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Jumpstart Your Journaling: A 31-Day Challenge. Journal Writing Ideas. Keeping a Writer's Journal: 21 Ideas to Keep You Writing. Keeping a Writer's Journal: 21 Ideas to Keep You Writing by Sheila Bender Return to Creative Nonfiction · Print-Friendly Version.

Keeping a Writer's Journal: 21 Ideas to Keep You Writing

10 Journal Keeping Ideas that Will Enhance Your Life. What should I write about?

10 Journal Keeping Ideas that Will Enhance Your Life

Will it sound dumb? Will I run out of ideas before I even get started? Keeping a journal can be a rewarding experience, but lots of people don’t know where to begin. Perhaps the best way is to decide what kind of journaling you want to do, though this isn’t always easy. There are all kinds of different strategies, ideas, and purposes behind journaling. My personal favorites are reflection and goal journals, but everyone has a different favorite. And that’s okay! 1. There was a green robot.

Dream journals are a lot of fun. 2. 80 Journal Writing Prompts. Art Journaling 101. Technique Tutorials, Inspiration and Prompts. Art journaling is a fantastic hobby for people who enjoy being artistic, and when you finish a journal it is so satisfying to look through the beautiful and varied pages you've created.

Technique Tutorials, Inspiration and Prompts

I especially love journals that incorporate a wide range of media and texture experiments because these journals are literally bursting at the seams and are so fun to look through! You can use a huge number of different materials in your journal, and you can really let your creativity run free without judgement. The most popular materials are pens (markers, felt tips, micron pens etc) and paints (acrylic, watercolor, oil etc), although I've seen everything from salt to tea bags being used!

Art Journaling. Creative Journaling. Journaling-your-past.pdf. The 7 Benefits of Keeping a Daily Journal. Though I typically write several thousand words a week, I have never been a consistent journaler.

The 7 Benefits of Keeping a Daily Journal

I’ve tried. I have friends who swear by it. It’s just never worked for me. Until recently. My wife Gail and I have been on an extended vacation for the past two weeks. When we arrived, Gail challenged me to keep a journal. So far, I have written daily for twelve days in a row. Here’s how journaling has worked for me in this setting. Gail and I get up at about 5:30 a.m. I might write about what I read in my Bible, a dream I had last night, an experience I had yesterday, or what I hope to accomplish today. The main thing is I am writing for myself rather than an audience. If I had to sum it up, I would say journaling has afforded me seven benefits. Process previous events. Will I stick with this after my vacation? The Importance of Keeping A Notebook. In her excellent book The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft and Creativity Louise DeSalvo talks about the power of keeping a notebook (different from her tip of keeping a “a process journal“).

The Importance of Keeping A Notebook

She gives the example of how Joan Didion uses her notebook: “Into her notebook, Didion writes descriptions of people she observes, random observations (the sign on a coat in a museum), facts she’s learned (the tons of soot that fell on New York in 1964), recipes (one, for sauerkraut).” Didion believes that a notebook is critical because it’s a record of “how it felt to be me” at a particular time. It’s a record of the people we used to be (as we are ever-evolving), she says. And we tend to forget these people we were. We tend to lose these parts of ourselves if we don’t have them written down. We think we’ll remember ourselves when we first tasted certain moments — especially big, loud moments. But, as Didion says, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” Famous Writers on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary. By Maria Popova Reflections on the value of recording our inner lives from Woolf, Thoreau, Sontag, Emerson, Nin, Plath, and more.

Famous Writers on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary

“You want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you,” Madeleine L’Engle counseled in her advice to aspiring writers. W.H. Auden once described his journal as “a discipline for [his] laziness and lack of observation.” Magical Mornings: How to start your day with more creativity, serenity, and insight — Better Humans. Each morning our return to waking life is marked by a unique mental state.

Magical Mornings: How to start your day with more creativity, serenity, and insight — Better Humans

In those first minutes of our day, our minds are in an estuary between the dream world and 3rd dimensional consciousness. Like an aquatic estuary, it’s ripe with nutrients and lifeforms that you can’t find anywhere else. This in-between state of the mind can be used for greater creativity, serenity, and flow. For many years I squandered these golden minutes. Being overly concerned with productivity had me immediately sprint to my daily to do list. Like an engine, or a muscle group, your mind runs a lot smoother if it’s allowed to gradually warm up. Inversely, going from sleep to mental sprinting can send the nervous system into Fight or Flight mode. Meditation has become quite popular in the business world for it’s ability to train the mind towards clarity of thought. Hypnotists do their work by getting subjects to enter lower frequency brain waves states.

I started doing Morning Pages 292 days ago.