A Kernel on Keeping a Writing Notebook

and making it do the writing for you

It’s that time of year again. Pumpkin spice wafts from the coffee shops. School supplies pack the store shelves. My own children are headed back to school, and this year I am, too: I am about to begin my MFA in fiction. This week in fact. I am so excited. I know it’s going to be a great year, and I also know that some teacher of mine or of my children’s (and maybe one of yours) will require a “writer’s notebook.”

How many of us have started a new season in our writing life by investing in one of those (often expensive) leather-bound journals and then dutifully draining our pens, scribbling page after deckle-edged page, only to find these journals are where our best ideas go to die? 

I confess that I have kept some version of a writer’s notebook since I was first assigned to do so as an undergrad. I now have a long row of them, neat as soldiers, marching across an entire shelf of my bookcase. I thought every writer did. So you can imagine my surprise, when, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that only one of my fellow Kernelists keeps a physical notebook (hey, Natalia!). How do the others function? Their methods are a wonder and a mystery to me.

My secret shame is that for years (and years and years) I kept these notebooks without making them earn their keep. I was very good at filling them with snatches of dialogue, lyrical phrases, and inspired ideas. I was less good at the alchemy of turning that material into the gold of actual stories. However, in recent years, thanks to long conversations about craft with my fellow Kernelists and the pressure of frequently churning out finished drafts for critique in writing workshops, I’ve developed some habits (I hesitate to call them techniques) for putting my notebooks to work.

Get your machete at the ready, because we are headed into the weeds of the writing process!

What even is a writer’s notebook?

The simple answer is that it’s whatever you want it to be. A place for story ideas, character sketches, thoughts to delve into later when you have more time—even full first drafts of whole stories. There’s no rule about what goes into it, only that you keep it handy and use it regularly. 

I use my writing notebook like a visual artist uses a sketchbook: to experiment. I keep my list of “good words” in the back. (See Neidy’s excellent kernel on keeping a personal dictionary.) I keep lists of “books read” and “books to be read,” as well as a bibliography of books I am working my way through as I research the Dutch Golden Age for the historical fiction novel I am writing. And as I am reading all of those books, I am constantly noting details I want to inject into my stories. What colors did they wear in 17th century Amsterdam? What names did they christen their babies? 

I also keep additional reading notes in my writer’s notebook: those brilliant passages that inspire higher-order thoughts I want to craft into my own stories, those inspiring quotations that I hope will become the epigrams of my future novels. When, in my fiction reading, I uncover a brilliant turn of phrase with a mellifluous cadence, I’ll rework it on a topic of my own, with my own vocabulary. (Similar to what Natalia described in last week’s kernel). I have the rough drafts of letters I’ve written to my pen pals (yes, I have pen pals). Recently, when I was asked to write a book review, I jotted down my notes while reading—and I wrote the rough draft of that review in my notebook. I wrote my first, scrambled ideas for this kernel in there, too, along with all of my previous kernels. 

My point is that everything goes in the notebook. Nothing gets lost. But I’m also hoping it’s an info dump for my brain, freeing up my little gray cells so they can think more and bigger thoughts. This is the basic concept behind The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll, and if you aren’t afraid of going down a rabbit hole, I’d encourage you to check out his book.

One notebook to rule them all

I am a firm believer in keeping a single writer’s notebook. Don’t get me wrong. I use other notebooks for other things. I keep a journal for my heart’s ponderings (Moleskine). I use a bullet-journal-style planner (Leuchtturm1917) for my day-to-day appointments, daydreams, and exhaustive to-do lists. But for my writing I have always stuck to simple dollar store ruled composition books, the kind every school child uses to write lab reports and reading responses. I love how their very cheapness encourages me to be less precious about what I write in them.

Keep it organized

When beginning a new notebook, I label it by start date: March 2023, for example. Then when I fill the final page, I add the end date: August 2023. In this way I can scroll back in time to the genesis of any story idea to see what originally sparked my enthusiasm. Notes for the novel I am currently drafting appear in six or seven different notebooks (I fill about three per year), and I still occasionally reach back to those early entries for inspiration. In this way I can just as easily find the passage I need to describe in detail the slow unfurling of a German springtime—from first crocus to last iris—because I remembered making note of it the spring I lived in Germany (Notebook No. 18: March 2022–June 2022).

