Category: writers notebook (Page 1 of 4)

Pocket Notebook

I keep a writer’s notebook, and since I also carry a backpack with me most places, I used to take the WNB with me everywhere.

But honestly, I hardly ever took the full-sized notebook out in public and wrote in it. Just too unwieldy.

I like the idea of having one notebook where I keep all my thoughts, but since I’ve been watching a bunch of notebook “advice” videos, I’ve warmed up to the idea that maybe I need different notebooks for different things and different situations.

I started writing my fiction in my “fiction notebook.” And then I bought a Leuchtturm 1917 notebook for my RPG notes. Then, finally, I bought a little pocket notebook to be my “on-the-go” notebook for random thoughts and ideas. Basically, a substitute for my main writer’s notebook.

I almost bought a Field Notes pocket notebook, but my kids really love these little blank comic book notebooks from the Unemployed Philosophers Guild, and they’re the right size to fit in my pants pockets, so I thought I’d go a little quirkier than Field Notes and get a notebook from the Unemployed Philosophers instead.

There are many to choose from, but I went with the Cloudspotting one to start because cloud-watching is also a hobby I’ve wanted to start for a while, so I thought I could capture my random thoughts and sketch and identify clouds at the same time.

So far, about half-way through the notebook, I’m glad that I’ve started carrying it around almost everywhere I go. First, it allows me to be unshackled from having to take my backpack everywhere in order to have my full-sized notebook with me. I can leave my backpack at home when I go for a walk around the neighborhood or to the library or wherever, and yet I can still jot down some ideas in my cloudspotting notebook if necessary.

I find that I DO jot down things more often now that I’m carrying the pocket-sized notebook. It’s not nearly as weird to take out my little notebook and write a few lines of dialogue for a story or a blogging idea or whatever. And there’s the added bonus of getting to sketch some clouds if the mood takes me. (I don’t always use the cloud-sketching areas, though, so maybe next time I’ll get a more “normal” writing notebook.)

Often, I take the ideas in the pocket notebook and transfer them to my main notebook or use them in my fiction. I end up spending a lot of time during the day thinking about my fiction, about my writing ideas, and this, in turn, keeps my momentum going for my various writing projects. I’m less “stuck” since carrying around my pocket notebook.

In theory, I like the idea of one notebook for everything, but in practice, the multiple-notebooks strategy really does allow me to do more writing throughout the day. I grab my pocket notebook instead of my phone when I’m waiting in line or watching my kids at the park. I flip through it to reread earlier ideas and ruminate on them a bit more, sometimes expanding them, sometimes challenging or changing them. I look at the clouds and try to figure out which type they are, spending a few minutes sketching and paying attention to the weather and the wind.

And yeah, I like that my pocket notebook is a little different, that it’s got a bit more character than an ordinary Field Notes or whatever. I smile when I see the Cloudspotting cover. It’s kind of silly, but the silliness actually makes me want to use it more. I don’t know why, but the whimsy of a “cloud” notebook (or a “Captain’s Log” or “Neverland Passport”) gives me a jolt of pleasure that’s just strong enough to counteract the lure of my phone. I’m trying to break the habit of looking at my phone whenever I get bored, and if it means carrying around a quirky little notebook, then that’s what I’ll do.

And I’m getting more writing done too. Which is the whole point of a notebook anyway.

Goal: Finish Norse City Limits

My top writing goal for 2024 is to finish my novel, Norse City Limits. Inspired by both my love for Icelandic sagas and my love for film noir, NCL mixes elements from Grettir’s Saga and Norse mythology with some of my favorite noir tropes.

I started out writing it late last summer and made a lot of progress right out of the gate. I guess I was excited about starting something new. The idea for NCL has been rattling around my brain for years, so that build-up and energy just flowed right through me when I finally started drafting. I think I wrote roughly 15,000 words in those first few weeks.

Then the school year started and I began teaching again. That slowed things down considerably, and because I wasn’t outlining my chapters as I went, I ended up forgetting a bunch of stuff as my momentum stalled and I didn’t write everyday.

I wrote a short story, started another short story, started a novella, and then went back through and reread all of the NCL manuscript thus far, taking notes and outlining each chapter.

After that process, I finally resumed drafting the novel, but with a bit of a twist. The school year started with me wanting to experiment with having the students draft by hand. Basically do all their writing in notebooks and on pads of paper. This was my way of resisting AI, I guess. Of getting us all to think more intentionally about our bodies and how doing things by hand shapes how we think.

