Welcome back to Alchemy for Authors!
In this week’s solo episode, I discuss how I use Writer’s Notebooks to collect inspiration and pay attention to the stories all around us. In the intro I share a brief personal update about my writing plans for the next sixteen months.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Leuchtturm 1917 Notebooks: https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/
- Clever Fox Planners: https://cleverfoxplanner.com/
- Steff Green’s Website (includes links to the Writing Your Skeleton Draft course): https://www.rageagainstthemanuscript.com/home
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Find the full transcript of this episode below.
Episode 87: The Magic of the Writer’s Notebook
Jo: Hello, my lovelies! Welcome to Episode 87 of Alchemy for Authors: The Magic of the Writer’s Notebook.
So I hope you’ve been having a wonderful couple of weeks of writing since the last episode of Alchemy for Authors. Today I wanted to talk about writer’s notebooks and how I personally use mine in the hopes that I inspire those of you who maybe haven’t adopted the habit of using a writer’s notebook to consider doing the same, if you feel that it will be helpful for you.
But first I thought I would share a little bit of a personal update partially in the hopes that by sharing this in a public forum, I am also attempting to hold myself accountable to seeing it through.
So over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking at how I can go deeper into my writing practice, be more productive and find a way to make this writing thing more of a financially viable gig to eventually replace my day job. This isn’t really a secret, but it is something that has been really strongly on my mind over the last maybe month or so. Maybe it’s time that I take this whole thing a little more serious than I have been this year.
So there’ve been a few different factors that have led up to me looking at ways to get a little bit more serious about this. And one of them has been through seeing some of the ups and downs that the people around me have been going through with their day jobs, and how I personally feel about being locked into working for somebody else, and how sustainable I see my present situation in my day job. Now, I don’t think it’s a secret, but I am in education and I’m sure if you are in education or if you’ve ever known or talked to anybody in education, teachers or whatnot, you would have no doubt heard a slew of reasons why the sector is getting more and more difficult to sustain for any long amount of time. There are certainly people out there that do it, and I think they are absolute saints. I’m in my 10th year of doing this as a full-time income, and even in that time, I have found big changes in the industry and the sector that certainly have me reconsidering how long I will be able to continue in this sector. Not that I don’t love what I do because there are aspects of my job that I absolutely adore. Teaching and the students are the main things. But again, if you’ve ever talked to anybody in the education sector, you know that that is actually not the biggest part of the job in most cases, so it’s the other things that tend to be a little tiresome at times.
So while this isn’t to bag on my day job at all, because without it I wouldn’t be able to financially do a lot of the things that I do on the side here, which is write my books and put out this podcast and that. But I have been thinking long term about what it is that I really want for my life, what I want that to look like. And of course, that is spurred on too by seeing some of the dissatisfaction of those around me and how unhappy they are at feeling caught in the traps of doing what they must do to pay the bills and not what they actually want to do. So there’s been some soul searching and just going deep into looking at what it is that I actually want for my life, what direction I want it to go in.
And during this time I had purchased virtual tickets to this year’s Inkers Con and have been listening to some of the sessions on that. And right away, the very first session that I listened to was by a New Zealand author whom I guess I hadn’t heard of. Uh, she goes by the name Steff Green and she was talking about skeleton planning. And I know this is a weird tangent to get around to what I wanted to talk about, but it really just resonated with me and my way of thinking about creating a story and how skeleton planning might actually be a way that I can fast forward my productivity a little bit without having to forfeit my natural instinct as a discovery writer.
So I am not really a plotter. And so the skeleton writing or skeleton planning looks to me like it would be a really good fit to help me kind of fast forward getting my books done, which would be absolutely awesome. And which really appealed to me.
So down the rabbit hole I went with enrolling in Steff Green’s course on skeleton planning or skeleton writing. I can’t remember what it was called. I absolutely devoured that. Really enjoyed that. I’ve already gotten started on my second paranormal cozy, Hades’s Hex, and following that inspiration, I also enrolled in her course, 12 Months to Full-time.
Now, one thing that I love about this, I enrol in lots of courses. I devour the information. I love learning. It’s one of my Clifton Strengths. But I really love the fact that Steff is a New Zealander, a Kiwi, like myself. And so it makes it easier to believe, I guess, that if she can do it, I can do it too. Uh, she had a similar financial goal when she started out getting serious about wanting to go full time with her writing. And so those things like finding people who have gone before and done what you want to do and seeing that it is possible, I guess is all that more inspiring and motivating that you can make it happen too.
