Building a Creative Handbook.
What is a Creative Handbook?
A creative handbook is basically your own personal encyclopedia of writing stuff. You fill it with anything and everything that helps you in your writing: names, tips, writing prompts, world building and character development, story titles, research questions, and anything else you want to remember. It’s your go-to for when you need to name a character or are building a wonderful new world for those characters or need to think of a better way of phrasing something. Anything that you know will help you right now or something you think might help you in the future, add it.
Here is a handy list of things to include in your Creative Handbook:
Names – characters, towns, cities, bodies of water, businesses, planets, countries, story titles, chapter titles. As you can see, I have my character names organized into different categories and lists that I’ve found online.
Writing and dialogue prompts – add any prompt that tickles your plot bunnies. I have my favorite writing and dialogue prompts lumped together in the same section and I keep them straight by writing the dialogue prompts in red and the writing prompts in black. I also have a weakness for regional gothics, so I hand copy the ones that I like and put them in this section. I even found that post about places where reality is a bit altered and put it in there, too.
Fantasy and medieval (if you write that type of stuff) – occupations for fantasy characters, questions to ask yourself about your magic system if your story has one, types of potions and ingredients, list of royal ranks and forms of address, info on dragons and their powers, ect.
Things related to the human body – symptoms of various conditions and illnesses you might be likely to use, PTSD symptoms, the physical limitations of the human body, human decomposition, types of kinesis and super powers. I even have a page on the value of human organs on the black market.
World building – this is one of my favorite parts of writing. You can build worlds and planets and cultures from the ground up and the only limitation is your own imagination. Include info on creating religions, food, class systems, marriage traditions, family and societal structures, occupations, geography, transportation, social taboos, government, magic, flora and fauna, ect. I could go on and on about world building, but I’ll leave it at this.
Character development – villain motives, signs of an abused character, fun ways for your character to be wrong, ect.
Synonyms – better ways of saying and describing things. The first thing I have in this section is an extensive British-to-American dictionary for when I write British characters.
Tips and helpers – different ways of beginning a story, how to translate emotions into written body language, show-not-tell tips, punctuation helpers, and literally anything else that helps you!
Terms and definitions you want to remember:
Recipes and menu ideas – if you like to go into detail about the food in your stories, browse the web or look through cookbooks and magazines (preferably ones with pictures of the food) and save, print, clip, or copy them for future reference. I have my recipes in a separate folder because I’ve accumulated so many.
You also need a miscellaneous section for things that don’t fit anywhere else. To give you an idea, here are a few things that I have in my Misc. section: Dualities that replace good an evil, murder terminology in layman’s terms, non-romantic story plot ideas, a list of future election years going up to 2464, city and town suffixes, skills a character should know to survive an apocalypse, the tornado rating scale, info on hurricane rating and how they form, meteor terminology, obscure color words, and vocabulary words and their definitions that I like.
I also have this page protector in the very back of my Handbook that’s full of little useful things that I’ve clipped from magazines and a (really) old encyclopedia.
I find most of the stuff that I add to my Creative Handbook from Tumblr, Pinterest, and Wikipedia, but there are worlds of other great resources out there. You can make your Handbook out of a notebook if you want, but I’ve found that the best way to do it is with loose-leaf paper and a binder. This way, you can add, remove, and organize stuff much easier. I highly recommend starting with one that’s bigger than you think you’ll need because I started out with a small handful of pages in a pronged folder and now I’ve filled up a 1 ½” binder and I’ve started on another one! Keep things neat and organized with tabbed dividers.
This is my Creative Handbook:
I’ve been building up this Creative Handbook since I was 15…I am now 23 and it’s still growing! You can decorate yours however you want. You can add stickers, punch it up with washi tape, use different colors of paper. The sky’s the limit! I hand write most of the stuff in mine, but when I come across something that’s really long, I’ll either print it directly from the website, or if it’s a Tumblr post, I’ll open my word processor and type it out, then print it.
If you decide to make one or if you already have one, please share your pics! I would love to see them!
