty or ninety per cent of the pages will be covered in scrawl that is unusable (in my case, unreadable), but the remainder will be pure gold.

5. It is important to experiment with your favourite type of notebook, to find a fit with your writing, your way of life. Do you prefer A4, A5 or A6? Hard or softback? Spiral bound, perfect bound, saddle stitched or legal pad? Plain or decorative? There are as many variations as there are writers, so search for your soulmate.

6. Digital pretenders try to usurp the throne of the mighty notebook; the elephantine Evernote – the social Pinterest – the humble blog. None can take the place of the battered book in my pocket, waiting to be folded, felt, fondled, to be torn, scribbled on and abused. The tactility of the notebook its USP. An individual feel which can not be replaced.

image: Billy Alexander: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ba1969

The Notebooks of Never Letting Go by Claire Fayers

Like most writers, I hoard notebooks. Hordes of them. And I never throw any away so the numbers keep increasing.

I love the convenience of technology: I can type faster than I can write, online backups mean I never worry about losing data, electronic indexing means I can skim through everything and find what I’m looking for in record time.

But notebooks have their own convenience. They’re lighter than a laptop to carry, easy to stick in a pocket in case I get the urge to scribble a few lines.

Also, people get very worried when they see you writing in a notebook, and you can have some interesting conversations when they ask you what you think you’re doing (maybe that’s just me?) People who wouldn’t bat an eye if they saw you taking notes on your phone seem to think a notebook is somehow scary and official.

Actually, I find that the opposite is true. I love notebooks because they’re not official. When I sit at the computer I feel that it is ‘proper’ work and I have to get things right, which doesn’t help me when I’m trying to cobble together a first draft out of nothing.

But a notebook can be scrawled and scribbled in, filled with random lists of words, arrows pointing between pages, crossings out and notes in the margins. And, because there’s no index, I love going back through old notebooks and discovering jottings that I’d long forgotten (hence never throwing them away.)

Just for fun, here’s a jaunt through some of my favourite notebooks, inside and out.

The Notebook of Many Projects

 


I like this one because it has multiple sections, which, if I’m feeling organised, I can use for different projects. The page is from my first jottings for my second ‘Onion’ adventure, which became Journey to Dragon Island. None of these ideas made it into the final book, which is reassuring and reminds me that my first notes don’t have to be any good, they just need to be a starting point.

The Notebook of Flowers and Signatures

 

I bought this little notebook in France I love the pretty Monet cover and it’s a handy pocket-size - which means it has become quite battered from travelling shoved into a small space. I especially like these pages – my first attempts at working out my ‘book signing’ signature. How many other people have done this?

The Notebook of Insufficient Cartoon Penguins

 


My husband bought me this one for Christmas one year. Given my love of penguins and writing, it could have been made especially for me. I confess, I haven’t drawn nearly enough penguins, but here’s one of my random lists of favourite things. If I’m stuck for ideas, I’ll often make these lists and see if anything jumps out.

The Notebook of Not Dropping Things

 


I cheated on my last book tour. The Book is a character in Mirror Magic – a talking, grumpy book of prophecy so I create a book prop. I used sticky tape to attach all my notes, including print-outs of readings, so it was all organised in one place. It meant I didn’t drop anything, didn’t forget where I was in my talk, and I could hold the book in one hand and gesticulate wildly with the other. Because everything is taped in, I can change my content with a little careful peeling. I recommend this method to everyone who’s prone to dropping things in front of an audience.

The Notebook of Mediocre Plans and Atrocious Maps

 

I love big notebooks. This one is A4 size and is great for scrawling in and being messy and disorganised at the start of a draft. My map-drawing skills are not the best (she says with gargantuan understatement) but when I'm inventing a new setting I find it useful to sketch out roughly where everything is. This is a very rough first attempt. I'll redo it a few times as the story progresses.

And finally...

The Notebook of Unbegun Terror 

 



My friend bought me this little beauty for my birthday and I haven’t dared write anything in it yet. I often ask children what they think authors are most afraid of and then show them a blank sheet of paper.

A blank page is terrifying in its perfection. One mark, one wrong word will spoil it.

But that’s what writing is all about, isn’t it – a glorious leap into the imperfect. And so, here goes…

Happy writing to you all!

Claire Fayers is the author of the Accidental Pirates series, Mirror Magic and Storm Hound. Website www.clairefayers.com Twitter @clairefayers

What is it with Authors and Stationery? by Jo Franklin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that authors are totally obsessed with stationery. I mean seriously, hopelessly, dangerously obsessed.

