I take many notes when I am writing.  Some of my ideas that I scribble down make the cut in the final project, some don’t.  Inspirations come at different times of the day and night, I jot them down in no particular order that turns into a jumbled mess of thoughts.  I wish I could keep them in a neat organized notebook but alas, my self-diagnosed ADD fights me on this :) .  When a writing project is going very well, the images and ideas play in my head like a movie and if I do not get concepts at least on paper, I feel I lose valuable ideas and formation of plot lines.

Yes, I submerge myself in my own notes.    

This practice use to bother me, having all these partial ideas and snips of paragraphs of my story in a small bundle of my idea notebook, but this is my creative process and it seems to work better for me than whatever I was doing before.  Once the ideas are down and out of my head I can start to formulate an outline.  Simple really.  I think the idea of writing scares many people because they believe in order to write they need to sit down and type out a book in completeness from the beginning to The End with ease.  It doesn’t happen that way unless you are Hemingway, which by the way would type at his old fashioned typewriter while standing!

These ideas I write down are beneficial when I am on chapter five and I realize the plot has a hole in it and need to rewrite, move, or scrap a whole chapter- it happens…  Holes do happen, especially the longer the writing project and you won’t get lost in the ‘no idea abyss’ if you have taken time to write down your ideas at the beginning of your project when it’s new in your mind.  That is when the scribbled notes come in handy!  Ideas, Ideas, and more Ideas!  The more I write down at the beginning of my story in my idea notebook the easier it flows later when I’m having a ‘no idea’ day (AND those days do happen).   

So if you are having hesitations about writing or blogging grab a trusty pen & notebook, and write, write, write.  I promise ideas will come to you that you will want to write about and it will be a great resource on those days that you don’t have any ideas to write about. 

So get submerged in your own Idea Notebook!

Happy Writing!!