12 Gifts of Christmas - For Writers

           By Ruth Symes / Megan Rix

There are so many lovely gifts for writers out there, from extremely cheap to lavishly expensive. We must be the easiest people to buy for! Here’s my top 12 Christmas list:

1. Journals and notebooks and paper: You can never have too many or too much, in my opinion, (recycled paper best if poss). A4 books for getting down to some serious writing. Smaller notebooks for stuffing in a handbag or pocket, along with a pen, for when inspiration strikes!

When walking on the beach this spring I even found a waterproof notebook that you could use in the rain or in the bath.

2. Yearly Planner Wall-chart: I love being able to put a daily sticker (occasionally two) on my yearly wall-chart to mark off each 1000 words written. The best part is coming to the end year of the year and having a wall-chart covered in them - very satisfying.

3. Timer: If I’m needing help to get motivated I put a timer on for an hour and tell myself I can’t have another coffee or lunch etc until the hour is up. A friend of mine used to tie herself to her chair so she couldn’t stop until her designated time was over. I think tying yourself up is too extreme - but a timer is good to have. 

4. Books to read: Reading for pleasure and reading for research. Books you like and ones you don’t. When I was thinking of writing my memoir ‘The Puppy that came for Christmas’ my non-fiction agent told me to read as many animal memoirs as I could. I must have read over 20 before I put pen to paper.

All that reading must have helped because it made the Sunday Times Non-Fiction Bestseller List last year.

5. Mobile phone: With email on it, so the writer never misses a precious publisher or agent’s email while out walking the dogs.

6. Incense sticks: These help me focus when I’m not in a writer-ly frame of mind. I also find them very good for getting me in a mystical, magical mood for when I’m writing the Bella Donna books.

7. Smart Pen: I love writing by hand and although this pen is expensive, along with the special notebooks it needs, it lets my scribbled handwriting be converted into print - it also lets you write anywhere as you just plug it into the computer once you’ve finished – and voila you have text - just remember to turn it on! (I forgot to do this when we were on holiday and came back with tons of handwriting that couldn’t be converted into print - v. annoying.)

8. Dragon Dictate:  For when the poor writer’s hands are too tired from typing and mouse manoeuvring. Seriously though, RSI should not be taken lying down - if a writer starts getting twinges of pain in  their hands they should try to vary the way they write.

9. Pens and pencils: Must haves! You can never have too many pens because you can never find one when you need one.

10. Diary: To record all those things that can be turned into a story or go in a memoir one day.

11.Subscriptions to Writing Magazines: How To ones and Book Review ones. I loved getting this one from America last week: ‘So you've made your list. You've checked it twice, but if "The Puppy That Came for Christmas" isn't on it, you need to check again.’ Thanks Terri Schlichenmeyer.

12. Writers holidays/retreats/courses: A luxury, I know,  but it’s very important for a writer to be rejuvenated every now and again - to keep them going for the next year or two!

 Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and Power to your Pen in 2012!  xxx

More details of my holiday gift ideas can be found on my website www.ruthsymes.com or www.meganrix.com

Notebooks - Celia Rees

Like many writers, I'm a sucker for notebooks and I have many. Big ones, small ones, handbag sized ones, leather bound, spiral bound, cheap ones and expensive ones with beautiful marbled covers and heavy, creamy paper that I can't bring myself to write on. Friends give me notebooks because they make the perfect gift for a writer, but most of them I've bought myself. I find them hard to resist. it is not just the pristine perfection of the pages. Starting a new notebook makes one feel one is doing something positive, making a fresh start.

I always advise anyone who wants to write to keep a notebook and I always have one with me. The notebook is the place where we capture fleeting ideas, impressions, note bits of description, write down 'the words in the air' that Abi Burlingham blogged about on Thursday (see below). It also acts like a sporadic diary, a place where what just might be that really great idea is recorded along with 'to do' lists, shopping lists, holiday lists, so I have a reminder of my ordinary life, as well as my writing life. I also like to collect aide memoire - cards, coasters, tickets, newspaper snippings - sometimes I stick them into the notebook, or if it is a moleskine I tuck them into the handy little pocket in the back. There is nothing like having a physical reminder to take you back to a time and place, either because you need to describe it or to conjure what was in your mind. My only regret is that I cannot draw. I have to confess to a certain amount of notebook envy when it comes to those who can fill the pages with little sketches and arty, italic writing.