Notebooks and pens are the tools or our trade. Even with computers, tablets and phones, authors often need a piece of paper to scribble something down on. An overheard conversation on the bus. A curious conjunction of a piece of litter and a park railing. A cute dog watching the world go by from a seventh floor window. Writers are curious and observant and need to capture those observations before they vanish into the ether. So every author carries a notebook around with them.

My favourite handbag notebooks are like a passport and come from Muji. They are slim and easily slip into my bag. I use them to make notes if I go to a seminar, scribble plot points that come to me as the tram hurtles round the bend towards the next station or even to write the latest list of items I desperately need from Rymans.

I also try and keep a notebook for each project I'm working on. These are the well recognised hardback notebooks made by Moleskine or Leuchtturm. I use the A5 size as they are big enough to fit lots of words on the page but not to big to be intimidating. An empty page can be very frightening for an author. The larger the page, the more words are required to fill it, so in most cases I stick with A5 maximum.

My project notebooks often don't get filled to the end. I begin religiously making notes in the way that I think proper authors do - yep, seven books in, I still have to convince myself daily that I am as much a proper author as Stephen King or Michael Morpurgo. Notes on character, notes on setting, research notes. To be honest, I rarely go back to them. But like writing down revision notes, the act of putting pen to paper ensures that the information seeps into my brain in some form of other, ready to reappear in a different form at a later point.  As my project progresses from being a bundle of ideas to an actual piece of work, I forget about my smart hardback book and move onto something cheaper.

I use a disposable notebook to write my first drafts. I always write long hand in the first instance and once I get going, my thoughts tumble out of the tip of my pain at great, illegible speed. I cross things out, leave sentences hanging unfinished and write the same thought six different ways at times. I find a spiral bound A5 notebook is best for this phase of writing. For some reason, I like the continental grid style so I tend to buy these notebooks from Lidl. The paper is good quality but the books inexpensive (99p) and I get through about twenty a year. As soon as I have typed up today's chapter, I rip the pages out so that I have a blank page ready to write on the next day.

Larger format notebooks feature in my life too. I use them when I want to make BIG plans. I use BIG writing and draw scruffy pictures that could be buildings or people or arrows or anything or maybe nothing. I think visually even though I have no skill as an artist. Expressing myself in big writing seems to unleash my creativity when an idea is still tiny and new.

My passion for stationery, led me to set up a website www.paperspenspoets.co.uk with Anita Loughrey where we explore the relationship between writers and their stationery. Everyone has their own quirks and preferences and the articles make fascinating reading.

Do you have a notebook obsession? Which brand? Format?  Or is colour your thing?

My name is Jo Franklin and I am a stationery addict.

National Book Lovers Day by Jess Butterworth

As I write this, it is National Book Lovers Day, a day for bibliophiles to celebrate their love of books. This day always reminds me of Matilda, by Roald Dahl, and the feisty five-year-old protagonist who makes her life bearable by teaching herself to read, devouring books and surrounding herself in literature from her local library. It’s also one of my favourite books!

In my mind, Book Lovers Day isn’t limited to once a year, so here are some ways to celebrate your love of reading every day!

1.    Visit a library.

2.    Find a favourite spot to read, or make a reading nook.

3.     Try a book swap with a friend.

4.     Read blogs about books.

5.     Join a book club.

6.     Attend a literary festival or author event.

7.     Buy a new notebook to start your own story in.

8.     Write a review. It will make an author’s day and be valuable to other readers too.

9.   Visit bookshops. 

10.  Read aloud. 

Happy Reading!

Jess Butterworth 

Running on the Roof of the World is out now. 

Find out more about Jess on her website, Twitter, or Facebook.  

On notebooks & outlining lite: lubricants for the imagination – by Rowena House

Outlining, plotting or whatever you want to call it isn’t for everyone, but being a fan of structure – with a tendency to over-analyse pretty much everything – I do plan out story ideas quite a lot.

Even so, outlining in detail is way too time consuming even for a control freak, as well as being deadly for the intuitive, subconscious workings of the imagination.

So while I think “pantsters” are right when they say we’ve got to stay fluid and open to the unexpected, that’s not the same thing as wandering aimlessly through a story to see where it ends up.

The answer for me is balance, i.e. finding the right system. AKA outlining lite. These are my current favourite techniques – plus one I’ve decided is definitely to be avoided until after a first draft.

The three-sentence pitch

This is a great exercise to focus the mind, with the added bonus that we have to squeeze our masterpieces into three sentences max at some point anyway to get it passed an agent, editor or acquisitions meeting (and, if successful, a bookshop buyer too) so why not start out by thinking in terms of the story’s pithiest possible iteration?

