Keep a workbook of your ideas, observations
Excerpted and edited from a 2006 YWP article
By Gail Gauthier
- Turn a blank notebook into your writing workbook. Use the space for ideas, observations, and writing attempts.
- Fill the pages with words, pictures, lists, outlines...anything you want!
- If something that happens during the day gets your attention, jot it down. Great story ideas could come from anywhere.
- Don't worry about grammar. Write down your ideas as fast as possible - you can revise them later. This is your workbook, it's okay if it gets a little messy.
When I was in high school, I read that writers kept journals in which they wrote every day about their lives. I wanted to be a writer, writers keep journals, so … You can see where I’m going with this.
I found a notebook and wrote a sentence in it. Then I never touched the thing again. I worried that my writing career was off to a bad start.
Today, however, a lot of the work I do as a writer is done in notebooks. These notebooks have little to do with what happens in my life, and I don’t always write in them every day. That’s OK. They aren’t actually journals, so I don’t have to make them conform to what journals are supposed to be. They’re workbooks, and they conform to what I need for my work.
Mostly I need a place to try out ideas and to break through small writing blocks. Creating a place to work can be a great help for any writer.
Try out ideas. Say you see somebody pulling a vacuum cleaner, and you think, “Hey, that vacuum hose looks like an alien weapon attached to a portable power source.” You’ve just had an idea. Find your workbook and write something in it about your idea. Anything. Maybe you write a whole page, or maybe just a few words. If you like outlines, you can start an outline. Or, even, you can draw a picture.
Anything you write down will be correct because your workbook belongs to you. You call the shots about what goes into it.
Now say a couple of days later you’re at your summer job at the local Laundro-mat. You’re thinking about how you hate this place and you hate your boss and if you managed a Laundromat things would be so different.
Suddenly, you realize you might have a story idea. So when you go home, pull out your workbook and write about this new idea.
You now have two story ideas you can use some day. Without the workbook, you’d have none.
You also have some experience looking at situations and realizing they have dramatic potential. You have some experience thinking like a writer.
Break through small writing blocks. With workbooks, you can decide where to go with an idea. Say you’ve had an encounter, or a dream, or a conversation that you feel has merit. Jot it down.
And suppose you decide to work on it more later. You feel there is a story in this idea, but it’s buried somewhere in your mind, and you can’t find it. Here’s an exercise: Free-write it.
Write everything you can think of relating to the idea. Write as fast as you can without worrying about grammar or punctuation or whether what’s coming out of your pen is good or bad. Keep going as long as you can. When you’ve worn yourself out, stop and read over what you’ve written. Underline anything you like, anything that could get your story started.
Now you’re ready to leave your workbook and begin formal writing. Anytime you get stuck while working on this story, any time you can’t think of “the next thing,” go back to your workbook and repeat this exercise.
Your workbook will probably be a mess. But that mess should provide you with lots of material for future writing.
