Keeping a Folklore Notebook for Creative Writing

Why Put Pen to Paper

British folklore rarely arrives neatly packaged. It turns up as a rhyme your grandmother muttered when the sky went yellow, a village name that sounds as though it ought to belong to a giant, a story told in a pub by a man who swears it happened to his uncle in 1974. These fragments are the raw material of fiction, but they evaporate within a day unless they have somewhere to land.

A dedicated notebook — paper, not a phone — does two things. It slows you down enough to notice detail, and it keeps everything in one place, so that a saying collected in a Norfolk churchyard can sit beside a plot idea scribbled on a train. The physical object also becomes a record of your own reading life: six months in, you can see what you were drawn to and what you kept circling back to.

Choosing and Setting Up Your Notebook

Anything pocket-sized will do, provided it survives being rained on. A5 is comfortable for longer notes; A6 fits a coat pocket, which is the only size that actually gets used. Choose ruled pages if your handwriting sprawls, plain if you like to sketch floor plans, gravestones or the shape of a hedge.

Set it up in ten minutes and you will save yourself hours later:

• Leave the first three pages blank for a contents list. Number every page as you go.
• Use the front for capture and the back for a running index, written sideways so it does not confuse you.
• Agree on a few symbols and keep them simple: a star for a story seed, a square for place lore, a circle for sayings and dialect, a cross for anything you want to verify.
• Write the date and place at the top of every entry. Folklore without provenance is just a nice sentence.

What to Capture

The trick is to record more than the story and less than a transcript. Aim for the details that carry scent and texture:

• Sayings and idioms — "as thick as thieves", "raining stair-rods", "never cast a clout till May is out". Note who said it, their age, and where they grew up.
• Place names and field names — Gallows Hill, Cut-Throat Lane, the Nine Ladies. Names are plots waiting to happen.
• Customs and calendar dates — wassailing, well-dressing, mummers' plays, the first cuckoo, the last sheaf. Note what happens, who takes part and what has changed.
• Weather lore and omens — red sky, magpies, solitary swans, a cat washing behind its ears.
• Ghost stories, family legends and tall tales — including the ones told with a wink. The wink is part of the folklore.
• Objects and textures — a hagstone on a windowsill, a horseshoe nailed point-up, a jar of buttons. Physical detail is what makes a fictional world feel lived in.

Organising Without Stifling Yourself

The great danger of a folklore notebook is that it becomes a filing cabinet and you stop writing. Resist tidiness for its own sake. The commonplace books kept by readers and writers for centuries were messy, personal and cross-referenced in ways that only made sense to their owners — and that is exactly the point.

Two habits keep the mess productive. First, index by theme, not by source: water, thresholds, strangers, the dead, gifts, bargains, roads. Folklore is built from recurring motifs, and you will start to see the same pattern in a Cornish tale and a Suffolk one. Second, review once a month with a pen in hand. Read the month's entries and add a single line at the bottom of each: what does this remind me of? That line is where stories begin.

Turning Notes into Drafts

When you want to write, don't start from a blank page. Open the notebook and pick one entry that still gives you a small jolt. Then ask a few questions of it.

• Who would be most damaged by this story being true?
• Whose version of events is missing from the account you collected?
• What if the custom were performed wrong, or performed today, by someone who only half understands it?
• What happens the year the tradition stops?

Write a one-paragraph version — no more than 150 words — in the notebook itself, directly under the note. Keep the original fragment intact above it, so you can see the gap between what you were told and what you invented. When a paragraph keeps pulling at you, move it to a screen or a second notebook and expand it there. Ten entries a month, and you will have a queue of drafts rather than a pile of curiosities.

A Note on Courtesy

Most of what you collect will come from people rather than books, and they deserve care. Ask before writing anything down. Explain that you are a writer, not a journalist. Record names only with permission, and never publish a story that someone told you in confidence, however good it is. Some things belong to a family or a village and are not yours to give away. Note also where a story has already been printed, so you can check a version later and see how it has shifted.

Kept honestly and kept close, a folklore notebook becomes more than research. It becomes a portrait of a place as it is now, halfway between what people believe and what they say they believe — which is precisely the territory fiction works best in.