During my senior year of high school, I chose a semester of Creative Writing as an elective. I loved that class and learned so many things. My teacher’s greatest emphasis that semester was keeping a writer’s notebook.  She kept a notebook close by for all of her writing ideas. The suggestion made sense to me, but I never really implemented it at that time.

Someone might need the Rosetta Stone to decipher all that scrawl.

Later, during my teaching years, I used to receive valu-pak coupon mailers.  Perhaps you are familiar with them.  Each coupon advertised anything from personalized checks to mail-order contact lenses.  I often scanned and tossed these. During one of my scan and toss sessions, I halted on an advertisement asking, “Do you think you could write for children?  Has it ever been your dream to write a book?”  Now, it may surprise you ( if you read my last post) that I had never seriously considered writing a book. I had never set any writing goals at all.  I thought a writer was a college English major scribbling in her own home office, with at least three books ready for publication.  I never realized writers could be people who worked regular jobs and wrote in their spare time.  Therefore, when these questions leaped off the paper at me, my silent answer was “Yes,” and “yes.”  It was spared from the scan and toss pile and I sent off for an information packet.

A week or so later, an application for the Institute of Children’s Literature arrived.  In the application was a kind of writing aptitude test.  Based on my answers, I would find out if I would be accepted into a writing course.  I did well on the test and I was invited to enroll.  This prompted a first ever conversation with my husband about my love for writing.  He agreed that it was something I should pursue, so I started the correspondence course.

This brings me back to the notebook.  The writing course highly encouraged writers to compile a writer’s notebook.  This time I listened.  For the past thirteen to fifteen years, I have kept a notebook and pen close by.  Recently, I learned from some of the writing groups I participate in that other writers use the voice recorder on their phones to capture their ideas when they don’t have their notebook handy.  I have used that once or twice, but my memo app is full of writing possibilities.  What do I do with such a notebook?  What do I write in it?  Story scraps?  Occasionally.  Plot points?  Sometimes.  I have several notebooks for many different purposes.  I keep a research notebook to record all my notes for my historical novels.  One spiral-bound serves as my character notebook so that I can keep track of all of my characters in my current WIP (work-in-progress).  More on what takes place there in another post.  I have a market research notebook to query possible future publishers about my finished manuscript.  I have tons of notebooks where I write the actual story.  And then I have this.

Cheesy smile:  Check.  Tousled hair:  Check.  Gold mine:  Hello! Priceless.

This is my gold mine.  Gold mine you say?  Well, I hope it will be at some point.  This is where I write down my hundreds (okay, a little hyperbole there, not quite hundreds. Yet.) of ideas for character names, story or book titles, first lines, dialogue possibilities, and yes, story ideas.  In the beginning, I jotted down the bare minimum of notes.  Since then, I’ve learned to expand on my annotations because I have mined a lot of fool’s gold attempting to decipher what those earlier scribblings meant.  Inspiration for story ideas come from a lot of different places for me, too numerous to write here, so I will write about those in a post or two at a later time.  This is also my middle-of-the-night-bathroom-trip-when-inspiration-strikes notebook.  Every writer knows this.  Inspiration strikes hard in the dead of night. She strikes you so hard that by morning you have amnesia and can’t recall a word she told you. I don’t let inspiration get away with that anymore.  Thus, the notebook. When my internal idea machine stops working, I flip through Goldie in hopes that a nugget or two will pan out.  Sometimes that can get the old idea workshop up and running again.  I’m mixing my metaphors, I know, but Goldie hasn’t given me any ideas on how to avoid that.  Plus, it’s late and I tend to get punchy.

One of the purposes of this blog is to give the reader a window into the writer’s world and process.  For me, thinking like a writer began when I started keeping a notebook.  It has been an invaluable tool to me.  For those reading that might want to write someday (why not start today) record observations, conversations, descriptions and you will have an endless source of story ideas.  For those reading who have no plans to write, but are just curious about a writer’s journey, the notebook is the take-away.  That and those valu-pak mailers really do work.