Notebooks and Process Notes: March 2019

One of the side-effects of doing my Quarterly Checkpoint this week is the realisation that I’m going to have very little time for high level strategic thinking on the writing front. With that in mind, I’ve shifted my drafting process back to handwriting in notebooks–a tactic that’s served me well in terms of keeping forward momentum during highly stressful periods.

Since it’s been a while since I did an update about the state of the notebook wodge I carry with me, I figured I’d take a quick look at what I’m carrying and how I’m using it right now. Fortunately, it’s a pretty slimeline wodege of notebooks for me—there’s currently four notebooks in my kit, and I’m only usually carrying two or three of them at any given moment:

The notebook on the bottom is a large, dark green JS Burrows Journal from my local office supply store–essentially, their name-brand knock-off of the moleskine design. It’s a remarkably nice piece of kit for the price, and there are a bunch of little improvements to the design over the last time I’d used one of their large journals. The shift to a creme-coloured paper, for one, and the move away from the larger 8mm rule that made it feel like I was writing in a school exercise book.

It’s also a little wider than most notebooks that size, which makes it a pleasurable thing to hold and work in. It’s currently holding the bulk of my actual writing and brainstorming for the novella-in-progress, which means there’s lots of bits where I write a scene, and lots of places where I stop and braindump everything I know about the story before I write things, like so:

I started using this technique after spotting it in the notebook pages included in the first edition hardcore of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, and it’s been useful enough to justify my tendency to stickybeak in other people’s processes ever since. I do this kind of brain dump anytime I’m about to start a new scene or sequence in the story, but also when I get stuck on something and can’t figure out what.

Above that is the X-Brand A5 Pressboard Spiral Notebook I picked up from Officeworks for about two bucks, ignoring my usual distrust of spiral binding because it had blank pages and the press-board provided a good writing surface. It tends to be the place where more detailed planning takes place for various projects–it’s where I’ll breakdown a scene that isn’t working, trying to figure out why, or where I’ll do a rough-and-ready draft that is mostly an attempt to get the bad (or cliched) way of doing a scene out of my head before I write it.

Basically, there’s lots of stuff like this, where I figure out the relationships between characters in a coming sequence:

And far lengthier bits where I’m working out beats within a scene and working through what I’ve come to think of as a “scene sheet,” stealing bits and pieces from various resources. This usually starts with mapping out the default structure of the scene, trying to figure out how things will change:

Then moves on to asking a series of questions recommended by scriptwriter Charlie Craig in his portion of Linda Venis’ Inside the Room, focusing on the hard questions about why this scene is there, whether every character needs to be included, and how it’s going to do something different or surprising:

Asking the questions about which characters need to be there is particularly sobering, as my rough-roughs will frequently include way more characters than necessary. Cutting things back to the people with conflicts generally tightens the scene and gives me new angle on how to achieve the effects I’m looking for.

If you look hard at those two photographs, you may also spot elements taken from Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid and the petitioner/granter dynamic outlined in Robin Laws Beating the Story. It’s rare that I do deep planning outside of the scene level, but when I go into it I grab from every resource I can think of that may help me solve a particular issue.

Additionally, I keep these sorts of things seperate from the main drafting notebook because it’s a subtle queue to my subconscious about what we should be working on at any given time. Planning and writing are two different parts of the process, and I’m trying to keep them seperate as much as I can.

The pink notebook on the pile is for short-story drafts, which makes it a really piecemeal book since I rarely do more than a page or two before I switch to another idea. I hadn’t looked at it in a while—there’s a stack of half-finished story notebooks in my pile—and I was surprised to see the first draft of Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight tucked away in its opening pages.

No photographs of this one, since it’s the wild west and the place where I do fun work rather than work work. That makes it a relatively protected space in my process.

Finally, the notebook on top is a red, grid-ruled Moleskine that I’ve been using as a bullet journal since the start of the year. It’s my first time going back to the Moleskine after a year and a bit using the equivalent from the Leuchtturm range, and the subtle differences are telling. It’s a little bit more compact as a notebook, and that extra half-inch of space makes a bigger difference than you’d think.

The Bullet Journal gets used for general planning, raw idea dumps, and the occasional blog post or essay draft. Basically, anything that doesn’t fit into the core notebooks above.