My writing notebook is beginning to look dingy and drab like you would expect that sort of thing to look. I’ve taken to carrying it around every where I go and jotting down more and more things. My new one is to write down any phrase I hear that I like. While I have the ability to use a note app in my phone there’s something that just feels more concrete about the writing notebook and I have, so far, been really good about keeping up with it.
If you’re a writer or you think you might want to start working on something soon—even if you just a have a few ideas bouncing around in your head—a writer’s notebook is the way to go. I go through the things pretty slowly for the most part and the notes I take might not always make sense to everyone. But I have saved more good ideas and preserved them for later because of this system. It’s like a record that I keep, some of the earliest idea books that I have date back to high school.
I used to keep them for nostalgia, joking that they’re to remind me of how bad my ideas used to be. Then I went looking through them and there was some stuff there I could use in Keep Austin Safe that I would have never remembered or considered before I looked in there. To be honest besides the faint glimmers that made it down from the progenitor, I had forgotten the point of most of my old stories. When I looked back at the notes I had, the concepts were well thought out, they were just muddled and badly executed.
So what I am saying to you, and this might be cliché advice (but that’s because it works) is to get a writer’s idea book and keep it near and dear. It will improve your ability to get topics you can use and it will come in handy in keeping your ideas preserved.
Pulp & Fiction 