I have, at last count, at least ten such notebooks like you see above. They all date from various years of my life. The smaller one at the top is (one) of the notebooks I wrote my second fantasy novel in in longhand. Yes, the coffee cup stain tells you about my working habits.
The one at the bottom is from 2003 and is the notebook from my year long novel writing course, which, honestly, I think I took more away from in terms of friendship forming and discovering the true joys of brainstorming and creative collaboration and conversation than I did on any technical level. In particular, I formed a deep, maternal kind-of love for my teacher, a local beloved poet who sadly died from cancer in 2004; only a matter of months after I accidentally ran into her at the mall and to whom I showed off my then newborn daughter.
The one thing which has stuck in my head is the only real ‘rule’ which she was adamant about:
“When writing dialogue you should always only ever write ‘said'”.
So:
“I hate you!” she said.
Not:
“I hate you!” she shouted/whispered/muttered/spat/snarled etc.
In practice, it really does make sense. The latter is a kind of lazy shorthand. Yes, if J. K Rowling can get away with it, then I guess you can too, and, look, in my writing one or two may slip through occasionally, but my advice is 95% of the time, use caution.
The notebook on the left, really, I just added for a joke because I laugh now and the spare time I used to have where I would write out ‘good words’ (in alphabetical order!) to use in my work. I doubt if I’ve ever used half of them. If half…
I may take some more pictures of some others later – that’s if I don’t think I’m boring you to tears?! ‘Cause I won’t if this is all yawnsville. You tell me!