Now, despite the name of the course being 12 Months to Full-time, that’s not actually my intention. Like I said, I don’t dislike my job. There’s a lot that I really, really enjoy about it. And ideally if I could, I would like to see it out at least until the end of next year, 2025, remaining in the position that I’m in, but working hard behind the scenes to also supercharge my writing career and getting that off the ground a little bit more so that maybe in 2026 I would have the option of at least pulling back my hours. And so this is a goal for me that I’m looking at quite seriously at the moment and what that would look like and what that would require from me. Primarily a lot of extra time and energy devoted to my writing. That has been on the back burner quite a bit this year because of other things happening in my personal life and work life that have hugely impacted my ability to do that. But right now I am riding the wave of inspiration and have got really clear for myself on what it is that I want to achieve, what it is I want my life to look like in the long term, while trying to realistically envision the sustainability of the path that I am on presently. So that’s a bit of a motivating factor as well.
So, yeah, so that is where I’m really excited at the moment for the possibilities available. And again, it’s not like me wanting to create a living from my writing is new, not at all. It’s something that I’ve always aspired to, but I will admit I’ve been incredibly lazy with. And I am the first one to come up with a list of excuses why I’ve not been putting in the energy, the effort, the time, and the money that I probably should to be making that a reality. So here’s my hope that for the next 16 months at least, I can reverse that a little bit and be a little bit more serious about making that a reality.
But anyway, you might have noticed recently, whether it’s through the podcast, through my last solo episode, or through my newsletters or whatnot, that I’m definitely feeling a bit of renewed inspiration about where my writing path is going. And that has also been motivated in part by my day job where I am presently teaching a few creative writing classes. That brings a lot of joy to me, because alongside writing creatively, I also love talking about creative writing, if you hadn’t noticed. Hence this podcast. And so one of the things that’s been coming to my mind has been the use of writer’s notebooks. It’s always been a part of my practice and writer’s notebooks have always been something that I’ve encouraged my students to use as well. And so I wanted to spend today talking about how I go about implementing writers notebooks into my writing life and some of the things I do and why I find it beneficial to do so.
So with the writer’s notebook, here’s the thing, I am absolutely a stationery junkie. I love notebooks and pens and planners and all the rest of it. But I am really specific about the types that I like and what I use them for. So I have a good old Clever Fox planner that I use every year and have done for many years, just to keep my general life in order, and to schedule podcast episodes, and keep track of that and to keep track of writing deadlines and newsletters and just general life things. Being in education, I also have a Clever Fox teaching planner as well. I love Clever Fox. When it comes to keeping a writer’s notebook, a place where I jot down my ideas and inspirations and all that good stuff, I’m pretty specific with the notebooks that I prefer as well. Despite having quite an assortment and always being willing to trial other notebooks, I find I go back time and time again to the Leuchtturm 1917 bullet point notebooks. Those are my absolute fave. They come in bright colours. I often have writerly stickers that I’ll put on the front covers of them to kind of differentiate them a little bit and get me excited to use them. I love the fact that my pens don’t bleed through the paper. I love the dots rather than the lines. When I’m writing a novel or a story, I tend to dedicate one of these books to the novel in itself, where I will use it to keep track of my story consistencies, for example, make sure that I’m being consistent with eye colour and names and models of cars. And also what swear words my characters like to use, because, you know, I’ve got to differentiate between those depending upon who the character is. So I’ll often dedicate one notebook to a story. I’ll also use it to keep track of word counts and whatnots. I like to use the dots to draw little graphs so I can keep track of that. It’s one of the ways that I gamify the experience, helps me with my ADHD, feel like I’m making progress and can visually see it. I know I could do all of this online, but I really love the idea of paper and pen for all of this.
My novel journals or my novel notebooks are not a writer’s notebook. A writer’s notebook, like many of you probably already know, is really just a way of writing down ideas and inspirations as they come. So therefore, I can never be accused of complaining that I don’t know what to write about. And it is one of the many key tools that I encourage my students to have so that I don’t have to hear them complain that they don’t know what to write about. So it is a collection of ideas. It is my place where I am jotting down anything and everything that comes to mind. I’m trying at the present to get into the habit of spending at least 10 minutes a day just writing down random things that come to mind. Easy for me, again, I’ve got an ADHD brain, so as soon as I write about something that I might visually see in my environment, my brain goes off on different tangents and I’m writing down recollections from my childhood or my crazy teen years or something, but there never seems to really be a shortage of inspiration out there.
