This post was originally written for Nero's Notes, where I'm one of the blog writers, but I thought it would be interesting to my readers, too.
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Current 'capture' notebooks |
People (who evidently don't know me!) often assume that I just write straight into Word when I'm writing my novels. Actually, I barely use Word at all! I write and edit in Scrivener, but that happens a
long time after any initial ideas for a book - often months, sometimes
years down the line. Long before I actually start writing anything that could conceivably be considered part of a scene or anything, I capture ideas and do a shed-load of noodling around, thinking about characters, settings, plot... None of this is done on the computer! All of my planning is done in notebooks.
I've been writing seriously for well over a decade now, so I have a
lot of notebooks that I've used for novel-writing. To cover all of them in one blog-post would leave you all wanting less (a lot less!) so I'll break it up into a couple of posts... Today's post is on the kinds of books I use for capturing ideas. I'll do another post on the notebooks I use once a book idea has got enough going for it that it will actually get written!
I am never without a notebook. Never. Whether I'm at my desk, out and about, or in bed, there's a notebook to hand. Sometimes I get an idea about the book I'm working on and need to capture it. Sometimes I've seen a person and there was something about them that I wanted to note - their clothes, their conversation, their demeanour. I can also get ideas about stories or settings, or see a whole scene really clearly and need to write it down before I forget it. All of these things and more are captured in a series of notebooks that I have dotted around the place.
Essentially, I'm too disorganised to have just one notebook for capture. I'd forget to take it out with me, or I'd leave it next to my bed, or in my handbag and by the time I'd found it, whatever it was I wanted to note would have flown out of my head and be lost forever. It would make my life a lot easier if I could just manage to have a single notebook for capturing these things, but I'm an old dog and that would be a new trick.
So, these are what I have in use at the moment: