Writers of the world…we all share this problem. You know.

This problem.

I can’t begin to tell you how many empty journals I own. Spirals, composition journals, leather bound, you name it. To me, they’re all beautiful and special, so special, in fact, that writing in them would ruin them. Mostly because my ideas just aren’t good enough or well-thought-out enough to put on those intimidatingly blank pages. I have a notebook titled “My Thoughts” yet none of my thoughts seem to be on the pages. It’s as if my own brain isn’t worthy of having its thoughts chronicled somewhere.

Surrender doesn’t come easily. I have tried to write random things in my notebooks, I haven’t managed to fill up a single one yet. Meanwhile, my iPhone notes are full of random thoughts, things I forgot I jotted down. It’s stuff like this:

Nonsense, right? To me, of course, all of it makes sense. I know the context after I’ve reread my notes (most of the time), and I can recall what I was thinking. Of course, I don’t always jot things down on my phone, sometimes it’s inaccessible. But I’ve thought of a way to overcome the journal problem: legal pads.

I discovered that with journals, there’s too much commitment. It feels final to put thoughts into a book that’s bound (no matter what way), but to put them somewhere ephemeral means they don’t have to be fully developed. In fact, I’ve taken to tearing out pieces of paper from my legal pad and stuffing them into journals. For some reason, this works. The legal pad papers are the first drafts of my ideas, and after that, I’m confident that the second draft at least deserves to be written down in a slightly more permanent place. I know the second time around, it will be better. The second time around, I will have thought about it more, I will have deemed it worthy to be thought about more than once.

If you struggle with this debacle, consider legal pads. They have all those easy to tear sheets of lined paper that you can use to get out all of your mediocre, infantile first thoughts. Then you can work them out in a notebook or journal and you won’t feel like you’ve somehow disgraced an inanimate object. It seems silly, but it works. Sticky notes are another solution, but I find that my ramblings are too long for a paper that small.

Above all, don’t be afraid to write down your worst ideas, sometimes, it will lead you to your greatest ones.