Writing notebooks: what I use when I write a book
This post was originally written for Nero's Notes, where I'm one of the blog writers, but I thought it would be interesting to my readers, too.
A few weeks ago, I talked about the notebooks I use to capture ideas (Writing notebooks: 'capture'). Today, I'm going to talk about what kind of books I use once an idea has enough oomph that I think it will be a book.
This noodling around could be thinking more about the setting, or plot or the characters. Usually, it's a bit of all three, though plot and characters often seem to come together.
I used to use A4 Clairefontaine Age Bag notebooks and all notes went in them. They had a decent amount of real-estate and were fabulous for writing in with a fountain pen. They were a one-stop scrapbook of ideas which in some ways was great - everything was in one place, but were often fairly disorganised. I'd often start out intending to do notes on setting in one colour, on characters in another etc., but then by about 40 pages in had forgotten to do that! If I went back to them after any time away, I was flipping back and forth through them to find things. Fun, but inefficient. The paper is amazing. The rest of the notebook is 'no frills' with no ribbon markers, no elastic closure and no pocket in the back cover, but for what I wanted, they were brilliant.
Read more »
A few weeks ago, I talked about the notebooks I use to capture ideas (Writing notebooks: 'capture'). Today, I'm going to talk about what kind of books I use once an idea has enough oomph that I think it will be a book.
This noodling around could be thinking more about the setting, or plot or the characters. Usually, it's a bit of all three, though plot and characters often seem to come together.
I used to use A4 Clairefontaine Age Bag notebooks and all notes went in them. They had a decent amount of real-estate and were fabulous for writing in with a fountain pen. They were a one-stop scrapbook of ideas which in some ways was great - everything was in one place, but were often fairly disorganised. I'd often start out intending to do notes on setting in one colour, on characters in another etc., but then by about 40 pages in had forgotten to do that! If I went back to them after any time away, I was flipping back and forth through them to find things. Fun, but inefficient. The paper is amazing. The rest of the notebook is 'no frills' with no ribbon markers, no elastic closure and no pocket in the back cover, but for what I wanted, they were brilliant.
Read more »
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