So I often do start by paying attention to my environment. So, using my five senses, this is what I encourage my students to do: what I see, what I hear, what I smell, what I taste, what I touch. You know, all of those things, what is in my direct environment right then and there. And then I let my brain just go with it. I find that when I give myself permission to just write unfiltered without thinking, that is when the interesting stuff rises to the surface and I start to get some cool quirky little ideas popping onto the page. As a bit of a recovering perfectionist, for a long time it was incredibly hard for me to just let go and write messy, particularly when I had a beautiful, nice new untainted notebook in front of me. And I admit even as excited as I am to start a new notebook, when I have one, the first time I write in it I’m always met with a little bit of resistance, and I have heard people say that sometimes it’s best to get some not so pretty, not so special notebooks so that that resistance doesn’t hold us back from actually getting our ideas onto the page. Writing messy though is so important and I don’t mean writing in a way that we can’t read what we’ve written. But writing without censorship, and that’s really what we must do if we as writers want to create anything of note. Perfectionism, as we know, leads to paralysis. And so if we give ourselves permission to not be perfect, to write what comes to mind, to not censor ourselves, we’re going to find those juicy things that could find their way into stories or novels or poems or anything else later down the line.
My writer’s notebook is really just a juicy cornucopia of random things. It is random thoughts that come to mind, it is quotes that really resonate with me. Sometimes it is song lyrics or poems written by other people that I’ll jot down and of course write who the source was or who the author was that might find themselves as quotes in my book or just inspiration for story ideas in itself. I find music and lyrics wonderful for this. And as I’ve talked about before, it’s one of the reasons that I always create a playlist on Spotify before I start writing the novel so that I can always plug into that inspiration for my story, that mood and the atmosphere when the words may not necessarily be flowing.
My writer’s notebook is also where I jot down random place names, character names, things that I come across in my normal everyday life that I’m like, Ooh, that’s a little bit different and unique. I wonder if I can use that somewhere along the line? It is also where I jot down snippets of conversation that I eavesdrop on just out in my normal everyday life at the grocery store, the service station, even the classroom, if I’m honest. Sometimes people say unusual or intriguing things that I just can’t help myself, but I have to jot down because who knows when that might be a hook for a story, an idea, or it might lead me to create an entire scenario or character for something that I’m writing.
So my writer’s notebook is also for all my wonderings. It is for lists of “What if”. What if this happened? What if this person met this person? “What if’s” are fantastic ways for creating a story premise, or conflict for your story when you have written yourself into a corner, which I often do as a discovery writer.
In preparation for this episode, I went back and looked at some of my writer’s notebooks from previous years and I have to admit I haven’t looked at some of them for an incredibly long time. And I was kind of surprised by some of the things I wrote. When I connected it to what year I wrote some of the things, there are definitely some themes. When I was having a rough go of it many, many, many years ago in my day job at the time, I can see a little bit of the angstiness certainly coming through in the words and what I wrote. I was also pleasantly surprised by some poems that I had written that I have no recollection of writing, but they are definitely mine. I also found some found or blackout poems that I’d written at different times. Notes from writing workshops and writer conferences, which were really cool to go back through. I also saw, which I guess I’d forgotten about, notes that ended up later being major scenes or chapters in some of my published novels and short stories. So that was really cool as well.
So my writer’s notebook is really a tribute to living a writing life. I talk to my students about having writer’s eyes and looking at the world with writer’s eyes, which is different than how we go about perceiving our world on a normal day to day average person way. When we look at our world with writer’s eyes, we’re going a little bit deeper. We’re using our five senses. We’re looking beyond the superficial to the feeling of something, the mood of something. We’re looking with a more descriptive lens and we’re looking with a “what if” lens. We’re starting to create stories when we see the world around us. Our writer’s notebooks allow us a forum for capturing these moments, these ideas, because we never know when a snippet of description that we’ve written, or a place or a setting, or some dialogue is going to be instrumental to a scene that we’re writing, or a short story, or a poem or novel. And it reminds us too, by looking at the world in this way, by using this writerly habit of keeping a notebook, reminding us that we are writers. It reminds us too, that our lives are stories. Our lives are full of stories. And that story is really written all around us. We are constantly living little hero’s journeys, calls to adventure, refusal of the call. We’re constantly going through mini or major dark nights of the soul and then coming out the other side with the sense of renewal or transformation.
