My Novel Notebook with Sarina Bowen
How I use a 7x10 notebook to corral my notes, ideas and anxieties while I'm writing a novel.
Even after 30+ books, I’m still perfecting my system for note-taking. I carry around a loaded idea—that if I could just perfect my system, writing books will become easy.
It hasn’t, unfortunately, made my job effortless yet. But in coming to terms with this problem, I’ve managed to learn a few things about my process. And it turns out that having a dedicated notebook for each project is vital to the cause.
Sometimes you have to expand your definition of “working” to include staring into space, or rereading your notes.
First the fun part—you get to buy a new notebook. Lately I’ve been using Moleskine “extra large” (B5) sized hardbacks for this job. It takes me months to write a book and I’m going to be dragging this sucker around everywhere I go. It might as well be beautiful.
Although maybe you’re not a paper person. Maybe you’d rather use a Remarkable 2, or a folder in the Notes app on your devices. That’s fine (she said reluctantly.) But I like a physical book, because when I’m stuck, or struggling, I like to put the book on my lap and page through it. I reread my notes, glance at the photos I’ve pasted in, and I feel connected with the work even when I’m not, you know, adding words to it. Sometimes you have to expand your definition of “working” to include staring into space, or rereading your notes.
So what’s in this thing, anyway? We’ll use the thriller I’m finishing up now as an example. Here’s what I did to keep myself on track.
The Setup
Title page: I write in my cell phone number in case I lose this thing. (That is the big risk, yes?) But then there are three colored stickers, the kind people buy for tagging things at a garage sale. I use these extensively to color code my notebooks. For this book, in logic that makes sense only to me:
Purple is for research
Red is for background / back story I’m establishing
Pink is for plot
We’ll get to how I use these in a minute.
Index page: This handy trick is borrowed from the bullet-journalers of the world. Please know that many of the notes I write in the book will never make it into the index. They’re too ephemeral. Too flail-y. But sometimes I come up with something that I know I’ll want to refer to later, and I make an index note for it.
For example, I interviewed a retired Maine police detective for this book, and his interview is scribbled on page 75. I know I’ll need to refer to it again, so on the index page I write: “75 — Lt. Tim Cotton interview.” Ditto the architect I took to lunch. (I’ll also put a purple research sticker over the edge of these interview pages, too!)
Other items that make the index are back story stuff, themes, character development ideas. Anything that’s meant to be reassessed over time.
Inside the front cover: My notebooks always end up full, so I don’t like to waste any space, including the endpaper. This time I printed out a Google map of Portland Maine, cut it out, and glued it into the inside of the cover. I use rubber cement or double-sided tape for these inserts.
Timeline: Thrillers have busy timelines, and this book is no exception. My primary timeline lives in a spreadsheet where I can add and subtract dates fluidly. But some books aren’t quite that demanding, and writing timeline items in pencil or erasable ink is often just fine on paper.
Photos! I’m not a very visual person, so I pulled some examples on the interwebs of what my characters look like. IE, one character’s daughter was sourced from a sulky-looking model on the Banana Republic website. I don’t own these photos and I’d never share them with readers. They are just for my own creative imaginings. I also print out photos of vistas and public places in the city where I’m setting my book. So I can remember what it’s like to walk down those brick sidewalks.
Names: it’s so easy to forget the names of secondary and tertiary characters, so when I name anyone—even the waiter, even the goldfish—I scribble that name down on this page. By the way, the names page gets a red label tucked around the corner of the page, like an index tab, because it’s background information! When I’m looking for the names page, I can spot this little red flag and find it quickly.
Places: same idea but with locations. I pick out real addresses in my setting city (Portland Maine in this case) and write them down on the Places page. Another red background label, of course.
Themes: this is one that takes time to develop, but I love working through the themes of the book. This book is about several things. Restoration is a theme, since the heroine is an architect. A question that keeps coming up is, what does restoration mean? The mansion in the story has to be brought up to 21st century standards. It will never be the same as it was in 1860. And the heroine’s relationships are similarly undergoing a sea change. You get the idea.
Calendar page: this one might be the most important page in the whole book. You could get out a ruler and just make yourself 7 columns and a bunch of rows. Boom. Calendar. But I use stickers that I buy for this purpose from Mochi Things. The thriller takes place over two months, so I stuck two of them in, and then I write what events take place on which days. This saves me a lot of grief later when I might realize I sent the heroine to work on Sunday, etc.
After these pages, I leave a few blank for character development. What does she need? What does she want? Etc. And maybe a page for brainstorming titles, too. But then it’s time to get down to drafting.
The Guts
After my setup, I’m left with more than 90% of unstructured space in the book. And even if the first ten pages of your notebook look tidy and inspired, I forbid you to be too precious with the rest of this thing. We are going to drool out ideas now, and many of them with be garbage. But that’s just the process.
If I’m on a tear, I’m probably not working in the notebook. I’m probably in the document, pounding on the keyboard like a cat in a Facebook gif.
When I reach the end of a beat, or get stuck (which is pretty much every other day) I open up to the next blank page and write something brilliant at the top like “And then…” or “Next stuff.” And I wrestle with myself here, scribbling down dumb ideas at a sprint so I can get them out of the way.
Or—and I think this is a trick I learned from Jennie Nash—I write down three things that can’t possibly come next.
Usually this exercise shakes loose the next actual development in the book, or at least helps me find problems that need solving before I can carry on. It doesn’t matter if the word vomit ends up in the book. At the top of the page I write P/W, which stands for “pre-writing,” and then the date. As soon as I feel myself catching traction, I go back into the real document and carry on.
Occasionally, scribbling quite a lot of good dialogue into the notebook is a good tactic. From there, I can use the dictation function built into Scrivener (or Word) to quickly zap those lines into my file before editing them.
“But, Sarina, then you have a notebook full of half-baked stuff, yes?”
Well, sure. But that’s it’s job. When I flip back through the pages, I just put a big X on the upper outside corner of those used-up idea pages and move on.
In Summary
In short: my novel-writing notebook is an everything book. It’s for research. It’s for 3 a.m. ideas. It’s for character analysis. The concentration of all that work into one space is what makes the magic. Writing is (to my knowledge and sorrow) not a strictly linear process. Sometimes you burp out an idea that you have to reject…only to realize later that you were on the right track.
Scribble those. Save those. Savor those. When you’re done you’ll have a notebook that looks like it’s been to war. Because it has.
Happy writing!
~S.B.
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