Lines, Dots, Blank or Grid?

Which type of notebook page is most conducive to your creative thinking?

In a conversation with some writer friends, I mentioned that the pages of my ‘habit notebook’ (the notebook I carry everywhere, not the ones for drafting novels) are not lined but dotted. ‘Somehow,’ I said, ‘my pen feels more free in tracking wherever the thought or the words take me - which means my mind is then more free to go further.’

Some writers I know are free and happy with blank pages, others drop any notebook like a hot brick that has anything except the right width of lines. If I’m remembering the Brussels part of my childhood correctly, those educated in Belgium or France probably default to (or furiously refuse) gridded pages.

The thing is, like many people who’ve suffered a ruthlessly academic education, my left-brain tends to dominate my thinking (more on the left-and-right brain model here). My mind needs all the help (or at least, not hindrance) it can get to break out of orderly, linear, sequential, left-brain ways of thinking.

You’d think blank pages would be ideal, but practicality matters too: I have big, messy handwriting, and this is my everyday, do-it-all, habit notebook that has to work adequately for everything. Bullet journalling is not for me - but it’s not irrelevant that, as in the picture, dotty notebooks are often listed as suitable for the one-notebook-to-rule-them-all brigade.

Dots are just enough to keep my continuous prose adequately tidy and organised, while not constraining me when my right-brain is in charge, and wants my hand to loop out and track in some other form what it’s coming up with. These include:

• mind-maps

• family trees

• relationship trees

• sketch-maps

• drawings

• spider-diagrams

• clusters

• rhymewells

• standalone phrases my mind comes up with

• standalone titles my mind comes up with

• overhearings

• diagrams of ideas

• bullet-points of the stages of a scene or a character arc

• notes I make using indentations, bullets, arrows etc.

• free-writing

• paragraphs or pages of continuous prose

• ‘zero draft’- type writing

• moves, changes, re-orderings, or deleting-without-vanishing of any of the above

• and, OK, shopping lists, present lists, phone numbers, email addies, and a note of that business expense when I paid cash but forgot to get a receipt for it to keep HMRC happy … all of which are so much quicker recorded with a pen than with a tiny phone keyboard.

Collectively, I think of all these* as ‘imagining on paper’. It’s a more helpful and productive way to think of them than ‘plans’ - and particularly so if you’re a pantser whose imagination shuts down if it’s asked to work within pre-ordained lines (see what I did there?).

Not, of course, that this kind of thing is only useful before you embark on a first draft. As I explored here, such planning imagining-on-paper can be part of the process at any stage of a writing project. The bullet-point kind of micro-imagining-on-paper can even be key to writing more productively, as in Rachel Aaron’s famous post about how she went from writing 2,000 to 10,000 words a day.

Trust me, that post is really worth reading (I explored why here) if only as an insight into how writing happens; for example, both free-writing and micro-imagining-on-paper can be helpful for getting out of the don’t-know-what-to-write-next ruts of writer’s block.

But every writer is different - and now I’m about to start ordering the exclusive Itch of Writing notebooks that I’m thrilled to send Super-Supporters** when they so generously subscribe to the Itch at founding member level. As it happens, I’m able to offer them a choice of inner pages, but that’s got me wondering about why each of us chooses the kind of notebook pages that we do.

Then a friend reminded me that Substack has a Survey option - so for a bit of fun (all right, sheer nosiness!) I’d love to know your answers to four quick question:

I’ll leave this open for a couple of weeks for all subscribers who want to take part, and then report on the results.

As I said, the survey’s a bit of fun, but when it comes to your creative habits, I do think that it’s well worth occasionally asking your writerly self why?:

• What does the habit facilitate?

• What are its drawbacks? (In my case, that notebooks with dotty pages are a rarity in high street shops and usually only in more expensive ranges)

• Might a different habit facilitate a different thing, and have different drawbacks?

• Would that different habit be worth trying?

The thing is, when I first described my taste for dotty notebooks, a very good writing friend said, ‘Hmm...much as I'm intrigued by the dots thing, it makes my brain explode a bit to imagine writing that way! I would always go for lines.’

But when I described what I feel the dots help me with - much as I did at the top of this post - she said, ‘I want to try the dots now! It fascinates me... the idea of things feeling “more free”.’

What might help you to feel more free, when you’re imaging on paper?

Don’t forget that until the end of this day of posting, 6th December 2025, there’s 20% off all new paid subscriptions: just follow the link in that post. Substack doesn’t have the facility to do the same for existing free subscribers who upgrade to paid, but if that’s you, just upgrade by the ordinary route and I’ll gladly add a complimentary three months to your subscription term.

*OK, all those are imaginings-on-paper except the last one. My business expenses are definitely not imagined, and nor are my friends’ emails and addresses.

**Super-supporters also get a signed copy of one of my books, some other Itchy goodies, and every year a half-hour, one-to-one Zoom to discuss anything about their writing which would be useful.