One of my favourite novels is Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook - I fell in love with the idea of different coloured notebooks laid out on a table in which one would write different things - so exciting! I haven't quite figured out how to do it, but I'd love to try a similar thing myself.

Stop Press! Dianne Hofmeyr is reviewing my book, The Wish House in ABBA's Review Section today!

www.celiarees.com

http://www.facebook.com/theofficialceliareesfanpag

Uncurtained windows: reading writers' notebooks - Anne Rooney

Writers' notebooks are personal, valuable, essential. Somewhere to jot down thoughts as they occur before they disappear back into the ether. They contain the germs of ideas, solutions to problems, plots and titles that never went anywhere - a nostalgia-fest for the writer and a boon for literary biographers and critics in the case of the famous. Reading them is like looking into lit, uncurtained windows on a winter night, especially those in the backs of houses passed on the train. They give a privileged insight into the interior life - the writer in the wild, roaming his or her territory unaware of observers.

I've been using a facsimile of Bram Stoker's notebooks for Dracula while researching my own vampire series, Vampire Dawn (Ransom, March 2012). They look familiar. Spattered with odd jottings that are hard to interpret later, but also with longer pieces meticulously copied or summarised from books and conversations. There are typewritten notes and annotated bits of typescript as well as pages of handwriting (thankfully neat in his case). They offer a fascinating glimpse into the process of composing Dracula. The bits he didn't use are just as interesting as those he did.

He was very thorough. He went to Romania and interviewed local people. He wrote long lists of Romanian words he might use. He researched boats that had sunk off the coast of Whitby and boats that carried their cargo to shore. He recorded any odd episode or story he could use. Just as we all do.

I have two types of notebook. There's always a general notebook that is carried almost everywhere, and filled with odd ideas, observations, scribblings of any kind. Those are a chaotic jumble that probably make little sense to anyone else. Then there are specific notebooks for each project. These show the genesis and evolution of a book. It's interesting later to see the bits that never made it, the ideas that look really stupid later, and how far the final book has wandered from the original idea or plan.

My notebooks will never be of real interest, like Stoker's, but I can't show his as the facsimile is copyright, so here's a peek inside mine as a poor substitute for the curious.



This is a Moleskin softcover brown notebook. On the cover is a printout of an early version of one of the covers of the series (the first cover we fixed on).

I always stick a picture on a notebook or folder as it's the quickest way to see which is which.







Inside... these are bits printed from the web. I needed to know exactly how a guillotine works and the position of the body of the victim just before execution. This continues on further pages. In case you ever need to know, there is a tilted bench that the beheadee lies on.

And this just goes to show that I don't always carry the notebook. These notes are made on the slips of paper that come in books ordered from the stacks in Cambridge University Library and then stuck in later.












I try to find pictures of the characters. This is a series of six books (seven if you include Shroud-Eating for Beginners, the guide for new vampires) and there should, all being well, be another series of six in 2013. It's useful to have a visual reference for each character to make sure they stay consistent - no sudden changes of hair colour, for example. This is Titania. I'm not showing you the modern characters in case the real people object.





And this is how Titania got her name. After I'd written Drop Dead, Gorgeous, I noticed similarities with A Midsnummer Night's Dream.

Some more characters - these are historical figures I've co-opted as vampires. They are Louis Pasteur (lower) and Dmitri Ivanovsky. Working with real people, it's important to make sure they look as they did and to write characters that seem to match their appearance. Pasteur is robust, lively, intelligent, friendly and relaxed. Ivanovsky is reserved, polite, intelligent. They are both in book 4, Every Drop of Your Blood.

All writers discuss their work with other writers they trust. If you have those discussions on the phone or face-to-face you have have to make notes if you don't want to forget the insights they offered. I spend a lot of time chatting online on Facebook or Skype with two very dear friends who are also writers. This is a Facebook chat about plot issues with one of those people, printed out and stuck in the notebook. I won't name her in case she minds, and I've blurred the picture for the same reason.







That's enough of  a peek from your passing train. My camera has run out of battery now. But writing this has made me realise how lucky I am compared with Stoker. I don't have to copy pictures laboriously by hand (just as well - they'd be rubbish); I can print things out and stick them in; I can use higlighters; I can stick in a transcript of a chat! And, perhaps best of all, I can make a digital copy or photocopy of it all in case - God forbid - I lose the real thing. Not that I have made a full copy.... Next task!

