WHY CREATE A NOVELING NOTE?
Most writing books recommend keeping some sort of log to chronicle where you write, how long, what time, and how many words you wrote. I tried to do it using Excel, but I didn’t like it too much. Computer screens are cold and impersonal to me. I prefer the tactile response of pens to paper. Bullet Journals are both useful for tracking and the current journaling trend (Dear Diary is so passé) so I decided to formulate one exclusively for writing.
Tracking your writing sessions will help you see exactly where your best/most productive work is done.
THE SKELETON
For this experiment, I purchased Taroko Design’s A5 Notebook in Cream.
I am an avid fountain pen user, so the notebook I purchased has
This notebook is only 64 pages. This is good because we’re not going to be chronicling much. In fact, if you have a bullet journal already, you can create a section especially for writing and use these spreads.
PRE-PRODUCTION
First things first, you need to figure out your notebooks’ stats. This will help in crafting layouts and ensuring you can fit what you want on the page. I count the dots lengthwise and widthwise and write it down.
Choose a page in the front or back of the book to devote to pen/pencil/marker/
Create your cover page! You can do this however you want. I decided to have fun with all my stickers and washi. I’ve also included my idea notebook, which is more minimal in design. You can also put your contact information or note the time period this notebook covers. I’m going to have everything cover until January of next year, so it’s not going to quite be six months.
CONTENTS
WRITING
I divided my content into two major categories: WRITING and WRITING ADJACENT.
Logs under Writing are directly related to writing.
- Monthly Goals
- Motivational Quotes
- Word Count Logs
It is important to set a monthly goal that is both achievable and wide enough to get you to work hard to achieve it. Motivational Quotes are great because it can keep you going through those hard days where creativity is at a standstill and depression settles in. Word Count Logs will provide a visual metric for your accomplishments and encourage working harder in order to chart the “bigger” number.
WRITING ADJACENT
Logs under this category are more about chronicling your writing rituals.
- Beverage Log
- Snack Log
- Location Log
- Stats
The Beverage/Snack logs are there because I thought it would be fun to do a sort of “x cups of tea drank during the creation of this novel” stat.
Location Log is the most important one. For ease of use, I will include time/weather in the Location Log versus making separate logs for them. If you decide not to track your consumption habits, be sure to add the Location Log to your Writing list.
In addition, I added personal categories.
- National Novel Writing Month
- Books Read/Review Log (I made a mistake in the actual log! Oops!)
- Resources
- Fountain Pen Ink Inventory
I didn’t use up all the pages in this notebook, so the remaining pages are “free” for whatever I want to do with them.
National Novel Writing Month “NaNoWriMo” is a challenge where you try to write a 50K novel in a single month. It’s good for kickstarting a writing habit and meeting local writers. It’s one of my favorite times of the year! The spreads for this month will include things like Reward Lists, NaNo Daily Word Count Numbers, Reverse NaNo, and any other resources I want to write about for November.
Resources are for things like websites, books, and any other snippets of information I come across that will be helpful in noveling.
Fountain Pen Ink Inventory… well, that’s one that doesn’t really fit much but since I use fountain pens to write the first draft of the novel, I decided I can make an ink log in this notebook. I really just wanted to make one and this is my excuse, hahaha! Perhaps you have something personal like that you can include. The beauty of Bullet Journals is their flexibility.
OPTIONAL: DIVIDING YOUR BULLET JOURNAL
After I created the Table of Contents, I numbered it 1 and went through and numbered the rest of my bullet journal. From there, I decided how many pages to devote to each category.
The pages can be numbered later if at all. For the purposes of this guide, I was pretty thorough in preparing it. Not numbering the pages will create leeway in pages. As for 12-13, I accidentally dropped a big spot of ink in the middle, so they weren’t usable! Mistakes happen, so don’t get upset if something doesn’t turn out perfect.
Should you decide to do so, these are my numbers:
- Monthly Goals: 2 pages; 3 months per page.
- Motivational Quotes: 4 pages; what I felt would hold a large number of quotes. This is going to be filled out over time, not in one chunk.
- Monthly Word
Counts: 2 page spread per month. - Beverage/Snack/Location Log: My grid is 40 height, so I did one page per month for each, plus an additional page in case there was overflow.
- NaNoWriMo: 6 pages, padded in case I get more ideas come November
- Book Log: 2 pages
- Resources: 2 pages; these are meant to be short snippets so not a lot of space is needed
- Ink Inventory: 6 pages because I have a LOT of ink 😉
- Stats: 6 pages; one for each category for the total summation of the book.
PART ONE CHECKLIST
- Buy a Dot Grid notebook best suited for your personal taste and needs. Get something appealing that will make you want to use it! 🙂
- Note the dimensions of your dot grid and create a page for testing your writing materials if you’re going to use a variety of things.
- Create your cover page! This can be as creative or
as minimalistic as you prefer. - Create your Table of Contents.
4a. Divide your contents into page numbers if desired.
In Part Two, I’ll go over two layouts for the Monthly Goals — “artistic” and “minimal”.
Any questions? Suggestions? Comment below and be sure to check the box to subscribe!
Much love,
