The Journal - A Tool And A Friend!
September 11th 2006 13:57
A journal is, apparently, a good idea. Some are basically diaries, some are deeper, a catalogue of daily events of not just he writer’s life but the world around them. Then there are things like, say a ship’s log, which is basically its journal. Australia would be a much poorer place without the log of the Endeavour or David Collins’s Account of the English Colony (or to give it the full title (deep breath)… “An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1, With Remarks On The Dispositions, Customs, Manners, Etc. Of The Native Inhabitants Of That Country. To Which Are Added, Some Particulars Of New Zealand; Compiled, By Permission, From The Mss.Of Lieutenant-Governor King.”). These are day to day books, listing the many things that happen to a group of people in extreme situations. Collins was one of the primary sources for the Mary Bryant story, but is a fascinating book beyond that.
I could never be bothered with a diary. I did too many embarrassing things as a teenager I’m still trying to live down (and I’m in my 40s now!), but I found I was coming up with all these stories I didn’t have time to write, they were seeping out of my head, forgotten and by all unmourned. So I started writing them down as sets of notes, anything from a heading, a logline half a paragraph, up to pages and pages of character and plot notes, with potential sequel storylines, even in one case, filling an entire small A5 book with just one story. To try and keep track of what idea was where, I indexed all the headings on the first inside page as a mnemonic (hopefully) and numbering each book. Because I had this constant stream of ideas, I called the series Notes From The Flow, and while the first few are missing, which were those very small notebooks and a couple of A5s, latterly they’ve been A4 or foolscap size, filled cover to cover, and there’s about twelve of them. If I never had another original idea again, I could go back to these and find a wealth of starting points. Recently I’ve delved into them and combined a couple of different, not-so-interesting ideas, into something better, and that’s the beauty of these kind of journals, you don’t have to remember it all, and you can reassess the ideas at different times in your life, saying “that idea I wrote at 22 isn’t all that good, but knowing what I do now, if I add this component to it, it’ll be much better”. And sometimes the idea you had for a novel then, you realise later might make a better short story or script.
And of course for the younger, hipper person who’s on a PC or laptop, you have the perfect notebook at hand, because later you can cut & paste ideas all over the place! And even better if you have a tablet, because you can handwrite it, then store it as text! brilliant! But paper has one advantage – it’ll never crash. Keep backups. But I digress (again).
So buy a notebook, and start filling it. Character studies, poetry, one-sentence movie ideas, notes for a novel, pour everything in there! Worried someone might steal it once it’s on paper or disk? See my post on Wednesday in the Scriptwriting Blog about Ideas.
And a journal is your friend. It'll look after your stories while you have to do all that mundane real world stuff, it won't blab your ideas all over, it gives you links between those different ideas, and you can tell it whatever you like, no mattter how crazy, and it doesn't criticise.
At the very minimum you won’t have to carry all those ideas round in your head any more…
I could never be bothered with a diary. I did too many embarrassing things as a teenager I’m still trying to live down (and I’m in my 40s now!), but I found I was coming up with all these stories I didn’t have time to write, they were seeping out of my head, forgotten and by all unmourned. So I started writing them down as sets of notes, anything from a heading, a logline half a paragraph, up to pages and pages of character and plot notes, with potential sequel storylines, even in one case, filling an entire small A5 book with just one story. To try and keep track of what idea was where, I indexed all the headings on the first inside page as a mnemonic (hopefully) and numbering each book. Because I had this constant stream of ideas, I called the series Notes From The Flow, and while the first few are missing, which were those very small notebooks and a couple of A5s, latterly they’ve been A4 or foolscap size, filled cover to cover, and there’s about twelve of them. If I never had another original idea again, I could go back to these and find a wealth of starting points. Recently I’ve delved into them and combined a couple of different, not-so-interesting ideas, into something better, and that’s the beauty of these kind of journals, you don’t have to remember it all, and you can reassess the ideas at different times in your life, saying “that idea I wrote at 22 isn’t all that good, but knowing what I do now, if I add this component to it, it’ll be much better”. And sometimes the idea you had for a novel then, you realise later might make a better short story or script.
And of course for the younger, hipper person who’s on a PC or laptop, you have the perfect notebook at hand, because later you can cut & paste ideas all over the place! And even better if you have a tablet, because you can handwrite it, then store it as text! brilliant! But paper has one advantage – it’ll never crash. Keep backups. But I digress (again).
So buy a notebook, and start filling it. Character studies, poetry, one-sentence movie ideas, notes for a novel, pour everything in there! Worried someone might steal it once it’s on paper or disk? See my post on Wednesday in the Scriptwriting Blog about Ideas.
And a journal is your friend. It'll look after your stories while you have to do all that mundane real world stuff, it won't blab your ideas all over, it gives you links between those different ideas, and you can tell it whatever you like, no mattter how crazy, and it doesn't criticise.
At the very minimum you won’t have to carry all those ideas round in your head any more…
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Philosophy Blog
In fact, no writer should go anywhere without a pencil (not pen -- they leak) and paper.
Story from Roahl Dahl -- once a short story idea struck him when he was unequipped. So he stopped the car, and wrote the word "elevator" in the dust on the rear window to remember his idea by.