The Value of Notebooks
No writing is ever wasted
This week’s blog is brought to you by a wonderful writer friend, Jacqui Pack. Jacqui’s fiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of publications, including Litro Online, Swarm, Storgy, and Synaesthesia. She was among the winners of The London Magazine’s 2013 ‘Southern Universities Short Story Competition’, awarded Long Story Short’s ‘Story of the Year 2009’, and holds an MA in Creative Writing. You can visit her at her website: https://jacquipack.jimdo.com/
Like many writers, I have a soft spot for stationery in general and notebooks in particular. It doesn’t matter how many are already in my desk drawer waiting to be started, the temptation to buy another notebook is never far away. I find A4 pads great for scribbling down ideas at home, and A5 the perfect size for slipping into a bag when I’m out of the house. What catches my eye changes with my mood, but my preference is always for lined paper and a cover that makes me smile – perhaps because of a motivational quote, a funny one-liner or an attractive picture.
As well as this small hoard of pristine notebooks, my desk also holds a stash of old ones, their pages filled with handwriting of embarrassingly variable quality and legibility. Over the years, many of the ideas and scribbles they contain have found their way into my short stories and poetry and flicking through the pages of these old books often brings to mind parts of the creative process I’d forgotten. A discarded paragraph here, or an alternative stanza there, remind me of the directions each piece could have taken before publication lent it an air of permanence.
Within their pages are also jottings still waiting for their time in the spotlight, and I often find it useful to browse their pages to remind myself of what’s there. I did this over the summer, with the result that the opening of an unfinished short story – written nearly eight years ago – became the starting point for a recently published 400-word flash fiction.
So, how can you inject new life into an old idea? Firstly, don’t be afraid to play around – to paraphrase my first creative writing tutor, “no writing is ever wasted”. You may discover the idea connects to another unused fragment of writing, no matter how disparate their origins. Experimenting with content can yield good results: try changing the focus from one character to another, see what effect switching between first, third and even second person narration has, alter the age or gender of one or more characters, maybe set events within a different era or location. You could also consider changing the form of an idea. Could that unfinished poem work as a story or flash fiction? Might the ideas within that free verse carry more impact in sonnet form? Would using an epistolary style, or creating a non-linear timeline add energy to a sagging narrative? Once you allow yourself to start playing, there’s no knowing where your creativity will take you.
Of course, to make use of old ideas you’ll have needed somewhere to write them down, back when they were shiny, fresh and new. Which brings me neatly back to the importance of always having a notebook to hand, and why I can never have enough.