5 Pieces to Include in Your Writing Notebook
Depending on your writing process, you may have a place where you keep the notes related to your books and other writing projects.
But if you’re a new writer, or if you’re just starting to get serious about writing, you might have heard the term “writing notebook” and wondered what the heck that is.
Good news!
Today’s post is all about great pieces to include in your writing notebook, with simple steps about how to include them.
What is a Writing Notebook?
A writing notebook is simply a place to keep all of our ideas, plans, and goals for our writing projects. It can be in a binder, journal, digital format, or any other preferred format.
The main point of a writing notebook is to keep ourselves organized while writing and to help expand upon our ideas.
The main point of a writing notebook is to keep ourselves organized while writing and to help expand upon our ideas. They can include a multitude of helpful tools and pages depending on the writing project. Here are some ideas for great pieces to include in your writing notebook.
5 Pieces to Include in Your Writing Notebook
When you’re setting up your writing notebook, these are great items to include.
General Plot Outline
A general plot outline is an overview of what will be included in your book or story. It answers the question: What are the main goals of our writing project?
A plot outline should include ideas for:
Major events (Sometimes major events may not be large battles or huge crises. They can be smaller, internal or external, conflicts that directly impact our main character.)
Turning points for our characters
Setting (when & where our story takes place)
Themes
Lists of characters/name ideas
Any information we already know we want to include
It’s also important to have an idea of what the beginning, middle, and end of the story will look like. This helps to keep us on track and ensure we don’t stray too far from the main purpose of our story.
It’s okay to change our mind along the way. Sometimes we need to switch up the ending, or go back and rewrite the beginning. As long as we know what direction we’re headed, we will be in much better shape when it comes to writing our stories.
Main Character Page/Character Profile
The main character page is dedicated to the protagonist/main character (MC) of your story. Once we decide on our main character’s traits, it’s important to stay consistent throughout the entire story. A great way to keep track of this is to create a character profile for our main characters.
A character profile should include the MC’s:
Physical traits
Strengths
Weaknesses
Motivations
Obstacles
Anything that will come up multiples times in the story
Description of the antagonist or “enemy” and the reason they’re at odds - if the MC has a notable foe
We can also include important relationships on the main character page, for instance:
Their parents’ names
Significant other
Best friend etc.
Essentially, this page (or few pages) is meant to give you a space to include all important details about your MC so you can reference it when you need to. Creating this page will also give you valuable insight into your character and their unique qualities.
Character Chart
A character chart is helpful to keep track of side characters.
Important information to include on the chart is:
Each character’s relationship to the main character
Physical traits
Why they are necessary to the plot.
Having a visual like this will help ensure we don’t have characters that aren’t adding anything to our stories.
Character charts are also useful when we have many characters because we can go back to it and remind ourselves of who each person is. When we take a break from writing and come back, it’s easy to forget names (especially if you’ve recently changed them) and descriptions. Having the character chart makes our writing lives easier.
Book Timeline/Character Timelines
Creating timelines help us to keep perspective while we’re writing our story. A book timeline ensures that we’re staying on track and each event makes sense as it’s happening. It also serves as a reminder, as we’re writing, of what’s going on in our stories if we need to take a break.
Character timelines are useful to keep track of divergent character lines.
For example, we can create:
A main character timeline
A villain timeline
This ensures their actions line up with each other; a cause and effect type of relationship. Character timelines also help us see if there are any holes in the character’s life that need to be filled.
Goals Page
A goals page helps to keep us on schedule. If we don’t set goals, we may never finish the project!
There are multiple formats we can use to create our goals page:
Time-Related Goals: Goals we plan to finish by a specific date. For example, a timely goal might be “I have written (#) chapters so far, I intend to write two more by (date). Then, I will write (#) chapters every (#) days.”
Word Count Goals: Goals for how many words we want to write during each writing session. Word count goals can be something we do every time we write, or more sporadically - for instance once a week or once a month. For example, “This week I will write (#) words a day,” or “This week I will write a total of (#) words.”
Creating a chart for these goals, or using a planner (or both!) is very useful. We can make a table for ourselves in our writing notebook, or create an Excel sheet for our goals. Whatever format best suits our needs.
Interested in downloading some writing notebook sheets? Check out this writer’s bundle available on our Etsy Shop: The Confident Writer Shop!
My challenge to you is to try creating a writing notebook.
Do you already use a writing notebook? What will you include in your writing notebook? Do you set writing goals for yourself? I’d love to hear about your experiences and recommendations! Find me on social media or drop a comment below.
Let’s chat because you, my friend, are on your way to great writing.