So not only do writer’s notebooks serve as fantastic writing tools and for cataloguing ideas and whatnot, it also reminds us at our core of who we are just by getting in the habit of carrying them with us and using them. Now I am not always fantastic at having my writer’s notebooks with me all the time. I admit that. And when that’s the case, I do use my Notes app on my phone as well. And so this is no judgment about how you go about recording your ideas or anything like that. Obviously, we all go about this in our own ways. I’m just wanting to share how I go about it. I do, however, encourage my students and myself to try and take my notebook everywhere with me. Many years ago when I was teaching at an elementary school level, much, much younger ones, and I had sold them on the idea of having writer’s notebooks and that, I had encouraged them to take them with them everywhere. And this of course was met with a little bit of resistance when they turned up to school assemblies and whatnot with their writer’s notebooks in hand on their lap. Now, although that wasn’t always seen in the best light by the principal and whatnot, it did make the students feel that they were real writers. And there is something about tricking our minds into that confidence that we are doing the thing that we want to do, that we are acting as if we are authors and writers and whatnot, that seems to encourage a huge amount of confidence in our ability, and confidence encourages risk taking. And some really good writing and stories and whatnot came from that experience. For me, one of the best things was just seeing how confident my students were in their writing, and their engagement and enjoyment in the writing process. There was the novelty of them feeling as if they were real writers. And they were real writers. But that novelty of feeling that they were really embracing that title and having the ownership of that title through carrying with them a writer’s notebook to even things that you weren’t normally allowed to do, bring books or writing tools or anything to. So there was that.
For myself when I’ve looked back through my writer’s notebooks, I’ve seen some of the notes and that, that I was taking when I was really bored in meetings and professional development training sessions and that. Where, unable to focus on what was being lectured to me, my brain would drift off and start to take notes of my surroundings, the environment, and just following the rabbit hole of my weird thoughts and the tangents that they went off on. And then recognising some of my ramblings on the page and some of the stories that I ended up getting published down the line. Sometimes we don’t know our thoughts or where they’re going to take us until we actually start to write them down.
So I am interested to know if you keep a writer’s notebook and how you might use that in your life? If you have a specific notebook or app or something that you use to capture your ideas to tap into inspiration and to remind yourself that stories are all around us and your job is to collect them, to collect those seeds of inspiration that could grow into something truly amazing? Or else I would love to hear what writing tool is the most absolute useful for you? If it’s not a writer’s notebook, what is something that you can’t do without as a writer? For me, having a place to capture my thoughts, my ideas, to eavesdrop on people and steal snippets of dialogue or drama that’s going on in other people’s life, I mean, this is all fun times for me. But maybe there is something else that for you you can’t do without, and I would love if you would share.
So, as always, you can reach out to me through all the usual channels, Instagram, Facebook, at @alchemyforauthors, or you can send me an email at jo@jobuer.com. I do my best to reply to those as I’m able. If there’s a little bit of a delay, I will get around to replying. It’s just that sometimes things do go missing in my rather busy inbox at times.
I just wanted to also say a quick thank you to those people who reached out again via DM and whatnot to say that they really enjoyed Episode 86 of Alchemy for Authors. I really appreciate you reaching out to me.
I hope this episode has got you thinking about maybe what some of your long-term goals are for your writing career. How sustainable is the path that you’re on right now? And what is your go to tool for collecting ideas and inspirations to help you on your writing journey? If you enjoyed this episode, I would love if you could subscribe, rate, review, all those good things. Tell a friend, that is amazing. And if you are so inclined and want to show your support for the show, you can buy me a coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/jobuer. I always really, really appreciate any form of support and it really does help me keep the show alive, keep the inspiration flowing, and just all round means the world to me.
So on that note, I’ll leave you with a quote from writer, Susan Sontag, who says: “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” And that is what I’m hoping for you. If you’re using a writer’s notebook to go pay attention to the world, be inspired. There is story all around you. And so on that note, I am wishing you a wonderful, inspiring writing week ahead. Bye for now.
author mindset, Ideas, Sustainability, Writer's Notebook, Writer's Eyes, Writing Life