This week’s addict emailed me a wonderful essay on why she loves notebooks, and how writing in them inspires her creativity. Here’s some photos of some of her notebooks:

“I guess you could say that I’m a notebook addict. My current favourite are Paperblanks which I mainly use as Writing Notebooks and Journals. I’ve always loved buying beautiful stationery and notebooks for school or work, but it wasn’t until about a couple years ago that my obsession with notebooks really began to take root. I’ve always loved writing and a couple of years ago I made a New Year’s resolution to write regularly and write down my ideas as they came to me instead of letting them slip away, in the hope that I might finally find the courage to write that novel. And it’s the only resolution, with the exception to not biting my nails, that I’ve stuck to. A resolution that kinda became a compulsion. I buy notebooks all the time because I know that I’ll quickly fill them up, sometimes I’ll fill one in a few days, others in a few months. And let’s face it, you can never have too many notebooks. If anything, I don’t have enough.

I love notebooks, the crisp cool feel of the page, and that slight musky earthy scent. It’s that new book smell. I could breathe it in all day. Between the fresh, blank, crisp pages, and that new book smell lies the promise of something great; that new page is my territory, my blank canvas or unused putty to shape and mould as I like. It’s on these pages that I get to draft new worlds.

I like to be organised especially when it comes to my writing and my notebooks help me do this. I write down my ideas for stories or any piece of dialogue or description that comes into my head. It started as being a way to organise my thoughts, and take note of anything I would probably have forgotten later on. Now I have twenty one notebooks filled with ideas and the ideas are even colour coded by order of preference and divided so that the front contains story ideas, and the back has random snippets of dialogue, description, or research.

I love writing in notebooks because I love the way my hand flows across the smooth paper (something you could never experience with a computer). I love watching the way the thoughts in my head start to come alive on the page. Mostly I love that the more that I write up the idea, the more inspired I become. The story starts to shape itself. I love feeling inspired. It’s one of the best feelings in the world; that feeling that you can do something, and I get that feeling almost every day. It is amazing.

I have idea notebooks. I have notebooks for random stuff, quotes, writing, words of the day, weather, characters, future titles, current projects, poems, book reviews or thoughts, and poetry I like. The list goes on. Sadly, the oldest notebook I have only dates back to 2011.

I only attached the pics of my Idea Journals because I have so many notebooks buried in various drawers and on my shelves, and I don’t think I could fit them all into one pic.”