How to be Creative - Andrew Strong

I’m not sure whether creativity is as complex as writers of books on creativity would like us to think, and books on creativity are not in short supply, which suggests that the writers of these books are not that creative, for if they were they’d write something on a subject other than creativity, something no one else has thought to tackle, for example, How to Speak Lobster or Dummies for Beginners.

From 1964 and Arthur Koestler’s monumental The Act of Creation to 2012 and Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine – How Creativity Works(later withdrawn as Lehrer was forced to admit he’d been a bit creative in the quotes he’d attributed to Bob Dylan) -  I have read a lot of these books and I can tell you - they don’t help.

Because what they don’t often say is this: creativity is just a sunny word for work.  Long ago, at art school, it was impressed upon me that artists have to understand how their chosen materials behave. Whether your materials are paint, stone or film, get inside the form, practise, work. You must understand your medium, and for writers, these are words, sentences, paragraphs and so on.

I kept journals for twenty years.  Five hundred words a day.  Whatever the weather, whatever I was doing, I wrote.  If I had nothing to say, I made things up.  If there was so much going on that I had no time to write, I would still write.  And then one day I looked at all the words that I’d written and thought, if I’d written novels, instead of journals, I might have something proper to show for all this writing.  So I stopped writing my journal and started writing a book.

Writing a book is hard, isn’t it?  It’s not easy starting, and it’s even harder to keep going. To write well there is no doubt you need to harness your creativity.  I noticed from the early chapters of my first book that I often harnessed my creativity to develop ways of fooling myself I was working when I actually wasn’t, and the three most brilliant diversions I came up with were notebooks, research and coffee.

The lure of the pristine notebook is very powerful: it’s so exciting shopping for one, you feel like you’re working when you’re not, of course, and you can even stop when out shopping for a notebook and have lunch. And once you’ve found the notebook, you can start thinking about a new pen.

Similarly, research. For me research is a way of reading interesting snippets on the internet without actually writing.  I can spend an hour just looking for a minor character’s name. I set my most recent book in a real city I’ve never visited. This was a cunning excuse to spend weeks on Google Street Search, going for imaginary cycle rides. 

But preparing coffee is the quintessential distraction. I have an elaborate coffee making ritual that lasts around twenty minutes.  I love those twenty minutes.  I can think about my writing, pretend I’m very close to actually writing, but be staring out of the window at a tree, or a bird.  If there were a job that involved staring at trees and birds, I would love it.  Although I’m sure that after a few months I’d be looking at ways of not actually staring at trees and birds but something related to it, like shopping for a notebook so I could jot down which trees and birds I intended to stare at for the next week or so.

You see, this is the problem with being creative. You end up creating so many forms of distraction that your whole day is spent making coffee, jotting in notebooks and conducting research. And just to make matters worse, you can add to this list of distractions reading books on how to be creative. And as I said, I’ve read lots of them.

There are wonderful things some of those books have taught me, and very few of them have failed to be interesting. Guy Claxton’s Hair Brain, Turtle Mind is good on the importance of allowing the mind to wander; Tor Norretranders’ The User Illusion – although more about consciousness than creativity, does say some astonishing things about how limiting conscious thinking can be.  I’d also recommend Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary – a huge work exploring how western cultures have become too conscious, too ‘left brained’, too restricted. 

These books, and many others, are compulsive, and all emphasise that creativity occurs unconsciously, and each, in its own way, suggests how we can set up the right conditions for allowing the unconscious mind to play with ideas and come up with something. But for all their insight, these books don’t really help, they just tend to confirm what I’ve suspected all along, which is this: I need to get on with it.

So if you came to this blog as a distraction from writing, stop reading now and get back to work. However, if you came because you hoped for a tip or advice, I’m not going to disappoint.  Here it is: if you're a writer and you want to be creative, go and write, go and write anything at all, even if it’s what you’d rather be doing instead of sitting down and writing. Just write and write and write, and eventually, if you’re lucky, something magical will happen and you’ll suddenly realise that you have something, and you won’t know how it happened.

I just hope it doesn’t turn out to be a book on creativity.

Research with a Notebook: Dark Angels by Katherine Langrish

I rediscovered an old notebook the other day.  There's been a recent discussion on Terri Windling's blog 'The Drawing Board' about using good old-fashioned notebooks for scribbling down ideas for books - the advantages: low tech, cheap, versatile, and can go with you anywhere.  This particular notebook of mine illustrates that point particularly well, as it went with me into the dark depths of an extremely cramped ancient mine.  No way would I have carted an expensive electronic notepad down there! 

