Why You Should Always Keep the Notebook Open While Reading
By: Nicholas Leonard
Tags: Fiction, Fiction Writing, Inspiration, Guides And Tutorials, Content Strategy

Why You Should Always Keep the Notebook Open While Reading

Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

The Tricky Task of Finding Posts

This is something we’re all on a never-ending search for as writers. Especially when we stack ourselves up against the giants of platforms like Medium, where a seemingly endless amount of articles get posted daily.

Just thinking about somehow coming up with hundreds of posts makes my head woozy. Even with niches that I’m familiar with and enjoy, like Furry and Fiction Writing.

I have tinkered around with ideas on how to source content, but it’s mainly just been in the realm of “Help Content”.

While mining for help content can provide a lot of potential posts…what about just mining in general?

Ideas Off the Page

Reading is something that I’ve been trying really hard to get back into doing. Namely, to bring old ideas I may have forgotten back into my mind. I have lots of fiction-writing-advice books that I may have read once a few years ago.

I cracked open Nancy’s Kess’ Beginnings, Middles, & Endings the other day as I still managed to not finish it after all these years. That, and my Namir story still needed some proper pacing and plotting, so why not get some on-the-fly advice for planning Biel and Razzle’s adventures?

While reading the opening pages one of the ideas stuck out to me. At first, I decided to highlight it…except it’d been highlighted already. That’s right, I did try to read this some time ago.

Kess was talking about how learning the craft of writing is great, but useless if you don’t actually go out and, y’know, write. So I opened up One Note on my phone, made a tab for “Fiction Ideas” and wrote a note regarding the idea and page number.

Alright! Time to read more.

Wait, what’s that Kess? You want to talk about the differences between story and craft? That’s kinda cool! I’ll write that down as well. Oh and look at this idea that’s further down the page, and right here, another good one! Wow, this idea a couple of pages over could make for an interesting article!

Slow But Steady

I think I’d made it to around page 10 of my short reading session thanks to me constantly seeing something interesting, ruminating on it, and then adding it to One Note.

But from that session of ten pages, I gained roughly six or so potential topics to write about, including this post you’re reading.

This also could be really beneficial to us as readers, as something like this could get us to interact and maybe even discuss the ideas and topics in the texts we read.

Sure it’s great to clobber “A book a week”, but I think pumping the breaks and discussing ideas you liked from a book is good as well. However, this is just me thinking possibilities rather than “I’ve done it” concretes.

Photo by David Ballew on Unsplash

So I’ll take my slower method of reading, as it looks like it’ll give me a lot of ideas to write about. And these aren’t just silly ideas meant to inflate a body of work; these are great topics like doing research, story vs. craft, story concepts, and more.

An Additional Mine

I suppose I’ll be throwing down some money and building a couple of houses on this idea because this small reading session seemed to be so beneficial.

Sorry, been playing a lot of Monopoly with my roommates recently.

This might just be another mine that I, and others, can use to source some great ideas from. Typically I would just highlight or write in the margins of my books, but I think pulling up my digital notebook and scribbling some notes will help me remember.

Combine that with writing an entire post about the note, and that’s one way to remember some old pieces of advice you might have forgotten.

I’ll for sure bring an update about just how many little ideas I get while reading Kess’s book. I’ll also be keeping the notebook open while reading Medium because you just never know where some interesting ideas to add your own perspective will come from.