When the first installment of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events came out, I was eight years old. Over the next seven years, my mom and I read every single book together, often finding ourselves laughing so hysterically we had to put the book down to collect ourselves. There was a lot to love about those books, but one aspect that was always particularly fascinating to me was Klaus Baudelaire’s commonplace book. He was always jotting down facts, ideas, quotes, and thoughts, and more often than not, all the information he stored in that little blue book played an important role in rescuing the orphans from certain death.
A commonplace book can be a great tool for just about anybody, and it can be particularly useful for authors as a repository for inspiration, ideas, and notes that can help us win our own battles with Count Olaf—or, at the very least, writer’s block.
3 Reasons Writers Should Keep Commonplace Books
1. To Keep Track of Ideas
Whether a new character comes to you at the grocery store or a song lyric inspires a story idea, your commonplace book is a place to jot down your ideas — however preliminary or fully fleshed out they may be. Once they’re in your commonplace book, you can turn them into stories during your very next writing session or you can let them marinade for months. But you won’t have to worry about losing track of that perfect image or snippet of dialogue, because you’ll have it stored right at your fingertips!
2. To Experiment
A commonplace book is freeform by definition, and that means it gives you permission to take risks. This notebook is the perfect place to try out that new style you’ve been wanting to play with or explore a funky character who doesn’t have a place in your current work in progress but who’s taken up residence in your brain nonetheless. Your commonplace book is completely private. No rules, no judgment.
3. To Inspire Yourself
As you start to collect thoughts and ideas, you’ll find yourself with an overflowing inspiration bank for those days when you just aren’t feeling the muse. You can play with old story premises, riff on inspiring quotes, or draw unexpected connections between thoughts you recorded in different places and times. (And as a bonus, this little notebook is definitive proof, for when imposter syndrome tries to tell you otherwise, that you are, indeed, a writer.)
4 Tips for Getting Started
1. Pick the Right Notebook
You can go as fancy or as basic as you want here. That dollar-store spiral you have in your closet is just as good for a commonplace book as the $50 leatherbound journal you’ve had your eye on. I would suggest you consider three things, however, as you pick out your first notebook.
Trim Size: Be sure to choose a notebook you’ll be comfortable carrying around in your pocket, purse, or backpack.
Paper Weight: If you’re an ink pen (or marker or watercolor) user, be sure to pick out a notebook with heavy enough pages that you won’t be fighting bleed-through ink.
Page Style: Do you prefer blank pages, dotted, or lined? Wide ruled (yuck) or college ruled? Take a peek inside to be sure you like the page style before you make a purchase!
2. Make it Yours
You may be perfectly happy with a plain notebook, or you may want to jazz it up with stickers and washi tape. You might want to color the edges or add tabs or ribbon bookmarks. Go for it! There are no rules here, except to customize the notebook in a way that makes you excited to use it.
3. Choose a Layout (or Don’t)
The same goes for how you set up the notebook. You could divide it into separate sections for story ideas, character profiles, inspirational quotes, etc. You could create a bullet journal-style index to act as a running table of contents. Or you could simply let it be a free for all, allowing yourself to write down whatever you want, wherever you want. For some authors, structure is key. For others, freestyle keeps the creativity flowing.
4. Let it Be Messy
I think sometimes we get scared to write in new notebooks because we’re afraid we’ll “mess them up” with the wrong words or ugly handwriting or…whatever. That’s why so many of us end up with shelves and shelves of beautiful, totally empty journals. But here’s a secret: your precious notebooks were made to be written in. If you leave them blank for fear of doing something wrong, you’re not letting them fulfill their one purpose! So let it be messy. Don’t be afraid to scratch things out or write silly things. That’s all part of the process, and I guarantee you’ll love being able to look back on every bit of it.
9 Ideas for Filling the Pages
1. Eavesdrop
I maintain that eavesdropping is one of the most powerful tools for generating ideas, building complex characters, and writing natural dialogue. When you’re out in public — at a coffee shop, on a train, or anywhere else — and a conversation catches your ear, write it down in your commonplace book. Word for word, including the ums and ers. You’ll train your ear for dialogue, and you may just capture the perfect protagonist or plot point for your next book.
2. Collage
Paste in images or stickers or ephemera that remind you of your favorite character or evoke a fantasy world you can’t wait to build. This way, your commonplace book can double as a sort of vision board, giving you a little visual inspiration when the words aren’t quite there yet.
3. Doodle
One of my favorite strategies for overcoming writer’s block is to try a new medium. You can use your commonplace book as a canvas to doodle a scene that’s giving you trouble, or you can use it to sketch out images that inspire you while you’re out in the world.
4. Make Lists
Jot down character names you love, places you want to write about, questions you have about your novel, favorite pieces of trivia, or things that make you happy. The list-making possibilities are endless, and this is a super easy way to get your wheels turning.
5. Freewrite
Whether you’re a fan of morning pages or you like to work out your story problems on the page or you just like the feeling of putting pen to paper, your commonplace book is the perfect place to freewrite, or journal, about your writing life or your everyday life. Let your mind wander and your pen follow.
6. Rewrite
Got a scene that’s giving you trouble? Break it open in your commonplace book by rewriting it in a different tense, from a different POV, or even from the perspective of a different character, and see what you discover. You may feel freer to experiment in your commonplace book than you are in your work in progress, so let this be a place where the rules of your story go out the window.
7. Capture Fragments
Did a hilarious exchange between two characters just come to mind? A gorgeous image? An intriguing plot point? Sometimes we feel like we can’t write those things down unless and until they connect with a bigger story. But that’s not the case in your commonplace book (or ever, really). Jot them down here, and you’ll have them ready to go when you’re inspired to build them out.
8. Copy Other Writers
One of the best ways to hone your author voice is by imitating other writers, and your commonplace book is a great place to do that. Copy down passages you love just to feel how it feels to write them. Jot down notes about what makes those passages stand out to you and what characteristics you want to play with in your own writing.
9. Collect Quotes & Advice
When you come across an inspiring quote on Instagram or hear a great nugget of advice in your favorite podcast, write it down here in your commonplace book. When your well is feeling dry, you can flip back through the pages and get inspired all over again.
Do you keep a commonplace book? What does it look like, and what do you write in it? Drop me a note, or share in the comments below!