I Love Notebooks

My Writing Journey Part 13

A selection of my son’s story notebooks

The allure of a new notebook

Do you like notebooks, I do. Maybe it’s an author thing, but the allure of a beautiful cover and all those crisp, clean, empty white lines of possibility are hard to resist.

While I like the look of them, the actual process of putting pen to paper makes me hesitate.

Why would I want to sully those pristine pages with an untidy scribble of notes and ideas?

My son, also a writer, has no such qualms and has a significant number of books filled with paragraphs and chapters of whatever story he is currently working on. (Notebooks are the go-to gift for him.)

Keeping a daily diary

I’ve written in a day-to-a-page diary for most of my adult life and always struggle on that first day at the start of the year, knowing that once I commit pen to paper, the writing will not be neat with beautiful character – like those diaries of yesteryear that I so often see online or in museums. My writing maybe reasonably legible at the top of the page and gradually disintegrate to a doctor’s scrawl by the end.

I should apologise in advance for any descendants who will be reading them sometime in the far-distant future. Sorry but they won’t contain any deep, dark thoughts-it’s mostly a record of what happened in daily life.

And they certainly they won’t be looking on with admiration at the quality of the penmanship.

More often than not I start writing, (I write that day’s events the following day) thinking nothing much happened and then waffle to fill the lines only to remember oh yeah, that happened, and then I run out of room and scrunch words up to try and fit them on the page somewhere.

There is a spiral bound notebook of some sort by my bed for nocturnal story idea scribblings. (Actually, there are two – the other is for writing down things I need to do)

And in the morning, I have to try and decipher and rewrite the scrawl of scattered thoughts into something readable. And boy it can be a challenge!

Story Research

When I wanted to do some research for one of my country music romance novels, I took myself off to the Lee Kernaghan, Boy from the Bush doco-movie, sat up the back of the theatre, furiously taking notes with the help of my phone. Looking for life-on-the road insights, but more importantly to see what was going on backstage/side stage during concerts and to describe the view of the audience from the stage. Hopefully it has helped my concert scene feel more realistic.

Such is the life of this writer.