How to Use Your Notebook for Creativity
This article is for: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced—i.e. ALL of us!
Did you know your poet’s notebook can also help you with your creativity?
Using a notebook is a great idea, and if you’re not doing it, I think you should start! It’s a place to record ideas, store lines you’ve thought of, jot down observations, and make lists of words, and lots more.
It can become your portable writing life, a sort of external poetry brain, where you keep all the stuff that belongs to that part of your life, that you don’t have room for in your head!
But a lot of people don’t realize that their poetry notebook can be much more than a storehouse: It’s also a powerful tool for you to grow your creative side.
And in this article, I’ll give you five ways you can do that.
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Method 1: Make a Creative Safe Space
As you probably know from watching kids, children love to play—but not when they feel nervous, unsure, or threatened.
Your creativity is the same: it loves to play, but to play happily, it needs “safe spaces,” where it feels OK to try things out, make mistakes, and be messy.
Your notebook can become one of those “safe spaces,” and it’s not that hard to do. Here are a few simple ways to let your creative side know that when it comes to your notebook, it’s OK to play.
Anything goes
Let yourself write anything you want in your notebook, and without judging it. Sure, some parts of what you put in you’ll take to use in poems, and some you won’t, but that doesn’t mean the other stuff is bad or useless.
It’s like encouraging a young child’s art skills. You wouldn’t tell her that any of her paintings are terrible—you’d just choose the best ones to put on the refrigerator! And even in the ones that don’t work so well, she’s still learning things about paint, paper, brushes, colors, and lines.
Same for your writing. Everything you write is worthwhile, so make your notebook a warm, welcoming judgement‑free zone.
It’s OK to be messy
Creativity and mess go together. If you’ve ever been to a potter’s studio, or a painter’s, you can literally see this—and that multiplies by 10 when children are creating!
As poets, we’re used to working in lines: lines of a poem and lines on a page. But we mustn’t let lines trap us, like rules that are too strict.
So in your notebook, write sloppily—sometimes. Ignore the lines, or even better, use a notebook that doesn’t have them. Let yourself scribble, doodle, blot out. Write slantways. Make words spread out like ripples. Let your words be free as they want to be!
And don’t be precious about your paper: if you feel like writing 10 words on a page, that should be OK!
If you don’t feel that way, try using a cheaper notebook. Mine cost $4.25 for 100 pages, and I always feel free to use them up as fast and as messily as I want.
Habits make a home
Lastly, your creative side needs to get used to thinking of your notebook as its home. If you only write in it once a month, it can’t do that. Ideally, you would write something in it every day, or at least most days.
Which takes us neatly into our next topic!
Method 2: Write a daily observation
One of the best notebook habits you can create is to start your day by writing down some kind of observation.
I have done this for more than a decade, it has helped my creativity a lot.
All you have to do is to write down something that you’ve noticed recently, trying to record it with accuracy and detail.
You can write down things you’ve seen (or heard, or felt) in the world around you. That might be waxwings on the holly bush, clouds over the river, trucks on Main St., parents walking kids to school, trash on the sidewalk—anything.
You can write down an incident, or event, like something that’s happened in my family life.
You can jot down a character sketch of someone you’ve seen—what the look like, how they speak, how they move.
You can also look inside yourself, and record some process of thought or sensation that you’ve been through—like your feelings and perceptions during a conversation, for example.
The possibilities are endless, and the observations don’t need to be long: mine are typically between 5 and 20 lines of prose, though they can go longer.
As you make this one of your writing habits, you will find that it helps you enormously to come up with details and ideas. Suddenly, whenever you need an image or a description, you’ve got a ton of them sitting around, and your writing will become easier and richer as a result.
In fact, this will happen whether or not you consciously remember your observations, because what you’re doing is filling your unconscious mind with resources—but that’s the next method!
Method 3: Feed your unconscious
When you create, you call on your unconscious mind to send you ideas, images, words, phrases—and you hope that it has something to send you!
If your unconscious is richly stocked, it will send you up a dazzling array of material, and your writing will be smooth, exciting, enjoyable.
But if your unconscious is threadbare, then you’ll get clichés, repeated ideas, or just nothing—and all the pain that goes with not being able to create.
So, clearly you want well-furnished unconscious. And the good news is, you can fill your unconscious and make great ideas happen, by writing things down in your notebook.
Whenever you write something down like this, you are sending it to your unconscious, to add to its stores.
Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones calls this “Composting” so that creative seeds can grow. Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way calls it “Filling the well,” so that when you send down the bucket, it comes back full.
However you think of it, your creativity will benefit if you regularly write in your notebook things that you do not intend to make into a poem. There’s no ulterior motive for this writing: it’s just writing down the sake of writing.
Daily observations are one example of this kind of writing. But whenever you have a topic that interests you, try just writing prose about it in your notebook. Write memories, write reflections, write dreams, write dreads, write speculations—write anything!
That kind of purpose-free writing is what the unconscious latches onto and remembers, stores up, chews up, and then uses to send back great ideas to you when you need them.
Method 4: Create language stores
Daily observations and composting are (usually) written in coherent sentences, but you can get creative benefits from writing down fragments of language, or even just words.
If you hear or read an interesting phrase, write it down in your notebook.
If you misread a line of one of your poems, write it in your notebook.
Occasionally, take a minute to make a list of words, with no motive or rules—just enjoy the language as it rolls out!
And also keep lists of words that are new to you, or that you don’t use often enough (like “vex”!).
As a poet, your medium is language, so the more you feed language to your unconscious, the more you’ll have to work with.
Method 5: Practice creative leaps
One of the hardest things to learn to do in poetry is leaving behind logical, everyday thinking and making fabulous, fascinating leaps of imagination and words. It requires a new sort of creativity—which means it needs practice.
Your notebook is a the perfect place to practice these creative leaps safely.
When you’re doing your daily observation, you might want to describe a dog’s run. Try listing 10 similes for that movement—a wave, a stitch, a flapped sheet, a stapler, a bird’s wings…
Or, take a random word, like “gather,” and find “wild synonyms” for it, letting the associations get looser and looser:
Gather—pull—tangle—weave—snare—entice…
Just do it for fun!
Next Steps
If you don’t already do so, I suggest starting a Daily Observation habit in your notebook.
Every day, write down something you’ve seen, heard, noticed, or otherwise observed—in the world around you, in other people, or in yourself.
DON’T JUDGE THIS WRITING. Just write it.
If you do this, you will make your notebook a safe space for creation and feed your unconscious all at once.
If you do already make a Daily Observation, try adding a new habit to the way you use your notebook.
For example, you might make a Daily Word List.
Or write down one piece of interesting language every day that you find in the world somewhere—in talk, in emails, on TV, in books—anywhere.