Getting an idea down to three sentences reveals flabbiness, vagueness, unevolved situations, the yawn factor, and when focused on character, saves months of wondering what on earth the protagonist is actually up to.

Blake Synder in Save the Cat recommends successful one-line pitches should contain one adjective for the protagonist, one for the baddie and a compelling goal we all identify with as human beings. The three-sentence pitch gives you two more sentences to play with. Luxury!

The three-paragraph synopsis

Personally, I won’t attempt a three-sentence pitch until I’ve got this one nailed. The three paragraphs include the basics: who is the story about, what do they want, what stands in their way, what do they stand to lose if they don’t get it? Setting and style/tone are in there too.

Another thoroughly useful outlining tool I’ve come across in various guises is the “through-line” or spine of the story defined as a binary question. Will Jill win Jack’s love? Will the baddie kill the hero? Will Indie get the treasure? As long as the answer to this question keeps flipping Yes/No, there’s inherent (and coherent) dramatic tension throughout. I’ve found that if I can’t define this binary question within three paragraph, then it’s back to the drawing board.

Some people recommend using the three-paragraph approach like a book jacket blurb to test if the outline comes across as exciting/intriguing enough to tempt a reader to open the cover, but that’s not necessary. Practical and prosaic works too; no one ever has to see it.

A structural outline

Basically, this means hanging your story outline onto the key structural hooks as identified by whoever is your favourite writing guru at the moment (Yorke, Snyder, McKee, Vogler etc).

At a minimum these hooks include Inciting Incident, Midpoint, Crisis and Climax. Snyder adds an opening Disturbance. Yorke’s Into the Woods has tables about the different structural or turning points used historically and now. Romances have their own hooks, so do thrillers etc. It’s all useful stuff.

However…

This is the plotting system that recently killed a promising contemporary YA romance stone dead. Having worked on an outline for months, and nailed the theme and the villain and the twists and turns, I couldn’t summon the will or energy to write the damn thing.

I’m now convinced that structure is best retrofitted after the completion of a free-flowing first draft. Yes, it’s great to keep the big “hooks” in mind, but then just let rip.

Character transition

Ruth Hatfield made the point very well earlier this week on ABBA that if character is your thing (and like she says, character is the soul of most stories) then we neglect them at our peril.

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/finding-heart-by-ruth-hatfield.html

I’ve not tried it myself, but I imagine it would be perfectly possible to ignore plot entirely at the outlining stage and rely exclusively on character development. If that works for you, I’d love to hear how you do it – unless you’re selling one of those lists of 200+ questions, including the protagonist’s favourite flavour ice cream, which – to put it politely – don’t work for me.

I blogged before about OCEAN personality profiling and character development when editing, so here’s the link rather than a repetition.

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/eureka-nailing-epiphanies-by-rowena.html

But I prefer looser systems at the initial outlining stage, such as…

Mind-mapping

Mind-mapping on big pieces of paper is Fan.Tas.Tic. By big I mean A2 at least, i.e. sheets x4 the size of A4, spread out on the kitchen table.

I write freely, in spirals or bubbles, making connections. Chaotic thoughts get scrawled in corners, together with anything that keeps springing to mind for no apparent reason.

I also jot down random ideas for the Big Binary Plot Question, and experiment with ways that question might interact with the protagonist’s belief system and personality traits, as well as the interplay between plot and the dynamics of the protagonist’s relationships.

Mind mapping captures fleeting ideas, and comes into its own whenever an element of the story becomes bogged down or the whole thing is turning out to be predictable or dull.

I’ve been told the energy of mind-mapping is directly connected to working with pen and paper, which seem to unlock different doors in the imagination from a computer keyboard.

The notebook

OK, so this isn’t as an actual outlining system, but a beautiful notebook is a wonderful creative lubricant to stationary aficionados everywhere.

Personally, I reject the criticism that some people level at proud notebook owners that we’re being way too precious about our writing as if preserving each word for posterity.

For me, that moment when I’m ready to buy a seriously gorgeous notebook – one with an ornate hard cover, roughly the size of a book – is an expression of confidence: a story has reached a degree of maturity that demands more than instantly erasable (or delete-able) scrawl.

The purchase denotes purpose and the value of the time, effort and love I’m preparing to invest in the writing, while the simple physicality of an idea taking form within actual pages is nurturing and uniquely satisfying.

Happy outlining!

@HouseRowena