Keeping a notebook
What to do
Read the content and write your own notes. Focus on the key ideas, useful examples, and anything you want to remember.
Start a ‘writer’s notebook’ to collect facts and fictions, observations from everyday life and things you imagine.
Your notebook, or journal, should be with you at all times so that you can jot down anything that strikes you as interesting or unusual, and anything you might want to remember to come back to later.
Your notebook will become a secret testing ground for trying out ideas, phrases, mini-stories and scenes, bits of dialogue – all in complete freedom, with the knowledge that if things don’t work, no one sees these trial runs but you. Over time, your notebook will prove invaluable. It’s especially useful for noting down characters that you might want to develop later.
Make notes in a way that suits you, so that you can do it wherever you are – on trains, buses, in cafés, at home or work. Make your notebook a place you like going. You might use:
- a traditional school exercise book
- a hardback notebook with plain paper
- lined paper collected and ordered in a file
- your tablet, smartphone or laptop.
The only rule is to use whatever works best for you. You’ll return to your writer’s notebook in greater detail later, but start to use it right away.