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The Magic of a Tiny Notebook

The Magic of Tiny Notebook

I have a new notebook. It is tiny.

And it's the best thing that has happened to my writing ever.

(Technically it's a sketchbook but let's not sweat the small stuff. It's also not new, but shhhhh.)

Let me back up a little, though.

I've always had trouble writing... anything. I love doing it, almost as much as drawing, but for whatever reason the words in my head simply refuse to come out. Short stories, poems, roleplaying, papers for school: all of it was a horrid slog to get something passable down for the dA group event or RP thread or school assignment I was doing, let alone get close to whatever word count I had to hit, and I've mostly avoided writing for pleasure because of it. (Unless, of course, an idea gripped me so hard that I wrote a full fic for it in a feverish haze at 4 o'clock in the morning.) Fan fics, original stories, and abandoned replies alike languish in the depths of flash drives and backups, never to see the light of day because the despairs of writing started to greatly outweigh its delights.

But now that I'm working on this website that'll be, like, at least 80% writing, that shit can't fly any more! This stuff has lived in my head for years and I'm filing eviction notices!! It's time to pick up the pen again ~ !!! ☆

So I started stuffing my Youtube playlists and bookmark folders with every type of writing advice I could find, for every type of writing I could think of: first drafts, worldbuilding, notetaking, plot structure, outlining, character building, and on and on and on. While most of this stuff helped immensely in one way or another, the solution to the actual problem — simply getting the words on paper — still eluded me. So I tried other tips and tricks.

Tidying and reorganizing my workspace? I do that every week already! Giving myself a small treat for hitting a mini goal? Instructions unclear, have eaten the entire box of Pop-Tarts^TM in one go. Listening to lo-fi while I write? Kinda worked, actually! (But artcore is better.) Freewriting? I'm just looping back to my original problem again, but now half the words on the page is meowing!

None of this fully helped, but 50 (usable) words a day was better than 0, so onwards went the grind.

Until I found tiny notebook!

Y'know, this thing!

I had actually rediscovered it during my recent scramble to move, buried under other miscellany. I don't remember what I originally bought if for (I think it was supposed to be entertainment for a roadtrip?), but my mainstays had already been packed and moved into storage, and I knew I would be bored as hell in the new place until I could find what box my stuff was in. So I fished out tiny notebook along with a couple of pens and held on to them until the move was done. Then I set up a mimicry of my usual workspace, cracked open tiny notebook, and began to write.

And so I wrote.

And wrote.

And wrote.

...hey, what the — ?!

Where the fuck did these words come from.

I cranked these notes out in 15 minutes or so. It may not look like much, but this was the most amount of words I've written in this same amount of time, with the least amount of stress in a while. (Disregarding any 4 AM fever-writing, of course.) So what the hell changed????

My best guess? Every other time I've tried to get words down, it was all in a full-size notebook on full-size paper, or in a program preset to the default A4 size mock-up. All that empty space was lowkey intimidating, and my brain subconsciously punked out before I could even start. But with tiny notebook? Less space to fill in the first place apparently means less mental hand-wringing about it, which means the words come out much faster.

And boy, did the words come out! Look!

I filled this sucker nearly halfway in, like, 10 days and haven't slowed down a bit! In fact, I've only gotten better at writing in this thing, metaphorically and literally. Check this out!

Turns out the secret wasn't a bunch of mindfulness exercises in writing form, but tricking monkey brain into thinking you actually wrote a lot :P

Now I still gotta rewrite these notes into something resembling an actually readable state (...and I gotta do that to the magic page too, now that I think about it) and there's no telling how the tiny notebook method is gonna handle that, but I feel way more secure in my ability to get that done now lol. See y'all in a week or two when I get some of these notes polished, I guess???

P.S.: It's probably kinda gauche to ask for donations on old web-adjacent thingies, but if you could please drop a dime or two into my Ko-fi, I would super appreciate it. I'd normally never ask, but a bunch of our stuff has gotten water damage while in storage and needs to be replaced. It would be cool to have a little bit more wiggle room to do that (•᷄ ᵕ̈ •᷅ ;)

P.P.S.: I couldn't find a way to work this in organically, but if you have trouble writing for extended periods of time, may I recommend the pomodoro method? (there's an official site out there, but the linked video explains it more succinctly and describes how you could modify it to fit your needs.) I have to reduce the length of my pomodoros from the officially-recommended 25 minutes to 15, but otherwise this has worked the same amount of wonders as tiny notebook, and it's pretty nifty in the rest of my life, too. Make sure you grab a pomodoro timer from your app store of choice!

P.P.P.S.: Speaking of Ko-fi, would anybody be interested in me posting at least some worldbuilding stuff to it? I basically never touch it and I feel like I gotta do something with it. There's at least one active worldbuilder on Ko-fi (their stuff fucks btw) so I know it's feasible, and with all the notes I wrote I can work up a backlog eventually...

P.P.P.P.S.: First time using alt text! If you're using a screenreader, can you tell me how I did? And let me know if there's something that needs improvement?