Notebook Mojo

Last week, I ran a bunch of writing workshops for Villanova College here in Brisbane. Four workshops spread over three days, focused on writing a crime story in 900 words. My year of producing original short fiction for Patreon came in incredibly handy, since I have a lot of thoughts on how to curtail your word count after doing that.

An interesting side-effect of doing a lot of workshops: I do not go anywhere near a computer while running them. All my writing work gets done in notebooks, scribbling details by hand, rather than firing up a desktop and working in Word or Scrivener directly. Partially, this is a practical concern—notebooks are transportable and easier to flip open when you’re filling a half-hour between sessions in an unfamiliar space—but it has benefits beyond raw pragmatism.

I made the switch because I operate from a baseline level of social anxiety, and it rages out of control when I break my routine. Three days of running a workshop in front of strangers definitely qualifies, not least because it’s physically exhausting as well as burning through my social spoons, and I knew in advance there’d be some heavy self-doubt and fear kicking in.

And it’s harder to write when I’m short of social spoons. Even if I can sit down in front of computer, my brain just runs short, panicked loops. I get bogged down rewriting the same paragraph over and over, deleting and tweaking and utterly freezing with the fear I’ll be exposed if anyone reads it. Dredging up a deep well of self-loathing because, well, a writer writes, don’t they?

It took me years to make the connection between social anxiety and my occasional bouts of fear-based writing paralysis. After all, writing is a famously solitary activity. It’s one of the reasons I pursued it as a career.

Thing is, it requires a surprising amount of mental health management to finish a draft without the social anxiety spinning out of control. Writing a story means you have to show it to people, after all, and showing it to people means they may judge you. Writing is predicated on exposure of the self, and this is the toehold that social anxiety thrives on — not just the fear of being judged, but that those who judge you are *correct*, which lies at the heart of a lot of socially anxious thoughts.

I often find retreating to a notebook makes it easier to get work done when fear is looming in the background. Writing a draft on the computer lines things up in neat text, makes it too easy to peer past the work in progress and visualise the finished product going live. It allows me to hyper-focus on mistakes, and trying to mitigate them.

And word processors make it very easy to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, rather than pushing forwards in search of the end.

But notebooks? Notebooks are private, and even if they’re not, I wish folks luck in trying to decipher my handwriting. Nobody is going to mistake my handwritten draft for the finished product, and I can’t mistakenly send it out before doing a final check because it still needs to be typed up. The part of my brain that likes to worry about whether everything is *perfect* can focus on the quality of my penmanship instead of my storytelling, and I’ll get an entire story draft done before I have to fix anything.

Notebooks are also, oddly, much more useful for getting some work done in the twenty-minute gap between workshops, or jotting down some notes while I’m so sore from teaching that I can’t sit at the desk (which sounds like a joke, I know, but my daily step count went up 800% over the last three days, so I’m physically shattered on top of the mental stuff).

I’ve spent a few years honing the way I use notebooks and when I should fall back on them. Sometimes I spend a whole chunk of my working life there, and other times it’ll be a few weeks. The important part isn’t what I do, but why I do it: handwriting is a tool I deploy to solve a particular problem and keeps me moving forward when my brain or life is uncooperative.

As the need for managing mental health fades, I’ll likely drift back to writing first drafts on the computer instead of filling empty pages. Neither is inherently better or worse—I’ve certainly finished perfectly fine stories both ways—but there are definitely times when one is the superior choice for the current circumstances.