Start Keeping a Writing Journal Right Now

It's Thursday, and that mean's it's Ask Alan day. One of the questions I get asked a lot on school visits is, "What advice do you have for aspiring writers?"

Well, if you haven't guessed by now, I have a lot of advice. But one of the things I always start with is this: if you want to be a writer, start keeping a writing journal right now.

A writing journal is a notebook where you write down all your crazy story ideas, all your ideas for characters, all your writing notes you take in class or read in books, great lines you wish you'd written, inspirational quotes--in short, anything and everything about your writing life.

I started keeping a writing journal in college. (That's the first one there on the left, in the picture.) I now have seven notebooks full of writing ideas and notes. (There's one more I've filled since that picture was taken.) These notebooks are invaluable to me. If there was a fire in our house, these would probably be in my arms on the way out. All my books I've written I have backed up in the cloud, but these filled with more than twenty years of handwritten notes, are like gold.

Any time I need inspiration, all I have to do is go open one of these up. My Horatio Wilkes novels Something Rotten and Something Wicked were born from a note I wrote down in the very first one--"What if I turned Shakespeare plays into modern day murder mysteries?" Pretty much every book since then has had its origins in these notebooks, or has been developed there.


Get yourself a notebook right now, today, that you like the feel of. Get something smallish too, that will fit in whatever bag you carry, because from today on you're going to be carrying it everywhere you go. And any time you have one of those flashes of inspiration, or hear great advice, or read some terrific line in a book, you're going to write it down in that notebook. And when you fill that one, you're going to buy a new one, and start to fill that.

And then, one day, you'll be able to look at those six or eight or ten notebooks on your bookshelf, and you'll know that every writing thought you've had for the last twenty years is tucked away safely in those books on the shelf.