Musings on keeping a writer’s journal

Over the past two days, I’ve been going through my tarot and writing playbooks. These disc-bound notebooks contain notes on my business ideas, Works In Process, and other important list and notes that have action items attached to them. I keep them nearby my writing nook and they help keep my ideas written down and visible.

My writing notebook has 4 sections:

  1. Submissions: This keeps track of what I am currently working on and whether or not it’s in Draft, Revision, or Publication mode.
  2. WIPs: These are works in progress. I keep a small summary of the project, comment the main characters, and then use storyboards to get out the major plot points from start to finish.
  3. Freewrite: Sometimes I hang with other writers, and we do free write exercises. This section has blank forms that allows me to jot those notes down. I transfer these to my Scrivener files at a later time.
  4. Quotes: This section includes favorite quotes from books I’ve read, inspirational writing life stuff, and other things.

At the end of this book, I keep a small stash of the most commonly used sheets for the other sections. I’ve had moments where I’ve run out of blanks and it’s never fun.

However, over the past year or so I’ve been lax in touching them. As a result of leafing through them over the past two days Ive decided that tools are only as good as how you use them. If you don’t use them, then nothing gets done. It’s a bit like why I condensed my twitter feeds down into one. I may be multifaceted but I found that when I have more than one “posting” place, I get a bit overwhelmed. And when I’m overwhelmed, I don’t do anything. I turn my head and ignore things.

Which is why this site and my tarot site haven’t been updated in forever. It’s also why I’ve been going through the playbooks to figure out how to condense and make each one useable.

Tools are only as good as how you use them… if you’re not using them, maybe it’s time to take a look at what works and what doesn’t and shake things up.

As I uncover the process of what works for me, I’ll do my best to post updates here and at my other site. For those who write and have hand-written writing journals, I ask you, what works for you? How do you line your books out? I’d love to know! Leave a comment and let’s discuss what works for us!

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