One of my favourite pages from Raymond Chandler’s notebooks, where he plans out a list of similes and descriptions that will later find their way into books. There’s similar lists scattered through the notebooks where he describes outfits, makes a note of potential titles, or golden comebacks for his dialogue. Once used, he’d go back and make a note on each list, so he wouldn’t repeat it in a later story or book. It’s easy to forget that writing is a multi-stage process involving ideation, actually putting the raw components of plot on the page, then layering in details like voice and tone that make the work unique. Often, writers approach this as a single task, sitting down at the keyboard and hammering words until a scene feels right. Reading through Chandler’s notebooks and realising you didn’t have to do all three at the same time was a revelation for me as a young writer.

If you take a quick gander at my Instagram feed, it should be pretty obvious that I am now an unapologetic notebook guy these days. A good 90% of my posts are basically me doing the pictorial equivalent of posting word-counts in a blog – tracking progress through a project by photographing page numbers. I do it there because, quite honestly, I have a pretty minimal number of Instagram followers and it’s less likely to piss people off, but also because I’ve come to appreciate the value of focusing on my process, rather than my goals. Occasionally I feel bad about doing this, but over the last week I’ve talked to a handful of people who have been inspired to the rock the analogue approach to their writing. And, since this wasn’t exactly a natural progression for me, I figured I’d put down a little advice. First, some background: I spent about fifteen years failing to write in notebooks prior to last year. I liked the idea of it. I could see the sense in working away from the computer. And, every year, there would be a sporadic attempt: I’d buy six packs of Spirax notebooks or legal pads, do about

This morning I’m pondering the right first move to bed into my daily routine. Right now, I have about four first moves that will kick of my day, depending on which groove I’m in:  Getting up and journaling to park ideas;  Getting up and writing directly into the computer;  Getting up and doing the day’s Worlde, then posting it to my family chat;  Getting up and brain dumping my top-of-mind thoughts into an Omnifocus inbox, then doing a project review and building my diary for the day. Of the four, Wordle is the worst option. Logging in to finish a Worlde puzzle only takes about three minutes, but it puts me in a social mindset because the next step is going into chat, and from there it’s a short skip to spending the entire morning answering email and tooling around on social media. Journaling is probably my favourite kick-off, but the chain of events that follow that meditative writing often means I’m slow to build up steam for the rest of the day. It’s harder to transition into day job work (or, at least, it was harder to transition into my old day job work), and harder to actually launch