Noteworthy: Elspeth Wilson
Author Elspeth Wilson shares her notewriting secrets
Elspeth Wilson is a writer and poet whose writing has been shortlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize and the Penguin Write Now scheme. She also writes the newsletter , creating an archive of writing tips, thoughts on craft and the publishing industry all through interviews with neurodivergent authors.
Following her poetry pamphlet, Too Hot to Sleep, Elspeth’s debut novel, These Mortal Bodies is described as a richly atmospheric campus novel perfect for fans of The Secret History and dark academia; an intoxicating story of obsession, infatuation and toxic friendship in the world of the elites, where rules are made to be broken. Publishing in July, it’s available to pre-order here.
For the longest time, I didn’t open any of the multiple notebooks I’d been gifted by various kind (too kind!) friends and family over the years. They sat on a designated spot on the shelf, pretty and decorative, some of them still in their plastic wrappers. I wanted to write – and I did write on the bus using the notes app on my phone – but something about the fancy notebooks with their patterned covers and golden sprayed edges made me afraid to use them. I thought I needed to wait until I had something ‘worthy’ to write in them. I was saving them for best, I suppose.
Then, my dad was getting rid of some old cheap ring bound notebooks and asked if I wanted them. I’d been meaning to get more into writing on the page anyway, after attending a transformative course on creative writing with Write Like a Grrl! These completely non-aesthetic notebooks turned out to be just the thing I needed to make journalling and note-taking a regular habit. That was in 2019, and I’ve been writing for fifteen minutes most weekday mornings ever since. I write whatever is in my head really; to-do lists, funny dreams, worries about the day/month/year ahead.
Funnily enough, the liberation of having a less aesthetically pleasing notebook just for scribbling has made me actually use my nice, gifted notebooks. Now, I use my pretty notebooks for making notes that I might return to in writing workshops I attend. At the moment, I’m using a smart, faux-leather bound notebook I got for my 21st birthday – it’s only taken me about ten years to get round to using it! Still, whenever I travel it’s whatever crappy notebook I’m using for my journalling that I take with me.
Any kind of daily writing habit […] will help massively with your writing.
Sometimes I just can’t figure out a problem when I’m not writing by hand! Then I have to turn to my notebooks. I have multiple entire notebooks which are just filled with pages and pages of notes for my debut novel, These Mortal Bodies. It’s cool to look back at them now and see how far the work has come! Also, I just think having any kind of daily writing habit, even if (as in my case) it mostly involves the mundanities of your life will help massively with your writing and the discipline that is necessary to create work.
It usually takes me about three to six months to fill in my ‘everyday’ notebooks and a lot longer for my fancy ones that I reserve for workshops. I feel a connection to whoever gave me my nicer notebooks so I guess any of them could be my favourite because they make me think about who gave it to me. Sometimes that person might not even be in my life anymore because I was given it so long ago and it has taken me forever to get round to using it – that kind of feels bittersweet when that happens.Â
If I had to pick a single favourite, I’d say it’s my ‘One Line A Day’ journal which was my birthday gift from my mum a few years ago. It pretty much does what it says on the tin; there’s space for five years’ worth of entries for each calendar date.
Although I don’t necessarily always write my entry on the day or even the day after, I have stuck to it consistently. When I go away, I use my notes app to write about my day and then transfer that to the journal when I get back.Â
Now that I’m three years in, I’m starting to see patterns (or at least things I can make into stories!). There’s one day where I’ve had a cold every day for three years. Another where I’ve been away on holiday for the same week in October for three years without planning it! There are days where I’ve written how down and lonely I’ve felt but when reading the entry I barely remember that at all, the feelings having subsided and their cause receded. There’s also little moments of joy that I remember well but only because my memory has been jogged.
The crucial thing for my journalling is to have a notebook that is nothing special to look at. It has to be lined, otherwise I just end up writing completely diagonally, but otherwise it doesn’t matter what it’s like as long as it’s not particularly pretty. And for my nice notebooks that I use for workshops, I just work my way through the backlog, picking whatever I feel called to at the time. I think I’m coming to the end of the notebooks I was given as presents for the last 15 years though so I need to come up with a new system!
Even though I feel like they’re ephemeral, I have a shelf full of them and I date them from and to so I know which period in my life they come from! For my journals this seems a bit futile because I’m not sure I could even read my own writing. But still, I like having a portal (albeit a very scrawly one) back to whatever I was thinking about in the past.
Sometimes when I’m having a rubbish day I will try and console myself with the thought ‘at least this will inspire my writing!’ If I miss my bus and it’s a massive pain, I will try and think what one of my characters would feel about that situation. Obviously, there’s lots of lovely things that inspire my writing too (My dog! Walking! Nature! Swimming in the sea!) but I don’t believe we get to pick and choose really. The bad to mid experiences will end up in your practice just as much as the good, even if it’s in rejection of them.
Thank you Elspeth!!
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I love the idea of reading notes on other writers notebooks! Thanks for sharing 😊