I recently read an article by Jason McBride about the importance, and indeed joy, of keeping ‘ugly notebooks’. If you want to read it, here’s the link.
I have to say that I find Jason’s notebooks anything but ugly, which is more than can be said for mine, but that’s because I use mine in a different sort of way.
It’s hard to remember the first writing notebook I specifically bought, but I have a sneaky suspicion it’s still in a drawer or box somewhere, still untouched, because it was too pretty to write in.
I imagine I’d planned to simply write stories, novels and poems in some sort of logical fluid way. Perhaps the fact that I didn’t know where to start exactly meant that I left it pristine, and carried on writing on scraps of paper or cheaper notebooks instead, and even pressed school exercise books into play.
Below, you can see my Latin revision book, and a selection of other notebooks I used for probably fifteen years from mid teens on when I was trying to get something actually finished.
I bought the blue and green ring-binder aged seventeen, aiming to be organised, putting different things in different sections and moving stuff around as necessary. I took it to university, planning to finish a novel which had a potential publisher, although I never did and it’s still mostly in my head.
Anyone who knew me then thought my writing was bad, but people who know me now will surely attest that it was a lot better than it is now. The notebooks and the ring binder are full of stories, novel concepts and first chapters, all handwritten. But as you can see they’re also full of planning. I have absolutely zero idea who these characters are, or what any of the code in red means after all this time, but note to my long-suffering editor who sometimes thinks I have a loose idea of plotting, at least you can see I have always tried. I also, as you can see, sketched out my thoughts about what characters looked like.
There was then a sort of creative pause of nearly twenty years in which I drew and painted some, but wrote very very little, until a series of events got me going again.
After that, I started to use notebooks again. Some of those the second image were bought by me (just because) and some were gifts. If you’re someone who’s gifted me one and it’s not there, don’t worry, it’ll be somewhere in the house or writing shed, shielding its contents.
The thing is, I now use notebooks differently.
I find writing stories by hand very hard now. I can genuinely type faster. I find reading what I’ve written even harder. But I do sometimes take one to a writing course and do the exercises in it, and occasionally, I write poems or pen pictures by hand as it uses a different part of my creative mind.
As before, I use the notebooks for:
- Plotting
- Working out characters’ ages and interrelationships.
But now, I also use them for:
- To do lists for the business of writing
- Blue-sky thinking/brainstorming with myself when I’m stuck to work out what the problem is and how to overcome it.
- Jotting down notes about things I mustn’t forget to include at some point, but not now.
- Asking myself questions that I realise I need to answer when I’m editing ‘Where has X gone?’, ‘What did Y do exactly?’ or, as you can see, ‘When was Crippen exactly?’
Another person might use notebooks in some sort of order – one for each book, or for each time of mental activity, not starting a new one till an old one is full. But despite being quite sensible and usually organised, for some reason, I don’t. I pick up whichever notebook is closest when I’m thinking about something, or perhaps the one with a cover that ‘calls to me’ that particular day and use it.
There are minuses and pluses to this. It can take a while to find what I remember noting, but, it can also be a joy when I come across something I’d forgotten.
So yes, my notebooks (on the inside) are pretty ugly and would make very little sense to anyone else.
I rarely draw characters now (although you can see a red story-board for a possible promo video below). My sketches (of other things entirely) are chiefly in sketchbooks which I don’t think are ugly at all (even if the sketch didn’t work out).
Perhaps I should start something hybrid like others do, sticking in physical prompts – leaves, postcards, pictures – and responding in sketches or writing. It’s worth thinking about.
Of course, journals and diaries are something else. Below is a drawing I did for last year’s Inktober to the prompt ‘Journal’. I have a couple of old journals from my late teen/early twenties too which are something else altogether and probably need to be ‘lost’ before someone reads about my young adult angst. I’d much rather they were like my drawing.
But at the moment, I quite like my different books: my sketchbooks for an outlet of creativity with no particular purpose and my notebooks for effectively talking with myself as I work out the plots to my books.
What about you?
Words and images copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).
