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I refer of course, to our notebooks. For example, my current notebook is a small 100 page spiral bound affair, currently half full with the demented scribblings that not even the most dedicated pharmacist can decipher. I can however, and what I see often makes me ask myself "WTF
was I thinking?!?"
Even worse are the sketches of characters and places from my books. (my drawing is a skill I haven't taken seriously in years.) This current abomination is used by me to keep characters and brainstorming seperate and fresh in my memory; each story has a page or two.
In college my notebook was a leather bound book with heavy gauge paper stock in which I'd painstakingly write poems with honest to the gods calligraphy. I have owned a few of varying types since.
So, show of hands, or maybe even pictures, which writers here have notebooks?
As a side note, which writers here have posted a story, went home, and immediately written 1k words or more on a brand new story... knowing all the while what a bad idea that was?
Yeah, guilty.
Comments
Any and all
Save the calligraphy.
I don't have any notebooks for writing with me after my move, but I've toa an 18x24 inch cardboard box full of notebooks, sketch books, and the like sitting in Arkansas waiting for me to pick it up, filled with story ideas, character drawings, and the like.
All I've got here is a handful of sketchbooks.
Melanie E.
I am not a writer.......
In fact, far from it. I am an engineer, and manage a large group of people.
My writing skills are confined to writing reports, proposals, and of course personnel evaluations and the like. OK - add in the ocassional letter or e-mail, and of course periodic rants or blogs on-line. My creativity centers more around the physical or mathematical abstract rather than any literary bent.
But, like many, I also have a habit of jotting down ideas in order to help remember them. Well, when I face it, I am an incessant list maker. I write at least one new list every day, and then use a colored highlighter to indicate each task as it is completed. Quite often my lists are annotated with multiple notes in the border, not to mention drawings and/or diagrams. Sorry - engineer here you know........
I don't use notebooks though. I developed a habit in college of using a legal pad to do this - starting a new list on a fresh page, and using a binder clip to keep the pad clipped to the current page. The Navy got me started on the Franklin System (and yes, I know that shows my age), and that later graduated to an electronic calendar and notes on my Palm Pilot. But for whatever reason, I always gravitate back to the legal pads, plural. There are always at least two - I am an incessant note taker, and will fill multiple pages at every meeting I attend, or during every conference call I participate in. Not to mention the usual outline of notes prior to the meeting which I use to organize my thoughts and talking points.
I keep every legal pad, placing them in a file cabinet reserved just for that use, and every year I box them up and store them in the attic.
I hope this answers your question - from a non-writer perspective of course.
Dallas
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
It does Dallas.
For the writer the notebook is to help our slipshod memories and to center our non linear thoughts - or so I suppose. After all that's what mine does for me. I often appreciate with mild awe the nice quiet orderly minds others have, because no matter how hard I try, mine simply just can't work that way.
Also the notebook can take many forms. One of mine earlier in life was a legal pad. So they count.
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Notes
When I was an engineering tech at a big electronics company, the engineering note paper of choice were paper napkins during lunch
Does dropbox count?
I have perhaps 50 stories started with snippets as long as 30+ pages, another 100 or so just ideas or titles. All are in files on dropbox because I stopped carrying notebooks around when computers got cheap enough to have more than one. I usually have a tablet with me and always have my phone so I keep notes on those.
I do keep sketchbooks with scribbles and sketches but I know that I will never be able to find the one I want when I want it so that's a dead end.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I was waiting for this one Erin.
Of course dropboxes count. so do notepad notes. An electronic notebook is still a notebook.
Just beware hard drive crashes. Those suck.
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If you appreciate my tales, please consider supporting me on Patreon so that I may continue:
https://www.patreon.com/Nagrij
notebooks and drawings
I have no talent for drawing so no pictures which I have created other than within my own head. Many times I either begin a story or discover a drawing, photo, image of some kind created by someone else which gives me inspiration for either a new story or the continuation of one.
I wish I could draw because the story worlds in my head are magnificent things which unfortunately I am mostly unable to share with all of you because my ability to describe those worlds is also lacking.
That brings me to my story writing.
The devil made me do it... Seriously, what with the comments of various agents and/or the paying readers of books to which I have contributed, my abilities to construct a story which mainstream booksellers find of interest seem to have an abysmal track record.
Why do I continue? Because there are a few out there who do appreciate (or at least they say they do) my material (when it’s free). I don’t know if people would actually pay for something I wrote which wasn’t included into another set of manuscript material.
At this point I’m not certain I want to find out because along with the many other things I do to put food on the table and a roof over my head, story writing is just one more tooth on the cog.