Getting a-head

Every time I sit down to write (which is almost every day), I start with a header. I write the date in the margins and the title of the story that my notes will become a part of. If whatever I’m writing about is so nascent it doesn’t yet have a working title, I’ll call it “Essay about Granny” or “Short Story about the Luna Moth,” but my goal is to assign whatever I write to a specific project as quickly as possible. I always want to be writing towards a story—not just writing words that will waste away in notebooks. If I write on more than one topic per day, I just rewrite the date and assign another header. This way, after I’ve collected enough material to begin organizing it into a draft, I can easily go back through my notebooks and the headers tell me where to pull everything I need to begin assembling my story.

*And here’s a bonus kernel of advice: write your notes in the voice of the story you mean to tell. This is my own personal riff on some very excellent advice in the incomparable Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell, and it was a game changer for me. Bell writes: “I don’t generate a separate document full of inert, nonnovelistic prose, which feels so different from the kind of language I want my novel to contain. …[D]o your note-taking inside your novel, in the voice of the book.” Now when I take notes, they aren’t just notes—they are sentences, or paragraphs, or sometimes full scenes written in the style of my story that are just waiting to be incorporated into my drafts. In recent years, I have often pulled together entire first drafts collated from such jottings in my writer’s notebook. I have one (very long) short story, written in snippets here and there over the course of many months that is still waiting to be given its proper shape, but I’m not troubled by this because I know I will be able to pull it from my notebook as soon as I am ready for it.

Check, baby, check

As soon as possible (a day, a week, hopefully never more than two weeks) I try to transfer all of the material I have been accumulating in my notebook into the stories that reside on my computer (I’m a big fan of Scrivener, by the way). Then I give that page a big ole checkmark with my pencil. It is super satisfying. By this point my notebook has done its job, and I don’t need to look at those pages again. This helps me to see at a glance what work I have left to do. My checkmarks also help me track my progress: they are a visual reminder of all the work I have done turning thoughts into stories. Transferring my handwritten notes to a computer document is how I like to ease myself into my writing time each morning. I start early, before the coffee has kicked in, and this habit jogs my memory about the stories I had envisioned in the previous days and weeks. Usually, before I know it, I’m happily writing along towards my word count for the day. 

My kernel of advice: Keep a writer’s notebook. Keep it handy. And put it to work writing your stories for you.

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Inspiration, Information, & Insight

• This week, Shelby read Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith, a short novel with flash-sized chapters that provided a thoughtful perspective on permanence, and started Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty, a short story collection about family and friendship set on a reservation in Maine. Both Smith and Talty imbued energy into their sentences that lit Shelby up. She also read this

  Lit Mag News
  essay by Mariana Villas-Boas on copyrights for writers, which was a good reminder to read through contracts before signing off on anything!

• With the return of pumpkin spice, Neidy was ready to jump into spooky season. She started two novels this week: Steven King’s Pet Sematary and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (the author’s preferred text version). For writers and readers disinclined to read “genre” fiction, these are two authors Neidy highly recommends. The books mentioned are horror and fantasy respectively, yet there is no doubt about the craftsmanship and attention that went into their creation. They are interesting to read concurrently because of the difference in their narrative voice: King is a master of the long sentence while Gaiman is a master of the short sentence. As she has been reading, she has tried to pinpoint what was added in revision (for example, she suspects King’s early repetition that Ellie would be fine was worked in after the first draft) and what required non-plotted generation (for example, she thinks Gaiman’s carousel ride into the mind of Mr. Wednesday must have come from exploratory writing). She hopes you will pick up something fantastical or horrific this week as well! 

• Natalia read a creative nonfiction essay that has really been sitting with her: “The Crane Wife” by CJ Hauser. The details and the raw emotion make what could otherwise be a cliché topic not a cliché at all, but incredibly relatable and true. It weaves a woman’s present day experience, relationship flashbacks, nature observations, and folklore. Natalia hopes to use it as inspiration for a creative nonfiction essay competition she’s hoping to submit something to in the next month.

• Sarah spent her final week of summer break training to be a teaching assistant and reading some of the most recent books published by members of her MFA cohort, including Bea Setton’s novel Berlin and Tobi Ogundiran’s short story collection Jackal, Jackal. (She’s trying to focus on the excitement—rather than the intimidation—of attending a program with such accomplished students.) She also visited the Mississippi Book Festival, where she heard discussions by writers Ann Patchett, Richard Ford, Maggie Smith, Rebecca Makkai, Mona Simpson, Claire Jiménez, and many, many more.