Right. The truth is, I’m a digital man in a digital world. I write on a keyboard most of the time. I build programs to aid my writing, track my writing, and everything in between. I’m not against the digital world at all.
However, I also love notebooks, and there are three in particular that have become really important to my writing process. They coexist with all the digital stuff I’ve got going on. Everything works together as a kind of ecosystem.
So today, I want to take you through each of them – what they are, how they fit into my workflow, and why I think they make me both a better and more productive writer.
Let’s get into it.
This is the first one. It’s the smallest, and that’s intentional, because I carry it everywhere with me. It sits on my bedside table. If I travel, it travels with me. It’s essentially just a little leather cover with whatever cheap notebook I’ve shoved inside it.
This is my ideas book.
Honestly, I’m someone who thinks ideas are cheap. They’re everywhere. You’ll be walking and one will pop into your head. You’ll be reading and another will appear. Sometimes you wake up with one.
And if you don’t write them down, they disappear.
Stephen King once said that writing ideas down is the best way to immortalise bad ideas. I love Stephen King, but I think that’s rubbish. Ideas, to me, are little fragments of stardust. Most of what ends up in here never becomes a full story, but it might become part of one. A sentence. A feeling. A piece of the puzzle.
Some of the entries are tiny:
“The funeral of a computer.”
“My shadow who demands snacks.”
Others are more obvious story hooks:
“Grindr hookup turns into vampire siring.”
And sometimes they become real stories. One entry in here became the genesis of a story I wrote at the end of last year called The Iceman. The note reads:
“A man always looking over his shoulder. He fears sirens and knocks on the door. He wants to confess on his deathbed but is too cowardly. His guilt follows him into the afterlife.”
The finished story became something much bigger, but this was the spark.
That’s all this notebook is for. Fragments. Sentences. Inspiration. Anything that falls from the sky goes in the book.
The second notebook is this – a Leuchtturm1917 notebook. I have a bunch of them.
Most of the time I’m a digital writer, but not always. Sometimes I’m on a train or sitting in a café and I don’t want to open a laptop. Sometimes I’ve simply had enough screen time, but I still want to write.
For me, writing sits above that feeling.
So this notebook exists as a place to write prose by hand.
There are no full stories in here. It’s usually fragments of prose: a few paragraphs from a story, a chapter opening, or the same scene rewritten again and again until it finally feels right.
I once heard Quentin Tarantino talk about the idea of a muse travelling through your hand and onto the page, and that it doesn’t like to travel digitally. It sounds a bit like mystical nonsense, but I do think there’s something special about physically making marks on paper.
I don’t believe in it enough to exclusively write by hand, but I do think handwriting accesses a different creative rhythm. Sometimes the right words arrive more naturally when you slow down and physically shape them.
That’s what this notebook is for.
The final notebook is my traveller’s notebook, which is essentially my life bible.
Again, I’m mostly digital, but I love having a physical organiser for my life. This notebook tracks weekly goals, writing targets, projects I’m working on, and story progress.
It’s also a diary.
If I’ve had a hard day, if I’m struggling with something, or if there’s an idea I need to untangle, I write about it here. I think a huge part of writing is learning to observe yourself and the world around you. Journalling helps with that. It forces you to verbalise thoughts that would otherwise just swirl around your head.
The third thing I track in here is data: word counts, submissions, yearly progress. Why? Honestly, because I’m a nerd. I like charts. I like stats. I like seeing progress visualised.
But I also think it keeps me accountable.
It’s easy to have vague ambitions. It’s much harder to write something down, come back to it later, and ask yourself whether you actually followed through.
That’s what this notebook becomes: a physical record of effort.
One of the great things about traveller’s notebooks is that they’re modular. You can remove inserts, replace systems, experiment with layouts. If something stops working, you can change it.
This one stays relatively slim because I don’t want it becoming cumbersome, which is why the prose notebook stays separate. But together, they form the backbone of my analogue writing life.
I’ve seen people online with incredibly complicated journalling systems – fifteen different notebooks for fifteen different purposes. I love notebooks too, but if I boil everything down, these are the three I come back to again and again.
The ideas book.
The prose book.
The planner and tracker.
And honestly, if you take one thing away from this, let it be the ideas book.
Get yourself a cheap notebook and carry it everywhere.
Because inspiration is fragile. Stardust falls from the sky for a moment and then it’s gone. You need somewhere to catch it.
Could you use a notes app instead? Probably. But I do think there’s something magical about pen and paper. Something grounding. Something that connects us back to generations of writers who filled notebooks long before we had glowing screens in our pockets.