I realized that while I do a lot of writing by hand, mostly in my writer’s notebook, I was still drafting all my fiction at the computer. I can type faster than I can handwrite, and typing just made sense. Saves times, right?

But that meant that I could only write when I had access to my computer, to the desktop that sits in our basement. That meant that my writing time was limited to those moments when I was home and could steal away to the basement to write.

Translation: I didn’t get a lot of writing done once school started because I didn’t have access to my computer. And even when I did have access to it, sometimes I didn’t feel like holing myself up in the dank, cold basement. Sometimes I wanted to sit on the couch with my husband in the evening, just to be near him, to spend quiet time together.

After watching this video on Neil Gaiman’s writing routine, I realized that I really love writing in my writer’s notebook, and writing by hand has always made me feel more experimental and loose, AND I was asking my students to draft their writing by hand, but I was still shackled to my computer, so the answer seemed obvious.

I needed to start drafting my stories by hand.

I took out the lovely leather notebook case my husband got me a few years ago, stuck a couple of Moleskine softcover journals in it, and started drafting NCL and my short fiction by hand. I started bringing the notebook with me to work, drafting in spare moments at lunch or after school. I sat on the couch in the evenings and drafted while my husband worked on his grad classes.

Basically, I got back into the groove with the novel.

At this point, I’m on chapter ten but not quite sure how many words because I’ve drafted the last chapter by hand. Probably getting close to 30k words. Which is admittedly not a lot. I’m thinking this book will be roughly 100k words, but that’s always hard to say until I get closer to the end. I don’t outline, so I’m simply going by the vague impressions I’ve generated for where the story might go and the scenes I have floating around my head.

Right now, my protagonist is stumbling and fumbling along, trying to be proactive but getting swatted down at every turn by the cruel forces at work in the city. It’s weird writing noir because it’s such a dark genre/style that calls for bad luck and evil fate to circumvent the hero’s actions. I want to be careful that my main guy gets some feeling of progress going even as the net squeezes tighter and tighter around him.

To finish the novel in seven months, I must write roughly 10k words per month. Very doable… except I also have the goal to finish another novel (Ysbaddaden) and even more stories besides. So 10k a month for NCL, but that won’t be all I’m writing each month.

As always, I’m hoping to “fail to success,” so no matter where I am by next month, I’ll be further along than I am now.

The “Morning Routine” is cliche at this point, but it still works

I hesitate to write about morning routines because I feel like at this point, all the gurus have spoken (often annoyingly), it’s gotten cliche to spout off about how important one’s morning routine is, and we’ve heard the advice ad nauseam so what more is there to say?

And yet, I have been thinking once again about why I’ve been floundering since mid-December, and the answer is crystal clear: It’s my faltering morning routine.

From early August until the end of November, my morning routine had been relatively steady (I even managed a modified version of it while visiting family over the Thanksgiving holiday), and even though my writing output wasn’t huge in that span, I was writing consistently and enjoyably. Life was in balance.

Then December hit, Christmas prepping and end-of-semester-grading took over my life, and the morning routine was decimated. I tried to get back on track in January, but to no avail. I couldn’t get to bed on time, and in the morning, sleep felt more important than writing, so I would snooze until it was time to get my kids ready for school.

And now, here I am in April, and I’m grumbling about how out of sync I feel, how paltry my creative output has been, and how, frankly, depressed I’m getting.

It’s the lack of a morning routine!

I’ve known it the whole time, but for some reason I had convinced myself that perhaps my life was too unpredictable to commit to a regular morning routine and I’d be better off sneaking my writing in whenever I could, doing my art whenever the small snatches of time presented themselves. Planning didn’t seem to be working, so I would be more spontaneous.

But spontaneous is just another word for not getting shit done. Without a rhythm, without a routine, I never was able to find those snatches of time. My output nosedived.

Here’s the thing: it wasn’t that planning didn’t work. It was that I had given up on committing to the plan. I wanted my sleep (I still do, of course). And I figured it was too hard to get to bed at 10:00 p.m. My life wouldn’t let me. I had to face reality. Blah, blah, blah.

But what I was facing wasn’t reality. It was my own resignation in the face of a challenge. I had given up and soothed myself by saying it was pragmatism.

