Today I’m taking part in a blog hop hosted by two of the people in my writing group 🙂  They thought it would be a fun idea for everyone to share their writing journals or notebooks, to see how each of us take notes or collect our thoughts.  I agree, fun idea!

I started writing very young but in Middle School, when I started to get serious about it, I bought a pad of lined paper and used that to write my poety in.  I still have that notebook and use it even now (although there are very few pages left!) but unfortunately it isn’t finished crossing the ocean between England and America yet, so I can’t show you that one.  It is really only poetry that gets written in there though.  For a long time I’ve had a sort of mental separation with poetry and novels – I can only write poems with a pen/pencil and paper, but I can only write novels on a computer.

Taking notes for novels is something that I generally do mentally.  So at the moment, this the state of my writing notebook lol:

Yes, empty notebook makes me sad 🙁

It’s strange, because while studying architecture at university one of the things that was instilled into us all was to keep a sketch book around to do quick on-the-spot sketches of things that were interesting.  Obviously, cameras are useful for this too but sometimes it helps to actually draw them so you get a feel for the shape and design.  I think the same is probably true with writing.  I tend to keep all of my novel ideas in my head and play around with them there.  But since starting NaNoWriMo this year, I’ve realised that having some form of note system on paper would be a big help, much like my architecture sketch book (which I would show but again, it’s crossing the ocean right now).

So my notes have progressed from my head this month and ended up on paper.  Although as I don’t yet own a notebook (I borrowed the other one from my husband) or any kind of organisation system, they end up looking like this:

But!  My saving grace has been discovering Scrivener.  It’s allowed me to stop being eaten alive by post-it notes and actually keep my notes and thoughts together in one place in the research folder for the novel.  Oh my god, what an amazing programme!  So now, my note taking has gone to a whole new level:

Brian and I had a lot of fun taking these pictures, getting post-it’s to stick on your face while you’re laughing is harder than you think! lol!  If you enjoyed my blog hop entry (or even if you didn’t!) take a look at the other blogs taking part in the hop today and how they keep their notes 🙂

Danielle La Paglia
Anne Michaud
Marianne Su
Victoria D Griesdoorn
Ren Warom
J. A. Campbell
Tammy Crosby
Maria Kelly
Chrissey Harrison
Tony Noland
Larry Kollar