ANDRE BEGIN

I’m no stranger to journaling. In fact, we go a long way back. I purchased my first one when I was eight years old. It was a little red book that I purchased from my neighbourhood pharmacy with the allowance money I had saved so preciously over several weeks.

Even though my original inclination was to use it as a diary, I only wrote in it occasionally about what seemed like trivia, even by my standards at that age. Even though the journal purchase itself could have been a sign of things to come, the hints of a budding writer only came later.

In university, the writing habit took off when I picked up a perfect specimen of a journal at the bookstore. This led to my first real musings as a creative, filling page after page with dreams, ideas and really bad poetry.

Through my working years, the next volumes of journals became the Times Square of everything going on in my head. Sometimes they served as gratitude journals. Sometimes they were my safe place to download my thoughts before they had a chance to fester into anxiety. Other times, they were a place where I jotted ideas for creative projects I might undertake down the road.

When I retired, I went back and started reviewing those notes, sometimes eliciting great interest when I could still see the potential of some of those brainstorms. It became an intriguing treasure hunt to reconnect with those nuggets of creativity but a needle in a haystack exercise at the same time.

The journals that made me want to write

Last year, I discovered a line of journals that took my breath away. The cover art sang to me as a perfect depiction of what the creative process meant to me. After buying about a dozen, rather than continuing down the road of an all-purpose journal, I decided to dedicate one volume to the capture of ideas for more elaborate writing projects. I simply called it “The Ideas Book”. I admit that it wasn’t a terribly innovative title, but its purpose was the important part.

Adjusting my processes

When it came to topics for blog articles, I was already quite happy with the running list I kept on my mobile device. It still works well for me given the relatively short time that a topic can spend within that inventory of ideas before they are turned into articles.

However, to me, ideas for projects of greater magnitude needed their own home. The Ideas Book seemed like the perfect place for them.

At first, it was a place to transcribe ideas from my old journals. To my great fascination, as I was doing that, ideas to improve upon or to complete those thoughts started percolating. As that thought process was happening, new ideas seemed to show up as well. Was this happening just because I had a special place to put them?

So many practical applications

When working on screenplays, The Ideas Book became my workbook, a place to doodle character names, location names and different twists in conflict or tension. The book became my home for story outlines, giving me an anchor to which I could refer during the writing process. It also offered me a place to brainstorm different possible outcomes to situations to find the one that aligns best with the overall vision of the story.

Whether ideas make the final cut or not is irrelevant. One never knows when a rejected idea for one story might be the magic ingredient needed for another one. The object is to keep jotting ideas to keep the creative energy flowing.

For one story, I needed clarity on the layout of the characters’ place of business, for the logistics of how and when the two main characters crossed paths to work seamlessly. That being the case, I sketched a detailed floor plan of their place of work in my book.

The book also became the repository for metadata material such as titles, loglines and elevator pitches that will be needed for marketing purposes later.

As well, it became a place where I have jotted down my goals and targets, to be able to easily refer back to them to ensure that my actions and efforts are aligned with those goals.

And the ideas kept coming!

What has been most fascinating is that since the designation of this journal for its unique purpose, it seems that random ideas hit me almost every day. It’s as if the ideas know that I have a safe place where they will be saved until their turn comes up to be developed into stories.

In doing so, outlining new stories and scripts seems to come more easily, as does the process of writing the story itself, with a whole volume of ideas and development work to which I can refer.

That being the case, I am glad that I purchased a stack of them because the first volume of The Ideas Book is getting full. Given the success I have experienced with the first Ideas Book, I will soon be dedicating a second volume to the task in the hope that the creative energy will continue to flow as freely as it did with the first.

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Sincere thanks for reading!
Have a great day,
André