As far as a notebook... Mine are on a notebook computer and backed up onto an external hard drive and two USB sticks. Stories which I wrote long ago (using a quill and a bottle of ink – not really) have been scanned and are also included in those notebooks so everything now is “electronic” and subject to EMP. See, I can learn new things... I figure if it’s going to go then all my backups should go at the same time despite the physical separation between them.
Point in fact I have been looking for an illustrator who is acceptable to both agents and publishers alike. “It ain’t easy.”
God Bless and keep on writing on.
Anesidora
PS. WOW, I actually was able to log in and post this. OH, and RED... I'll comment in my usual way concerns your next chapter.
Anesidoras.
Why you do it? you're a writer. writers write. There is no choice involved, sooner or later, a writer will always write - they are compelled to. That's all, there is no other why.
I'd write till my death even if everyone here hated it... I just wouldn't post anything. :)
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If you appreciate my tales, please consider supporting me on Patreon so that I may continue:
https://www.patreon.com/Nagrij
I have kept a notebook on me
I have kept a notebook on me daily for nearly 30 years now. There have only been a few gaps and those always felt odd. I have lots of really strange stuff in them, from work schedules, sketches, poems, silent chats, story notes, actual writing on said stories, philosophical musings, etc... If my mind pondered it, it often went into the notebook. It can be a scary place for those not fully prepared for my madness. I think it has been a tremendous help to my work.
Heather
We are the change that will save the world.
I'm guilty
I have notes and scribbles going back 40 years. Most were just musings, but crude sketches, and story ideas turned into gaming characters and adventure notes. A lot of them does give me that what was I thinking jive, but also that time machine thing. Yeah that was the 80's and you watch how that drifted into the nineties where I first serious first tried to put my stories down in some kind of coherent form.
I have almost as many unfinished stories on the 'puter now that I had written down, now. I can't say if that's an improvement or not. :)
hugs
Grover
I'm possibly the exception
I keep a notebook of characters on my stories because I forget who was what.
As for the writing bit, I sit at a blank screen and just write. There's no magic in it, it's hard work and like all skills improves with practice.
Angharad
Notes
I'm probably a bad girl for this. I've never kept notes at all.
Melanie
I'm another one who ...
... keeps my notes on my laptop computer. Even if I get an idea and scribble it on the nearest piece of paper, cardboard, Tyvek, or forearm, it still gets entered into an appropriate file at my earliest opportunity.
Moreover, I back up my data files regularly. A 1TB outboard drive always has room for whatever I have on my 500GB laptop storage. And my DOS-based script only backs up new and modified files, so the backup goes quickly.
Do a web-search for "Jesus Saves Humor" ...
All forms
I have old spiral bound notebooks with story ideas, for a while I had notes and stories on a palm device, then a windows phone and now some are in Gdocs but most are on my primary writing device, a phone with a hardware keyboard. Back when I was still using pencil and paper I was getting ideas so often that I stopped writing them down the first time I had them and only committing them to paper if the idea returned with something new, otherwise I'd have a few hundred things to work on instead of just the 90 or so.
Hugs
Cat
-
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.
Geek Girl Here
I have to plead guilty to being a total geek in such things. My notebook is all in magnetic media; a sub-file in my word processor. There reside a mismatched collection of works in progress. Everything from a few sentences to several pages. Some destined to never be finished, due to having written myself into a corner and unable or unwilling to rewrite so that idea can be saved... some, the impetus continue simply left and to continue would simple slogging some uninspired junk to finish just for the sake of finishing.
In another sub-file resides pictures that have given me story ideas some written and some yet to be written. Some suffer the same fate as the unfinished stories. My rate of collection far exceeds my ability to turn out stories.
But yeah, I'm a real geek girl... no dead tree versions for me.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Show of hands
Did all that. Used to keep a notebook for Crown or Tiara alone, until one day I opened it back to type into the computer, and I realized that all the pencil scribbles were blurred and unreadable. So to those who've been waiting for the next chapter of Crown or Tiara, I'm so sorry. I'm still trying to recall what I wrote in that blurred out notebook.
I also have a habit of starting a new story. It wasn't because I suddenly got a new story, it was because my dreams always gave me new stories to write. Unfortunately, I am one of those who can't write 1k stories. I always had my brain packed up with all the details that writing a 1k stories would be impossible. If however, I had a load of different story ideas and I had no time to write them all, I would turn them into poems. Those poems wouldn't be for the public, it would be so that one day, when I looked back at the poems, I will be reminded of those dreams and be able to write the next story from memory. So far, I have hundreds of poems, and I have not looked back at any of them, except for one, titled 'The City of Dogs', about a pair of preteen brother and sister who had to survive in a world after a nuclear war.