I'd wanted an underground sequence for parts of my 12th century medieval fantasy, 'Dark Angels' - most accounts of fairyland in that period assumed it existed underground, in hidden caves - and I wanted my hero's experience to be authentic.  No magical lights or handy phosphorescence - just a candle, and - when the candle goes out - darkness.

So I went off to Ogof Llanymynech, a Shropshire cave, and crawled in on hands and knees, accompanied by my husband and a guide from a Shropshire Mining club.  Once a hundred yards or so inside, and just before the bit where you actually had to lie down and squirm, I let the others go on, switched off my helmet light and sat in the dark for a while before turning it back on and making in situ notes:

Muddy up and down crawls with sharp and extremely gritty mud.  cold and damp with dripping water - breath forms clouds.  lots of little white drops on the slanted rock ceiling - the knock and click and tumble of scattering rocks - low rumble of distant talk in another chamber -  a low throbbing - a lost fly buzzes past, startling - you could easily get lost as it has - the distant entrance only a fuzzy patch like a tuft of grey wool - another passage - a little tuck of darkness at the side of the floor

And, heading back for the entrance -

greenish light - irregular - glitter of light on stones, the flash of water dripping - the rich green of the outside.

Notes like these are casual, immediate, and work as touchstones for the memory, reviving the experience so I can tap into it when doing the 'serious' writing. On a second trip, we did some filming, and here's the result - my new book trailer which I hope will convery some of the sinister beauty of the Shropshire landscape and legends which I tried to capture in 'Dark Angels'.

SCHOOL'S OUT! Or is it . . . ? by Anna Wilson

In January I wrote about the joys of giving children notebooks and letting them run riot with their story ideas. Since then I have met many teachers and parents who have done just this. They have told me how wonderful it is to see this space being used. The freedom to write or draw whatever the child wants has fed into stories she or he has often then gone on to polish in class in structured writing time. (This has not, of course, always been a direct result of my post – many teachers and parents were already giving their children the chance to explore their writing in this way.)

I would not be blogging about this again, were it not for something I witnessed on a long train journey last week; something which had me thinking again about how constraining we can be in our approach to our children’s education and the damage that can be done when pleasure is forsaken in favour of ticking boxes and getting things ‘right’. And, perhaps more importantly, when this approach leaks into home life.

A mum got on the train with her two small daughters, whom I guessed to be about five and six, and her son, who, I thought, looked about eight. They settled into their seats and the mother brought out some pens and pencils, paper and notebooks.

The little girls immediately clamoured, ‘I want my notebook!’ ‘I am going to write you a story!’

How lovely! I thought. What a great way to spend a few hours on the train.

‘Yes,’ said the mother. ‘You each have twenty minutes to write a beautiful story, and then I will read it and check it. Now – remember I want to see “wow” words, good punctuation, proper spelling, neat handwriting and lots of interesting verbs and adjectives—’

The boy groaned loudly (or was it me?) and put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t WANT to write a story!’ he complained. ‘I don’t like writing stories and I am no good at them.’

His mother placated him with promises of chocolate biscuits if he would only ‘be good like the girls and write for twenty minutes without making a fuss’. His sisters were indeed already scribbling away and reading aloud what they had written, eager to share it with their mother. She praised them and told them to keep going for the full twenty minutes.

What is it with this twenty minutes thing? I thought. Maybe she is desperate for a bit of peace and quiet. Don’t judge! You were in this situation not so long ago yourself: long train journeys with young children are tiresome and they have to have things to do otherwise you go crazy and so do they.

The boy then handed over his story. His mother, glancing at it, said, ‘Well, that’s not very interesting, is it? You haven’t used good connectives, there are no “wow” words, your handwriting is messy and you just haven’t made an effort.’

Pretty harsh, I thought.

Then came the killer blow.

‘You really have got to start making an effort with your writing, you know,’ the mother went on. ‘Next year you will have to write for twenty minutes and put all these things into your stories. You have been on holiday for a week already and you have done no writing. You must promise you’ll concentrate on this for another twenty minutes, or you will be no good at this next year.’

