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

(From The Writing World listserv)


KEEPING A WRITER'S JOURNAL: 21 Ideas to Keep You Writing
=================================================================
by Sheila Bender

Keeping a journal is one of the best tools to practice trusting
your writing and to make sure you keep writing. You can keep a
journal in a cheap or an expensive notebook, on scraps of paper
dropped into a box, in computer files or in letter form. Just as
long as you write as much and as often as you can without editing
yourself and you have access to the words you've written, you are
keeping a journal.

If you haven't been journaling or doing it as often as you wish,
think about where you write and when you are likely to have time
to write. If this is away from home, be sure the notebook you
choose is one you like carrying with you. Train yourself to keep
your notebook with you. If you are most likely to write at home,
keep your notebook in a place in your home where you like to sit.
If your favorite way to keep a journal is using a computer,
accommodate yourself by naming folders in ways that will amuse
you and make you feel good about opening them. If you use
different computers at home and at work, you might want to email
entries to yourself and keep them on one computer in one file.
There is also a wonderful software product out now called
LifeJournal. If you like to use your computer to journal, this
product provides prompts, inspirational quotes, a way to review
your journaling each week to find out what you've been dealing
with and a easy to use and thorough way to assign topics so you
can always retrieve what you've written about in certain areas.

It may seem intimidating to develop the journal-keeping habit,
and you may be thinking defeatist thoughts already, such as "I
can't do this regularly forever. I don't know how many times a
week I'll really remember," and so on. However, you can commit
to keeping your journal if you shorten the time of your
commitment and promise yourself you will not judge your efforts,
but just write. If you are already keeping a journal, you might
commit to using the ideas below sprinkled in among your regular
entries.

Make a specific commitment for a month. For example, tell
yourself that for this month you can make an entry every day or
every other day or perhaps on weekends or on Mondays and Fridays.
Write your commitment down in your journal, and then, whatever
you decided, make sure you write at least that often. You might
want to start the month off with an entry that describes why you
created the system you did and why you bought the notebooks and
pens or pencils or made the files or why you committed the
particular amount of time that you did. At the end of the month,
use your last entry to evaluate how your system worked for you.
Decide in that entry whether you want to stick with your original
system for another month, make some alterations in it, or move on
to a different system. After you write that last entry for the
month, reread your very first entry. How do your
end-of-the-month thoughts about journal-keeping compare to those
you wrote down at the beginning of your month? You might want to
write about the comparison.

Next, make a commitment to the same system or to a new
journal-keeping system for an additional month. Write this
commitment down in your journal and then keep your entries going
for another month. Do this month by month until keeping a journal
is a habit.

Here are 21 ideas to help make keeping your commitment
effortless:

Idea 1: A Travel Journal
------------------------
When you travel, write about your surroundings. Describe the
rooms, buildings, streets, landscapes, people, and activities in
which you are involved. Jot down dialogues and conversation.
Describe yourself in your new surroundings, being sure to show how
you react to the people around you.

Idea 2: Journal Your Journaling
-------------------------------
Choose an activity other than journal keeping and keep a journal
for several consecutive days about that activity. Some examples
might be: training a puppy, having a visitor, planting a garden,
or searching for the perfect gift for someone. Or take the same
walk on journal entry days and write about the walk each time you
take it. Whatever you do, capture your thoughts and behavior as
you do the activity you have chosen to journal about.

Idea 3: Word Meditations
------------------------
Locate five words from anywhere around you: your bulletin board,
a newspaper headline, a shopping bag, a warning label, or a card
in your wallet. Write each of the five words on a scrap of paper
and put the scraps in a bowl or hat. Choose one scrap and begin
to write about that word. Write for ten to twenty minutes without
stopping or editing yourself.

Idea 4: Tidbits, Odds and Ends
------------------------------
On some days you might just want to enter an apt phrase or
description or an ironic question that comes to mind. Leave them
as short paragraphs entered under dates. Someday you might
collect them under one title, such as "Winter Thoughts" or "What
My Mind Wandered to in Spring."

Idea 5: Your Writing Process
----------------------------
If you are engaged in writing anything -- a story, poem, essay,
play, or paper for school or for work -- make some entries about
your writing process. Be sure to say what your feelings are as
you begin, revise, and finish what you are working on. What
questions do you ask yourself? What are you learning that helps
you write? What do you think you are working against?

