I find it helps to intentionally "break it in". Draw something silly, write a bad poem, write a journal entry upside down, freehand a chart/page layout with bad lines, etc. Do something to make it no longer "perfect" to get yourself out of the mindset that the paper pretty notebook deserves a level of care and attention you find exhausting and ultimately disappointing when you can't keep an insane standard of care.

What makes them nice is the experience of writing on them. Not that the writing in them is a certain quality. Do you go back to your spiral bound notebooks? What if that content were in nice notebooks, would that change your behavior? I'll bet it depends on the content, not the paper it's written on.

If you stop writing in them as soon as your writing devolves, let it do that immediately and keep writing. If you want a perfect notebook, the only way to do that is to exhaustively transcribe from another source, and who has the time to do that?

The point of a notebook is to write on it, fancy or plain. If you enjoy the experience of writing on fancy paper, treat that as the goal instead of creating something worthy of the paper. Paper, even expensive paper, is cheaper than the time you spend writing on it. Ergo, give your writing time the paper it deserves, rather than giving the paper the content it "deserves".

TLDR: Immediately "ruining" the paper can free up your mental block on wasting it. You bought nice paper to write on, but paper quality should not dictate the quality of what goes on it. Unused paper is more wasteful than messy writing.

I've been collecting notebooks that I would "definitely write in someday" that several nice journals have been given to my five year-old, who gleefully scribbles all over them.

I'd use whatever you feel comfortable writing in. Over the years, it gets irritating to realize I've started several nice notebooks, just to go back to the spiral bound, and I'm hanging onto mostly-unused stuff.

I have some small moleskins that are fancy and slowly filling with my jumbled thoughts. I try to keep it to specific topics per notebook, which helps me to not get frozen when writing in them. They are, ultimately, just paper, and if theres a string or collection of thoughts or writings that i want to have as a collective unit i rewrite them (with actual readable handwriting) into another notebook.

I wish I could just treat nice notebooks as paper, but they absolutely paralyse me. I do hoard a lot of them since I use fountain pens so I get obsessive about paper. I get a few pages in and then get cross about how untidy it is and stop using it. A good pad however and I am away flying, happily messy and notes everywhere. Best case scenario is a pad with fountain pen friendly paper.

My favourite notebooks for fountain pens are Claire Fontaine notebooks/paper. They are not too expensive and are so good to write in, the pen just glides over the paper.

I also have a stack of cheaper notebooks from Muji which is a Japanese mini department store that sells a small range of everything at a reasonable price.

I've also purchased some some handmade beautifully bound leather notebooks from Japan. When I received them, they were so nice that I couldn't bare to write in them.

I don't write much at all these days but I used to need to take notes I could carry on me. Since I was much more likely to take notes and enjoy writing if I used a fountain pen I ended up with very nice paper too. I have journals I never got to because they were so nice it felt like a waste to use them but even my "crappy" journals that I actually used at work were the high quality paper. I have hundreds of pages of dumb notes about all sorts of work related things that I've written on very fancy paper with a $200+ custom ground cursive italic nib, it's kind of silly.

If you're looking for a good company that uses high quality paper: https://odysseynotebooks.com/

i admire anyone who can use a fancy notebook.

for many years i have bought them (for writing and sketching) i always think THIS time!! ...and i tend to become totally overcome with anxiety and shelving the book lol

for this reason i prefer loose leaf in binders or spiralbound books. anything else causes problems for me.