It wasn’t pragmatism. It was a reluctance to make changes. To turn off the screens and go to bed even if there were other things I wanted to do. The real reality is that we have to make choices, and from December to April, I had been making the choice to stay up later and not wake up early to do my morning routine. This was a choice I was making. I didn’t have to read one more online article after 9:00 p.m., but I did. I didn’t have to watch a second episode of that TV show, but I did. I didn’t have to put off my paper-grading all day so that I had a stack of them to grade at night, but I did.

These were choices. They still are choices I must face each and every day. But if I want to establish my morning routine again, then I must make different choices. Some things, yes, are always out of our control. I can’t control when my child has a nightmare and needs me to sit with him in his bedroom. I can’t control those nights when we get home late from visiting family and I have to stay up late to make the lunches and wash dishes.

But on typical nights, those normal nights when I have more control over my choices and time, I can start making the choice for the morning routine — the routine that gives my life balance and structure and health — over the choice for one more episode, one more article, one more paper to grade.

If it’s at all interesting to others, my morning routine consists of waking up at 6:00 a.m. and immediately doing stretches in bed to help with my back problems and muscle stiffness. Then I get up, drink a glass of water and take vitamins, and then begin walking around the house for exercise. While I walk, I usually pray. If it’s light enough outside, I might walk outside, but usually it’s too dark for that.

After my walk and prayer time, I do my Julia Cameron-style morning pages in my notebook, and then I do some creative writing, either fiction or nonfiction or poetry, whatever feels right and I’m most excited about.

By this time, I have to get ready for work, so I shower, pack the kids’ lunches, eat breakfast, and head to work with enough time to grade papers for thirty minutes before my first class period starts.

This is the ideal morning routine for me. In this three-hour span, I’m able to exercise, pray, reflect, write creatively, eat breakfast, and make progress on my teaching job, so that by 9:00 a.m., I have accomplished all the important things I need to accomplish for the day related to my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job.

After 9:00 a.m., if I’ve done my morning routine, whatever else gets accomplished throughout the day, I can feel good knowing I did the things I needed to do to make myself feel whole.

Maybe some of the gurus would say my routine is too ambitious, and that’s why I fell off the wagon.

Maybe.

But over the years, I’ve trained myself to become more and more of a morning person, and as I get older, I know that by the time the afternoon hits, I’m too tired both physically and mentally to be effective at my creative work. The best time for me is the morning. Before the day has had a chance to drain me. So I need to get several things done in the morning because my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job are all things I need to keep in balance for an ordered, satisfying life.

And if that means I need to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and go to bed at 9:30 p.m., then maybe I need to start making the choices that will allow me to do that. But it all comes down to choices, to what I value, and where I focus my time.

Not everything is under my control. Life will have bumps and setbacks.

But the morning routine — for me, at least — really does work as a tool and structure for making my art. I’ve noticed a huge plummet of happiness and artistic fulfillment since I floundered in my morning routine. And in just the past two days, since I’ve been trying to reestablish that routine, I’ve noticed a huge upswing in my mood and ability to get creative work done.

Reminding myself that the morning routine really does work, and that it’s worth making different choices at night, may be cliche to write about, but I wouldn’t have had the energy or time to write this blog post without my morning routine.

I’ll take the cliche every time if it means I get to make my art again and keep myself whole.

Creative Writing: Week One

I’m teaching a Creative Writing class for the first time in several years, and this week was our first week. I’ve got fourteen students — high school kids — and we started the week watching a movie, coloring, and eating candy (an idea I blatantly stole from Lynda Barry... sorry for being a thief, Professor Lynda!).

It was great, though. Super chill. Fun and relaxing. A big part of this class is about having fun and being playful, so watching a movie and coloring felt very playful and kid-like. These are teenagers, so sometimes they want to act grown-up and mature and be sophisticated adults, but there’s also this yearning for childhood and play and fun (something often sorely missing from their busy, over-stuffed lives), so by giving them permission to have fun, to be a kid again, to be silly and do something “just because,” I’ve (hopefully) given them permission to also be creative.

We talked a bit about what it means to be creative, and my biggest message on this is that creative means “to create,” so any time they are making something, they are being creative. Doesn’t have to be “original” or “special” or even “good.” Just has to be making something.

What that something is, I’m leaving up to them.

(One student asked if she could make jam every week, and I said, “Um… okay? But maybe write, like, a poem and stick it on the label?” It is a creative WRITING class after all; I feel like some writing should be in there somewhere…)

We also spent some time decorating our writing notebooks and choosing “guardian spirits” (via Austin Kleon), and I told them they had to do some “input” every day and that a big chunk of their grade will be based on how much input they take in week after week.