I must confess that, at the time, I wanted to lean across and engage the boy in conversation. I wanted to ask him if he liked reading and, if so, what kind of stories did he like best? What about his favourite films? I wanted to get him chatting about his likes and dislikes and encourage him to scribble them down, to use this precious ‘writing time’ as a chance to let his brain go wild. I wanted to tell him that it was OK to do that, and that afterwards he could go back over his story and concentrate on the connectives and the punctuation and the neat handwriting. I wanted to say that all those things his mother was talking about were indeed important, but that perhaps the reason he hated writing so much was that he was struggling with remembering the rules; that if he could forget the rules to start with, he would then perhaps find he loved writing stories, and that he had piles and piles of them to tell. I might perhaps have added that, as a published writer, I would be paralysed if I had to write a clean first draft from the off which obeyed all the rules of Standard English . . . 

Of course I didn’t. I did not want to upset his mother – after all, it was none of my business. In any case, on reflection, it was not her behaviour with her children that upset me the most, rather the fact that she clearly felt anxious that her son was not up to scratch with his English. Indeed, she was so anxious that he improve that she was insisting he work on it over the summer holidays, and work on it in the exact same way he is required to at school. She was armed to the hilt with educational jargon and was turning this terrifying arsenal on her weary son.

I was an editor before I was fortunate enough to develop my career as a writer. I know as well as anyone the importance of good grammar and correct punctuation. I appreciate clean, clear writing and a well-structured plot. I know good dialogue when I see it. My own children will roll their eyes and tell you that I am the first person to howl at the misuse of the apostrophe on a street sign or restaurant menu. Of course I can see why we have to teach these things and why parents should care about their children’s level of competence in English.

However, it makes me extremely upset that an obsession with such technicalities has the potential to wreck a child’s love of their own language. When you are as young as that little lad, creative writing should be fun, shouldn’t it? Leaving aside the dubious value in making your child work over the summer holidays in such a joyless way, I found it heartbreaking that the mother seemed not to see the potential for fun in giving her son a notebook and letting him run riot with his imagination before giving him guidance and advice on how to hone his ideas. Even more heartbreaking, though, was the thought of how anxious the woman seemed to feel about her son attaining certain targets in the academic year to come. She cannot be alone in feeling this.

I only hope that, come September, her son will find himself fortunate to have one of the many inspirational teachers we have in this country who are still in love enough with their subject to occasionally throw out the rulebook and teach from the heart instead.

www.annawilson.co.uk

Space to be Me - Anna Wilson

A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend about how to encourage children to write creatively. The topic came up because she was concerned that her seven-year-old son had been put off writing stories at school.

Her SEVEN-YEAR OLD son . . .

I was pretty horrified to hear her say this, not only because at the tender age of seven a child is coming home and declaring that “English is boring” and “I hate writing stories”, but also because I have known this child since he was a baby, and the minute he could string a couple of words together he was telling stories. He has the gift of the gab and a way with words that has always astonished me. At three years old he was already telling long and involved stories which kept me hanging on his every word, wondering what on earth he would come up with next, and making me laugh a lot along the way. So when I heard that this child no longer enjoyed storytelling, I had to ask why.

“He finds it paralyzing to have to remember where to put the finger spaces, full stops and commas,” my friend said. “And he hates the fact that joined-up writing is more highly prized than the content of the story he wants to tell. By the time he has struggled through following all the rules, he has forgotten what he wanted to write in the first place or has lost interest altogether.”

Of course he has!

“Take him to Paperchase, buy him a notebook of his choice and a really nice pen or pencil and tell him, ‘This is your own private writer’s book. It's your space to be you! You can write exactly what you like in it, draw pictures, whatever. I promise no one will correct your spelling or tell you to join up your handwriting or argue over commas. Just go for it.’ And tell him it's what I do and that I wish him good luck with his writing!”

A couple of days later I received the following email, which my friend has agreed I can share with you. I felt a little tearful when I read it.

“Just wanted to say that I gave both my sons a notebook, inspired by what you had said about writing. They both used to write lots of stories, but I realized that they hadn't for a while and that X in particular had been getting upset about how hard he found joined-up writing. When I said to him that he could write whatever he wanted in it, and he didn't have to write neatly or properly he literally danced round the room! He did his disco moves in excitement! That night he wrote two stories, one entitled "My Mum is growing..... round the middle", about a Mum who got too fat (she got obsessed with special offers) and exploded in the Prime Minister's house. The other was about an alien who visited two boys in class to help them with their hard Maths questions, then they let him stay and took him round school. It was quite a revelation, so thanks for the lovely idea. You are now a superhero in the eyes of my 7-year-old nutter!!”

