The Weekend Writer: Writers' Journals

Maintaining a journal is a big cliche in writer world, but it is also helpful. If you're a write-every-day person, it can provide you with opportunities to do that during those times when you're overwhelmed or traveling. Some of my most serious journal work has been done on vacation.

Lisa Catherine Harper has an excellent piece on writers' journals, Using The Writer's Notebook: A Practical Guide at Ploughshares' website. What's particularly good about her article is the variety of suggestions she has for notebooks/journals. You really can do anything with them.

While I do understand her point about handwriting with a journal, a journal computer program has the benefit of being searchable. Writers can go either way.

Here's some particularly good advice from Harper: "Be recursive. Don't write in your notebook and forget about it. Go back to read, underline, annotate, or dog-ear. Use Post-it notes to indicate important passages." I say this is particularly good advice because working on my journals is something I've failed to do. I've definitely been a dump-and-run writer. Paying more attention to my journal could oen a whole new world.
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Time Management Tuesday: The Black Hole That Is This Writer's Journals

Every writer keeps a journal, right? If you've been writing a while, you may have, say, a foot tall stack of the things. You may have 17 of them, in various sizes and shapes. They may have evolved over the years from an idea journal, to an idea journal/scrapbook to an idea journal/scrapbook/workbook to an idea journal/scrapbook/workbook/repository of everything.

Yeah, that paragraph describes my situation.

Now, those of you writers who do keep journals, how often do you refer back to them? How often do you actually use anything you wrote in them?

The bulk of the individual writing ideas I jot down in the journals are lost forever. Even if I pull a notebook that covered 1989 off the shelf and look at it, which could happen, the ideas I had back then probably don't interest me any longer. I wouldn't go so far as to say writing down ideas is a waste of time, because I think that recognizing ideas is a skill, and the more often you do it, the more often you'll be able to do it. So the very act of writing down the idea is beneficial, even if the idea never becomes a writing project.

The workbook aspects of my journals I use more regularly. I may free write relating to a work in progress, make notes about what I'm going to do on that project tomorrow or, say, when I get home from a trip. What I'm using is recent workbook work, not work from years ago.

Here's the real time-loss relating to writers' journals for me: I may think about a project for years before I start working on it. I may be making notes about it off and on during that whole time. When the day comes that I want to get started doing something serious with that idea, I may have to go back through several years' worth of journals to collect all my thoughts and work. And then how do I collect them?

Well, I started to address this problem last year when I purchased a program so I could start keeping my journal on the computer. The benefit? Instant organization and easy retrieval. I use Debrief's professional edition, which is not actually journal software. (I can't believe I didn't blog about this in depth last year, but I can't find a post.) I couldn't find anything that described itself as "journal software." What Debrief allows me to do, though, is very much what I was looking for. I can create folders for whatever topic I want, and I can add "notes" to the folders whenever I want. I can start a folder relating to an idea for a book, add notes off and on to it for a year, and then be able to find them immediately all in one place. I could even make those notes on things like "characters," "plot," and "setting" and keep adding to them. I can add links to any on-line content, which is important because I like to save newspaper and magazine articles that relate to story ideas, as well as reviews of books I might want to read on the subject. I haven't even learned how to use everything Debrief offers. I'm supposed to be able to outline with it and make note cards, but I haven't needed to try to do that yet.

That's terrific for the future, but what about those decades of journals filled with lost content?

I've started going through the most recent one for ideas for essays and short stories, since those have been what I've been working on for the May Days. I'm also going to be trying to collect what I know is quite a bit of information on my next big writing project. A lot of that I'll just transfer to the Debrief program on my computer.

But what about any old clippings I may have in there? I may find brochures, post cards, or any number of paper related items. Last Friday I bought a magazine file holder and a package of two-pocket portfolios. No way am I going through 17 notebooks, but as I'm hunting for the material for The Project, I'll pull out any scrapbook items I find relating to a few big topics that might turn into future projects. And anything new I want to save will go into them instead of into the void that is the journals. I should be able to find everything I've collected immediately

So how useful and easy to use do other people find journals?

What I Did This Evening Instead Of Blogging

I am spending time this week playing with a new program I'm hoping to use for maintaining my writer's journal. Notice that I did not say I was playing with some new journal software, since it isn't precisely a journal program. There doesn't appear to be a lot of those. It's more of a manage-your-notes-to-yourself business person type of program.

You can rest assured that I will go on about this at great length for you in a few days.