If you’re like me, you’re obsessed with notebooks. You hold them, you lick them, you stare at them until they’re uncomfortable. It’s wonderful. However, the downside of loving notebooks is that you buy them. A lot. And a lot of them will be blank. I personally like using one notebook for a novel (or novel series), but I also have a notebook especially for writing tips and my blog. I’ll share with you what I have in that notebook so that you can use something similar. Take from this what will be useful to you.

Writing tips

First of all, any books that I’ve read on how to write blog posts or any other books on the craft of writing in general, I take notes on and add them to the notebook. That way I have everything writing-related in one place. I’m also a minimalist so it means that afterwards I can donate those books and someone else can learn from them.

Novel writing and planning

In addition to useful information that I like to remember I’ve also added an editing checklist as well as a checklist for the snowflake method. I also have a page with the three-act structure, as well as two pages covering all subjects related to world-building, strong verbs, and pretty words to spruce up my prose. These are things I check regularly and I love having them in one notebook.

My favourite page is the one for my current writing projects. At the top of the page, I have the ‘thinking stage’, ‘plotting stage’, ‘writing stage’ and ‘editing stage’ and plenty of room below it for small post-its. On the post-its, I write the titles of the projects and I can move them around under the right heading as time goes on. I love it.

Blog

As for my blog, I have a brainstorm page with a mindmap of certain topics I’d like to cover. Then on two other pages, I write the actual topics of blog posts down, so these will be sentences whereas the mindmap page is just single words. On the other page, I write out several months and four or five dots as well as the topics. So I actually plan when I’m going to post what. I leave some more space to write down the number of views and visitors as well. My initial plan was to write down all blog posts for a month and schedule them but in the summer holiday that kind of all fell apart as I was too distracted, but I’m trying to get into that habit. 

Whatever works, works. And I like notebooks that I can actually use, instead of staring at them because they’re pretty. I’m enjoying them now and I hope I’ve given enough inspiration for you to use yours as well.