A Writer’s Journal: journaling to cultivate your writing practice
"Like the steady drip that forms a stalactite, the daily commitment to putting words on the page forms your writing habit”
Journaling as a practice offers numerous benefits as a therapeutic outlet. It also serves as a space to document the events and emotions of daily life, creating a valuable archive to revisit (and maybe cringe at) in the future. It’s a valuable addition to a writer’s toolbelt: a safe space for self-expression and a private place to cultivate your writing abilities.
Here are some of the valuable facets of keeping a journal to cultivate your writing practice. And don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you to write every day.
Journal to make a habit of writing
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
- Virginia Woolf
“Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life”, according to Gretchen Rubin. Journaling can serve as a cornerstone of your writing practice through the simple act of habit-forming. Going through the motions of sitting down and writing—no matter what you’re writing—cultivates a writing habit.
Like the steady drip that forms a stalactite, the daily commitment to putting words on the page forms your writing habit. It helps shake off the second-guessing and self-editing so you can sit down and just write. Even on “unproductive days”, when you don’t touch your manuscript or work in progress, you’ve still written something.
With each entry you write, the writing muscle grows stronger. Through the repetition of putting pen to paper, or your fingers to the keys, you fall into a steady rhythm that nurtures your craft over time. Transforming an empty page becomes habit: just another part of your daily routine.
Journal to inspire authenticity in your writing
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear."
- Joan Didion
A journal is a living, breathing document; a treasure chest of memories, emotions, and experiences to weave into your stories. As Joan Didion said, putting your thoughts onto a page can help you understand them in a way that ruminating on them might not provide. A well-kept journal becomes bottled inspiration—events that may seem dull or incidental today almost always transform into something fascinating when reading back later. You don’t have to wait years; a single week can bring new perspectives to recent experiences.
At least some of this real-life stuff is bound to make their way into your writing: to make dialogue ring true; to have your character have an authentic-looking breakdown, to accurately reflect the thoughts and emotions that accompany any certain moment. If you practice articulating real events and real emotions in words, then describing fictional ones in an authentic way becomes easier. And if you ever write a memoir, your journal becomes more valuable still. Personal anecdotes, snippets of dialogue, and those raw emotions you spill out in jagged, frantic handwriting can breathe life into your writing practice.
Journal outside the box
“Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”
- Judy Garland
There are no rules. Seriously. Record your days’ events with bullet-points only. Express your emotions through drawing. Make your journal a collection of weekly shopping lists. Keep it in the form of video diaries. Paste in screenshots of your DMS, your emails, and record your life that way. Write in it once a day, or once a month, or once a year—it’s better than nothing.
I have an example from my own journaling practice.
I usually have about five journals on the go at any given time. There’s no category or theme for each journal—I write in the one I happen to pick up in the moment. Hopefully I never have a biographer, because it would be a nightmare to put it all in order.
I don’t do this because I’m quirky, but because I’m scatter-brained and misplace things constantly. This is what used to happen when I wrote in my journals linearly: I would lose a journal; I would buy a new one; I would find the lost journal, and never write in it again, because I had the new one. Repeat. One night I was looking at a gorgeous, barely-filled-in journal that I’d abandoned five years prior and thought, why can’t I write in this? Who says? Since then, I journal far more often, because I’ve taken the pressure off myself.
And as a side-effect, it is fascinating to read an entry from 2016 directly before an entry from 2022 and see how vastly life differs between each. Seriously, do what’s right for you—some good will come out of it.
Go forth and have fun journaling! I hope it’s as valuable to you and your writing practice as it has been to me and mine. And if you’re having trouble deciding what to write about, I’ve included some prompts that I’ve come up with for my own journaling practice below.
Writing Prompts for your Journal
1. Write a journal entry in narrative form: include scene-setting, dialogue, literary devices such as metaphor, etc.
2. Imagine your dream life – what would a single day look like? Write about that day as if it really happened.
3. Write a journal entry from the point of view of one of your characters.
4. Describe your day and/or your emotional state using only shapes and textures.
5. Write about your day, or a memory, but write it from the point of view of someone else who was present (this could be a friend or family member – or get more abstract: a tree, the sky).