Source 1
Essentially, a writer’s notebook is anything that you observe or feel a twinge of inspiration from as you go about your day. Your notebook might be filled with journal like entries (records of your day and/or emotions), lists of items, a recipe you like, a sentence you took in through reading, listening, or talking.
How to Keep a Writing Notebook: A Peek into the Notebooks of Famous Writers & Thinkers
In her excellent blog post on writers’ notebooks, Nicole Bianchi offers visual examples of well known artists’ diaries (Leonardo DaVinci, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck) as well as brief overviews of how each on fit into that writers’ creative body of work.
Sources 2 & 3: From the Paris Review
The literary magazine The Paris Review offers a wealth of information on the topic of how writers work. For decades, the magazine has offered interviews with poets, writers, and playwrights. If you have a favorite writer, it is well worth your time to see whether or not an interview was made with him/her/them. For the purpose of this discussion on keeping a writer’s notebook, we will consider fiction writer Sarah Gerard’s contribution to the Paris Review’s “Daily” column (also recommended).
Here are two posts that detail why Gerard finds a writers’ notebook invaluable to her and how she uses them:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/08/28/on-keeping-a-notebook-part-one/
In this first Daily article, Gerard writes about burning her old notebooks (beginning writers often take dramatic stances) when she moved to New York City and the strangeness of what she ended up recording. (Subway directions, etc.) She also refers to an essay by Joan Didion “On Keeping a Notebook,” who states that a writer’s notebook contains “something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/08/29/on-keeping-a-notebook-part-2/
In Gerard’s second Daily article, she further explores the content of her notebooks . Gerard looks back at her journal and realizes she is looking at things she has overheard and then realizes she’d begun to intersperse her own lines and reactions. The point here is, don’t compare your individual jottings to the notebooks of famous writers You are getting into the habit of recording your observations and experiences so that you in turn become more aware of them. Like the Rumi poem on this site: “don’t go back to sleep.”