When I asked if I could use this email as the basis for my next blog post, my friend replied:

“Quote away! I have never seen a little boy so chuffed! He did a new disco move as he said "no capital letters" one disco move, "no joined up writing" another disco move "no full stops" another disco move, it was hilarious! Apparently finger spaces are worth having though. He was so excited he told his dad all about it when he got home, saying, ‘It's amazing Daddy! I can write what I like and it doesn't matter if it's messy etc.’ Thanks for inspiring me!”

I feel as though these emails should be included in a manifesto of some kind . . .

Hurrah for notebooks and the space to be me! (And as for that story about the Mum who was obsessed with special offers, I might just ask if I can "borrow" that . . . )

Find me on the web at http://www.annawilson.co.uk

Notebooks and challenges

NOTEBOOKS
Certain subjects come up every now and then in ABBA blogs, things that are dear to a writer's heart, something that bothers us all or questions we are frequently asked.
I am always fascinated by the way each topic is approached or dealt with in a completely different manner. One of the things that makes ABBA posts so interesting to read.

One of these is the perennial question of Where do you get your ideas? and Emma Barnes' lovely poem on the blog yesterday is a great example of a completely different approach to the subject.

Notebooks come up quite often. I looked and found there are 9 blogs with the tag 'notebook' and i am quite sure there are more where they are discussed but not tagged as such.

I know some writers whose notebooks are a work of art, with research information, quotes and sketches. Mine are sadly not such as these.  But  I love notebooks.  Some of mine are gifts but many of them I have bought myself - unable to resist their bright or pretty colours and images, or covers with a luxurious feel of soft leather.

These are just some of the notebooks I have collected, some are quite well used but many are bare aside from a page or two.  It is fascinating to go through them - all the things I discover that I had meant to remember, but had forgotten..
Often I will start one and forget what I was using it for then a new one comes along, so I start that, delighting in that wonderful sense of something fresh and new, the first pristine page...ahh!

Some are filled with off ideas, scraps of stories, thoughts on how to change something I am writing.   

One problem with notebooks is that sometimes I can't bear to write in them, especially if they are new, expensive, beautiful or quirky notebooks 

I have one in handmade paper bound in bark and tied with a thin string, it came as a present with a peacock feather quill pen and a bottle of dragonblood ink!    A truly a lovely present from one of my sons, that I have looked at longingly for a long time but not had the courage to start writing in!

THE CHALLENGE

The two notebooks in the picture at the top of the page were both presents and I decided I wanted to think of a way to use them together and do something new and interesting.


The lovely blue one with the picture of a dragonfly says 'IMAGINE' on the front.  inside each left hand page is blank with a quote at the foot of the page, the facing page has lines.  
The black soft leather notebook has lined pages.

The quotes gave me the idea to give myself a challenge. 
Being someone who writes on a laptop rather than by hand I use notebooks more as a way to think and jot ideas, or when I have no access to my laptop. 

The quotes are to be the seed for a short piece of writing, title or just the spark. Reading them I realised they could be taken in all sorts of ways for any genre of story or perhaps a poem, One or two have suggested ideas for a book I am currently writing. I find these quotes are real triggers for the imagination.  e.g.

                         'Not all who wander are lost'  J. R. R. Tolkien
and 
                          'Everything you can imagine is real'  Pablo Picasso

I decided I would use the black notebook to make notes (I am a bit of a scribbler) and it would be where I would try out ideas and the Imagine notebook is where I would write the main part of each  piece.  I also discovered that the book has each quote repeated three or four times and this made me think of how I could experiment in different genre e.g. the Picasso quote could work as well in reality as it would in fantasy.  

I have to admit I have barely started but like all the most successful New Year resolutions there is more chance of success if you tell people about them!

I hope to be able to report back later in the year that at least some of the pages of these new twin notebooks have been filled.

How do you use your notebooks?

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Linda Strachan  is  Patron of Reading to Liberton High School, Edinburgh 

Author of over 60 books for all ages from picture books to teenage novels and a writing handbook  Writing For Children    Her latest YA novel is Don't Judge Me  

website:  www.lindastrachan.com
blog: Bookwords