Writers' notebooks: 'A junkyard of the mind'

[CupofJoe]

As the British Library puts huge swathes of writers' and poets' personal archives online on their Discovering Literature site, including papers from Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, novelist Lawrence Norfolk looks at the significance of the notebook to a writer.

From BBC News Website:
Writers' notebooks: 'A junkyard of the mind'

 

[Kristene Collins]

Just for fun, I signed up for, and am participating in, the MOOC Start Writing Fiction by the Open University UK. The course also encourages a writer's notebook, and in fact, several of the assignments (particularly the early ones) are supposed to be done using said notebook. Now, in all fairness, they said using a computer/smartphone to keep track of things was fine, as long as some sort of log was kept.

Seems to be a thing in the UK right now in fiction writing. Or maybe it always has been, I'm not in the UK and don't know.