Input includes reading poetry, fiction, non-fiction, essays, comics, watching movies/TV, listening to music, looking at art, and having new experiences. When I told them they had permission to watch a bunch of movies this week and count it as their “homework” for my class, they all got very excited and couldn’t believe their luck. I also got very excited. I can’t wait for them to spend their week watching movies and getting ideas and having fun.

I’m very big on fun these days. We take things too seriously, acting as if writing stories or reading books or making art is some kind of excruciating task that tortures us. If reading a book is torture, you’re doing it wrong. And if writing something that came out of your imagination is laborious and unfun, then also: doing it wrong. This is art, kiddos. Not work.

So, we spent some time talking about how to have fun, and then I tried to do things all week that were fun. We went on walks. We listened to Japanese soul music from the 1970s. We made blackout poetry. We spent an entire class period inputting things into our brains: some students watched a movie, others read novels and poetry. I too read a book during that time, and listened to some synthwave music.

Their assignment this weekend is to keep doing their input, everyday. I’ll check their input logs on Monday.

I also asked them to spend thirty minutes to an hour doing some idea-generating. I gave them a list of twenty different activities to try, including playing the “What If?” game, making a list of titles, and listening to music to see what images and ideas flow from the songs.

In some ways, you could look at this first week and say, “She didn’t teach them anything! They just goofed around!”

And you’d be right. We did goof around. We did silly things. Playful things. Fun things. I gave them some advice about writing, but mostly, we just played. Because if they’re going to be writing creatively, they must first be playful. They must first be given permission to have fun. It’s a permission they were craving.

This first week was the giving-permission week: “Yes, you can play. Yes, you can laugh. Yes, you can make jam.” (Just maybe make a poem or a clever line to go with it.)

Going forward, we’ll learn some craft; we’ll learn techniques. I’ll give them prompts and exercises. But I’ll also continue to give them space and time and permission to have fun.

Make Dreams Happen

A little while ago, my husband bought me two notebook covers for my spiral notebooks (which are my preferred type of writer’s notebook). One of the covers is made of leather and has a little loop for holding my pen. It’s beautiful, but I haven’t used it yet.

Instead, I started with the cloth one, made of green and yellow cloth and stamped with the words, “Make Dreams Happen,” on the front. I don’t know why I started with this one and not the other; I guess because I felt like the leather one was too “special” to start with (listen, my brain is weird and makes up weird rules, okay?).

I love my cloth notebook cover. Everyday, when I sit down to write in my notebook, I see that message and I remember why I’m writing: because it’s always been my dream to write stories and essays and books. The notebook is the “dream-making” machine, the place where I seed my dreams and help them grow.

When I see those words stamped on the cloth cover of my notebook, I remember what is possible within the notebook space. It almost feels like a secret pocket world that I can enter at will and in which no one else has access. I mean, that’s the allure of a private diary, right? But the notebook isn’t a diary in the classic sense where I’m recording my day-to-day activities and feelings about my day. It’s much more of a playground. A dreamscape.

I go to this dreamscape often. I really like the work-play I get to do there.

(Maybe I should just call it “play,” but I don’t think “work” needs be a dirty word, either. I grew up on the edge between working class and middle class, so work sometimes has a negative connotation for me. Work is what you do for money, to feed your family. It’s often not something you enjoy but something you must do. But work excised from money-making and Capitalism is not drudgery, nor is it a bad thing, nor is it something to be avoided. If it’s work-play or play-work, then I see it as akin to real leisure — not just relaxation — in that it helps us live the good life and contemplate more deeply what it means to be ourselves. Notebook writing is work-play in this sense. It IS play, but it’s play mixed with a kind of rigor that hues closely to what we’d associate with work. It’s the work of being more human, and in order for that work to bear fruit, it must be approached like play. Anyway, that’s what I mean.)

I write in my notebook as much as I can. It feels like I’m doing my main work in my notebook, and all the other projects — whether blogging, writing fiction, teaching, gaming — are just a network of limbs extending out from the notebook. The notebook is the heart, pumping blood to the various appendages.

I feel guilty writing in my notebook sometimes (especially on days when I write five or more pages), as if the “writing” I do inside the notebook is an elaborate form of procrastination. But what I have to remind myself of is that the notebook is the dream-field, and my scratches across its surface are the furrows that house the seeds. Without such planting, I won’t have stories or essays or other creations to share with the world.

