What I'm Working On: July 30, 2013

Buying a notebook for a writer? There’s so many to pick from, and you can opt for the one that best suits your recipient’s writerly type.

Writers who love the muse will appreciate fancy leather-bound ones. Ones to write spells and incantations in. Ones that tie up with a leather cord and whose thick pages drink in the ink. There’s a ton of these on Etsy; here’s a particularly nifty-looking one. Here’s a vegan alternative as well.

Writers who like to make lists may enjoy notebooks with graph paper. These are good notebooks for your list and bullet-point writer. Does this writer love spreadsheets? Give them this. Or if they’re a gamer, get them a hexagonal one.

Nostalgic writers may like notebooks that call up memories of classrooms and scrawled pencil writing. Notebooks that could have held treasure maps or lists of the books you wanted to buy from the Scholastic catalog. Here’s a supercute little one for the programmer in your life.

Artist’s sketchbooks for those lucky writers who can draw as well as write — or maybe who just love a big blank page. Get ones with high-quality paper, where ink won’t bleed through. These are for your doodlers, the people whose notebooks have little faces and flowers in the margin. Poke around and look at different sizes. Maybe get them something huge or else so tiny they can slip it in a pocket.

Notebooks for pen lovers are usually ones with paper that take inks well, but actually, just get them pens of their favorite kind. Or perhaps a nice holder so they can carry their beloved pens about.

Notebooks for those writers conscious of their literary posterity should be a bit more formal. Get them a lovely personalized notebook with their name embossed on the cover. Or make your own by buying a notebook and decorating it for them. Write little notes of encouragement in the margins. Tell them how much you love their stories, how much you want to read them.

Are you a writer not sure what to do with all those notebooks people keep giving you? FInd out how to use them to spur your creativity and write things worthy of them in Fran Wilde’s online workshop, Journaling for Creativity, which happens next on Sunday, December 20, 2020, 1:00-3:00 PM Pacific Time.