Where do you get your ideas from?
My writing notebook is an external hard drive for my brain.
I’m on day ten of writing 30 articles in 30 days but I feel creatively dry today. I’ve a number of article possibilities looking at me from my scrivener file that I could work on…but none of them currently excite me. So I turn to my writing notebook to see what I’ve written recently. And there’s nothing there. Don’t get me wrong there are paragraphs of text but it’s a script outline for my next YouTube video. It’s notes I’ve taken from a meeting.
I’m missing my daily thoughts.
Notebooks are my creative life. I’m surrounded by them in my office: old ones with scans of my unborn son and daughter inside, new ones that I can’t bring myself to start because, although pretty, they aren’t quite right for me on the inside. And battered, well used ones: spines coming off, post-its sticking out of them and smudge marks on their covers.
My notebooks from the last two years in particular are crammed full with ideas, thoughts and anxieties. They’ve seen me through a pandemic, a need for a biopsy on my tongue and my love/hate affair with Instagram.
They’ve given me answers to questions I didn’t know I was asking. They’ve given me support and insights and they’ve given me sparks of ideas that have grown into something more tangible. With a…
