Now, I’m not going to do a whole pros and cons thing, I’m just going to tell you about mine:

I scribble down random sentences that come to me and I’ll add ones from my phone notes.

 

I’ll write down an idea and come back to it later to see if there anything to it.

 

I use it to work through ideas, especially poems because I find it easier to work out the rhythm of the words. I would hand write stories if it didn’t take an insanely long time to do (and then to edit).

 

I keep clippings of articles from writing magazines that I thought were interesting.

 

More importantly, I used it to map out the ideas for my entire story. My big WIP, was planned, mapped and figured out in the back section of my journal.

Plus, it’s so pretty!

 

 

So, for me having this little notebook is invaluable. I don’t write in it everyday, or carry it with me everywhere, nor do I have a perfect, bullet pointed journal that’s instagram worthy. This wouldn’t work for me. We were forced to keep ones like that as part of my uni course (which were also marked) and, even then, I kept an original messy version from which I copied over the useful content (I.E. the stuff that followed the way the marking criteria wanted me to think). I have also been through phases when I didn’t keep one and I noticed I was less productive, or the writing less focused as I had nothing to ground the thought I’d been trying to recreate.

In conclusion, I woud defintely reccommend keeping one but don’t follow the pattern and plans you can find on Instagram or Pinterest. You do you and I gaurentee it wil be a helpful tool.