It’s all happening under the surface, between the green and yellow cloth.

Pretending to be Prolific

Been thinking a lot today about my fears and the critical voice that constantly tries to stop me from writing. I wrote quite a bit in my WNB this morning, trying to figure out what my fears really are and brainstorming ways to combat them.

I’ve always admired prolific writers. Ray Bradbury. Neil Gaiman. All the old pulp guys like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith (and so many others). And there are women too, like Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, and Ursula Le Guin, who were incredibly prolific in their lifetimes. Jane Yolen is a writer today who is incredibly prolific and one I admire.

So, if I admire all these prolific writers, how do I combat my fears and get more writing done?

While writing in my notebook today, I decided to try a technique that will hopefully kill my critical voice and get me into the right headspace for writing.

That technique is visualization. If I can visualize myself as a pulp writer, as someone like Andre Norton, who loves to tell stories and doesn’t care what anyone thinks, then maybe I can let go of my perfectionism and fear of writing something “wrong” and just let the words flow.

You might be wondering, why the need for visualization? Why not just force myself to write more?

But this is where my critical brain is so deadly. The negative thoughts and fears keep me from “just writing.” I get hung up on worrying what people will think. I’ve tried “just writing more,” but critical voice always sneaks in and stops me.

Not necessarily in the moment of writing, but in the off-hours, when I’m thinking about what I wrote and start questioning everything. It’s in the in-between times when my critical voice is most ascendant, when it starts judging my writing and making me doubt myself. These off-hours ruin my energy and enthusiasm for the story. They make it harder and harder to sit down at the computer and write. I’ll force myself to do it, but critical voice has sucked all the fun out of it.

But the prolific SFF writers? I don’t know if they really didn’t care what others thought of their work, but I suspect they had a healthy dose of “don’t give a fuck.” And that’s the attitude I need to channel.

So my solution is visualization.

I like pretending. That’s why I like writing stories in the first place. It’s all make-believe. Like when I was a kid. Telling myself stories while I ran around the backyard. My kids do this too, all the time, and they are so engrossed in their make-believe epics, they have zero time for worrying what others will think. That is the key.

Since I like to pretend, since playing make-believe is where it all started for me, I’m going play make-believe now. I’m going to pretend I’m a prolific writer. I’m going to pretend to be an Andre Norton-esque fantasy writer who writes fearlessly and doesn’t care what people think.

Dean Wesley Smith often talks about how writing should be fun. His advice: “Make it play.”

Well, this is part of my play. I’m pretending to be prolific. Playing make-believe as I sit to write. I’m playing around in the story world even as I’m playing a part at my desk. And if I pretend enough — if I visualize myself as a prolific writer — then perhaps the make-believe will bleed into reality.

Visualization is one of those popular techniques for achieving goals and establishing new habits, and there’s a bit of a hippy-dippy quality to it, but I remember a teacher training we did at my old school several years ago, and the instructor was a professor of psychology, and he told us about the studies they did with students who visualized themselves taking a test and doing well, and he said that students who visualized themselves being successful on the test before they studied did better than the students who just studied. And there’s a bunch of research on how visualization coupled with practice can help basketball players improve their free throw shooting. It’s not unusual for performers, athletes, and others to imagine themselves on stage or on the field doing their thing and having success.

So why not visualize myself as a prolific pulpster who is having a blast writing all the stories of her imagination? To some, this might seem like a crutch, but to me, it’s just an extension of the fun to be had writing stories in the first place. If I can make-believe a story and write it down, why can’t I make-believe I’m someone who has a prolific career and writes with abandon every day?

The visualization has to be coupled with practice, of course. Which means I still need to sit at my desk and write. But when I sit down, I’ll imagine I’m a pulp writer, bursting with stories, fearless, ready to spin a yarn. It’s the fun of the masquerade, of playing dress-up, of pretending. I don’t write under a pen name (well, most of the time I don’t), but I can see how a pseudonym gives one the freedom to be someone else for a little while. If I pretend to be someone else when I’m at my writing desk, perhaps I’ll unlock some of that freedom.

What I hope will happen is that over time, I won’t need the visualization exercise. I hope I’ll simply BE a prolific writer who doesn’t care what others think and who has banished her critical voice. Until then, I’ll use my imagination and pretend.

It’s what writers do.

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