Writing in Your Notebook Can Help You Improve Your Skills

Notebook writing is different because we cannot go back and change what was said. We can cross it out, but always a piece of our soul will glimmer on the page. The hand can feed the mouth of the creative soul. Being creative need not be at the keyboard. We can develop things on a page that dot us with images of what we've seen. This essay will tell you what can be done in notebook writing, how it can help your writing, and points out the obvious fact a notebook is a far easier place to set up a journal than a keyboard.

We move the hand because it allows for us to tell a story on the page. It can be how we landed the high-paying job. It can be how we broke through the block on our novel. Many writers keyed in on this. Consider Julia Cameron: her whole "The Artist's Way" guidebook is intended for those willing to write in notebooks. The notebook writing is called "morning pages" and the writer lets go of everything in a stream of consciousness way. The morning pages allow for the writer to be free from the burden of editing every sentence a hundred times. Each note is given care, or perhaps rushed through, and because of that there is no hard way to write the morning pages. They can be freeing. Another writer by the name of Natalie Goldberg wrote in "Writing Down the Bones" that notebooks were key too; Goldberg said she went through an entire notebook in a short time. Both writers have sold millions of copies of their works, and for good reason: they tapped into what makes the notebook so strong-that initial point that it is harder to edit in a notebook.

Notebook writing can help your writing for all those reasons and more. Considering that writers are known for going over a sentence a million times (think of James Joyce) the notebook allows them to move on. But it does not mean sloppy writing; often it can be careful writing. Historian Shelby Foote would write 500 of his Civil War books in a notebook because he said it made him take his time; after he would type it out.

We can journal in the notebook. The experience is more enjoyable than chronicling our successes or failures on typewriter. This is not to say typing things out is bad, but the notebook is a different animal. It allows the writer to take their time or rush through the prose. A good writer would do well to remember the importance of the notebook; paper is where many of the best novels written came from.