From Chaos to Clarity: What Old Writing Notebooks Teach Us About Creativity, Storytelling, and Growth
Author Angela Brown discusses what old writing notebooks teach writers about creativity, storytelling, and growth as writers. This includes remembering the ups and downs of the creative process and how we get from the blank page to the finished book.
Stuck on a draft? For one author, the act of looking back through her old writing notebooks and revisiting the messy, unpolished beginnings of her previous books turned out to be just the trick she needed to get past some of her plotting blunders so that she could get her next story down on the page.
If I’m honest, I didn’t initially remember Charlie.
To be clear, this should not have been the case. In the somewhat recent past, I spent time with him. He told me things about himself, cracking his heart open for me like an egg. At one point, I found him interesting, or at least intriguing enough for me to make notes in my journal about his more memorable traits: nice; super cute; loveably quirky; really into cars…and books.
In theory, the moment I saw his name again, the floodgates of my mind should have sprung wide open, my memories of this allegedly nice, quirky, and well-read man easily pouring back in.
Instead, I had an entirely different reaction.
“Who in the hell is Charlie?” I said out loud to myself as I tried—and failed—to recall him.
It wasn’t until I breezed through additional pages and read over more of my scribbled penmanship—kind of a nuisance; trouble sitting still—that the lightbulb went off in my head.
“Ohhhhh,” I reminded myself, the whole mystery finally making sense. “That’s right.”
Charlie was never an adult.
According to the bullet-points I jotted down in the “Potential Characters” section of my Moleskine while drafting ideas for my sophomore novel, he was just a kid.
As I write this essay, I’m also trudging my way through a draft of my third novel, a sentence I genuinely never thought I’d have the good fortune to write. To be honest, I assumed the process would have become easier by now. It hasn’t. Despite my love for the concept, the characters, and the setting, the story’s revealed itself slowly to me—more a drip than the rush I’d anticipated.
“I just can’t seem to nail down certain parts of this plot,” I recently complained to my family during dinner. “It feels impossible. What if I can’t pull it off?”
“I think it’s going to be great, Mom,” my eight-year-old daughter, an avid book lover who charmingly refers to herself as my “book therapist,” informed me. Beside her, my two-year-old son, pleased that I was distracted by the woes of my craft, helped himself to more bread. “It’s like we talked about on the drive home from school. Just get through this scene, then it’ll click!”
“I don’t know.” I twisted a tangle of spaghetti onto my fork. “I feel like my last book poured right out of me! I hardly had to think about it. The writing was so clean. So forward moving! I opened my laptop every morning and—boom! —the entire story was right there.”
My husband looked up from his plate, lifted a skeptical brow.
“What?” I posed. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No it wasn’t,” he chimed in mid-bite. “Your story was definitely not ‘just right there.’”
“Yes it was,” I insisted, recalling the mornings I’d sit in my rattan writing chair, blink, and find 2,000 new words on my document. “I could see the whole plot from the very first page.”
“That’s because you’re not remembering things clearly,” he informed me, a bold statement. “We literally had almost this identical conversation about that book this same time last year.”
“We did?” I posed, genuinely not recalling it. “I don’t feel like that’s true.”
My husband and daughter exchanged a glance while the little guy grabbed more sourdough.
“We did,” they confirmed in tandem.
It’s easy when you hold a copy of your finished book—every question finally answered, every verb and description just right, every plot thread neatly wrapped up like a beautiful gift—to forget about all the stumbling that got you to that point. And that’s exactly where I was at that night at dinner—a box of ARCs for my new novel sitting in the next room. According to my family, I’d developed a type of writerly amnesia, apparently blocking out the countless blunders, roadblocks, and false starts that ended up pointing me toward the final draft.
Once our meal was complete, I did something I hadn’t done in more than a year, not since the day I officially submitted that second book to my editor: I opened my office cabinet, pulled out my old planning notebook, and then spent the next hour, alone, reading through it.
I’m being kind to myself when I tell you that what I found inside its sturdy black covers was an embarrassing, completely scattered, at times incoherent, jumbled mishmash. According to its contents, the story, the one I claimed “poured” right out of me, did so in the way I imagine concrete pours through a sieve, which is to say slow, thick, and undeniably messy.
The pages were not marked by clean outlines and straightforward ideas. Rather, they were a graveyard of questions I never answered, scenes I swore would be vitally important but didn’t bother to write, angrily crossed-out paragraphs, and list after list of characters like Charlie (and another named Bobby, though I recalled even less about him), whom I’d convinced myself were so imperative to the narrative and yet got scrapped. At one point, I’d considered adding in a true crime twist. At another, killing off my protagonist. The setting changed three times—the one I actually settled on and which, you know, ultimately drives the whole story? I’d sort of forgotten that it didn’t sneak its way in until the very last draft.
Yes, eventually I reached that blissful “flow state,” the one at the forefront of my memories that every writer strives to achieve.
But prior?
I was paralyzed by how many choices I’d need to make. The storyline, I’d noted more than once in that Moleskine, was too complex. “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING” is a line I literally wrote. Based on my many scribbles, for most of the time I tried to piece together the first two acts, the only thing I seemed intent upon was giving up.
Had my family really been right? Had I seriously been viewing the whole process through rose-colored glasses just because I was finally on the other side of it?
Apparently, yes. And yes.
In my sophomore novel, Some Other Time, a butterfly effect, second-chance romance about a woman who, on the brink of divorce, wakes up to an alternate version of the present day—one in which she and her husband were never married—and has the chance to see how the world could have unfolded through a different course in time, I created a protagonist who struggles with the idea of choice. Did she make the right ones in her past? What might have happened if she’d picked just a few different choices along the way? Would her whole story have changed? For worse? For better? There was no way to know—not unless she set off on an introspective journey to find out.
And maybe, to some degree, that’s what writing a novel is, too. It’s not just the final story—that pitch-perfect and cleanly-edited draft or the beautifully bound book that you and (hopefully) readers can hold—that matters. What matters the most is the blank page where you start. What choices, out of all the seemingly infinite ones available to us fiction writers, will you make to get your message across? To get your characters—whichever ones you decide are significant enough to hang around—to where they need to be. To make this world you believe in feel believable and important to everyone else.
“So?” my husband asked me later that night once I finally closed my notebook. “What’d you find?”
“I kind of forgot that, at the start, it was a mess,” I admitted. “Until I figured out which choices felt right, I guess.”
And then I did that thing every writer with a story brewing in her head eventually does: peeled open my laptop despite my uncertainties, clicked my current book document back to life, committed to a few small choices, and then patiently watched as a new piece to my story—even though it was still rather rough and messy—began to reveal itself to me across the page.
Check out Angela Brown's Some Other Time here:
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Angela Brown is the author of Olivia Strauss is Running Out of Time. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Real Simple, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Angela lives with her husband and two young children in New Jersey, where she is currently at work on her next novel. (Photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)
