Advice from a prolific scholary writer fascinated with the writing process.

Prolific writers, poets, artists, and thinkers of all stripes are known for walking around with a writer’s notebook in his/her pocket and using it for jotting down stray ideas that seem to appear randomly. Some novelists, like John Irving and Donna Tartt, describe a process where they are constantly jotting down ideas in handwritten notes on any available scrap of paper from a cocktail napkin to a receipt from a grocery store. They confess to working from an office that is littered with scraps of paper that record conversations, phrases, or fragments of thoughts. It just so happens that these are two authors that in podcast interviews describe devoting as much as ten years to producing a single novel.

As I wrote about in an earlier post, How a Writer’s Notebook Fuels Creativity, in addition to being an aid to memory, a writer’s notebook serves many purposes. Mostly this is in terms unleashing creativity and as an opportunity to spooling out an idea to see if it goes anywhere.

A Writer’s Notebook as a Time Saver

A purpose I have not written about is the role a notebook or set of notes can play in speeding up the writing process. All writers describe the process of writing as slow. In podcast interviews, I have heard writers say that sometimes a full day’s work may only yield a single usable sentence. A colleague of mine from long ago described the writing process she used as focused on the sentence. She did not move on until satisfied that each word in a sentence reflected precisely what she meant. The process is so time consuming because she is doing most of her thinking as she is producing the text of an article.

It’s not an everyday occurrence, but this morning I sat down at the computer and wrote 967 words in two hours and fifteen minutes. I was able to write so much so quickly because I had been jotting down notes and thinking about the points I wanted to make in that section of an article for many days. That’s not  to say that new ideas didn’t also emerge during the writing. The notetaking kept it fresh and helped me hold it in my mind until I had time to sit down and write it.