Scraps Of Paper

I have recently fallen in love with scraps of paper. At my job, we recycle paper by cutting the sheets into quadrants and using the back sides of them to write notes. I have used them to jot notes to myself before, but I recently grabbed a handful of them and spent a lunch break writing down a character biography and loved it. I like that I can fill one up quickly and move on to the next one and it's no big deal. It makes it easy to start since there is not a whole page staring at you.

I wanted to sketch out maps of the areas in my stories, and used these scraps to do those too. It was so much easier than using my notebooks. Even though I just use cheap spiral notebooks, I am starting to fetishize them. I don't want excessive crap in them. I want stories or story ideas to be collected in there. I try to fight those feelings, but it's hard.

Scraps of paper, though, are easy to throw out. We are never in short supply of them, and if I don't like what I write or draw, I never have to see it again, not even by accident. It also feels really nice having a pile of them collected. They are a confidence booster, seeing how much I've done up just as notes, all laid out before me.

And on that subject, I love that my scraps are so easily moved. Whatever piece of information I want to look at, I can pull up. I can find them really quickly and I can put anything I want side-by-side. It grants a freedom I didn't even know I wanted.

If you've tried everything else (and even if you haven't), try using scraps of paper to write on. The only concern you'll ever have is keeping them so that they they don't blow away in the wind. Also, remember to number sequential scraps; ignoring that is really unpleasant.