Idea 6: Poems
-------------
Do entries in the form of poems, even if you don't think what you
are writing about is poetic. Take what might seem prose-like and
chop the paragraphs into lines like a poem. When you see the
writing this way, you might find that images stand out, and with
some editing (such taking out extra words), you could have a rich
piece of writing.

Idea 7: Letters
---------------
Write letters you would never mail. Tell old boyfriends what
you'd like them to know now that you are older or wiser or
dumber. Tell family members or friends something you never told
them before. Tell a toy from childhood or a teacher from long
ago about something that makes you think of them now. Try
writing their letter back to you. Make a list of people and pets
and objects you remember from your childhood and make entries
from time to time in the form of ten- to twenty-minute freewrites
(where you keep writing without editing or stopping yourself)
about a person, pet or object on this list.

Idea 8: Worries
---------------
Sometimes unloading professional worries and goals into a journal
clears space for the writing self. You can allow one day a week
or a month for this kind of entry.

Idea 9: Revision for the Fun of It
----------------------------------
Choose something you have already written in your journal. Begin
to revise it, imagining an editor has asked you for a specific
kind of piece -- a memory piece, a poem, an essay on bus
riding -- and you have gone to your journal (inventory) to find
something and develop it. Don't worry about perfection. Instead,
try to make the revision into something that will interest the
editor.

Idea 10: Fellow Enthusiasts
---------------------------
Meet with someone who shares your interest in something --
gardening, fishing, knitting, reading, baking -- and then write
about your meeting with the person and the person's knowledge of
the topic.

Idea 11: Weather Center
-----------------------
Become sensitive to the weather and try describing the weather in
your journal entries. Put your eyes and ears to work on how the
weather affects the landscape, sky, people, animals, buildings,
and vehicles. Write it so that when you reread that entry, you
feel as if you are in the weather.

Idea 12: Writing From Where You Are
---------------------------------
Write entries that describe where you are as you write. Even if
you write from the same place every day, describe it as it seems
to you at the moment. Things change -- what is on the desk, out
the window, under your feet -- and you will become a keen observer.


Idea 13: Prompts
----------------
Challenge yourself to write using a prompt. For example, "The
last thing I ate before I sat down to write this entry was
_______ and the next thing I might eat is______. This is because
_______.

When I look up from the page, the first thing I see is_____. I
like/don't like this because_________.

If I could describe the place I am sitting to a set designer for
a movie or play, here is what I would say: ___________.

Here are five things I should not have put in the trash and why.

Here are five things I ought to put in the trash and why.

When I go to the White House for dinner, I always wear my
__________ and take along my _________. That way _________.

When the nightly news director put words under the shot of me to
identify me to the people, the words were ________. This is what
had happened: _________.

Write a list of five to ten prompts of your own that you can use
from time to time. Or ask a friend to invent some for you to use.

Idea 14: The Alphabet
---------------------
Make the alphabet your friend. Challenge yourself to put down
your thoughts entry by entry with titles that start, with each
letter of the alphabet for 26 continuous entries. Or challenge
yourself to start each entry itself for 26 days with words that
begin with the alphabet's letters in order. Or write 26
meditations, one each on each letter of the alphabet.

Idea 15: Reading Lists
----------------------
After you read books, write reviews of them in your journal.

Idea 16: Library Searches
-------------------------
Go to library online catalogs and investigate a subject and
writer. Search for some of the books. Write about your search.

Idea 17: Responses to Writers' Groups and Writers
-------------------------------------------------
Write about your creative writing class, your writers' group,
your reaction to a writer you are reading.

Idea 18: Radio or TV
--------------------
Turn on the radio or TV for twenty seconds. Write about what you
heard.

Idea 19: Other People's Entries
-------------------------------
Invent journal entries your friends or relatives or bosses might
write. If you are a fiction writer, invent journal entries your
characters might write.

Idea 20: Your Journal-Writing Employee
--------------------------------------
Invent a persona for your journal -- a character who is employed
as a journal writer for you, whose job it is to make entries on a
schedule you propose, someone whose creativity in dreaming up new
ways to approach the genre will be rewarded. Write the job
description in your journal. Write the interview with the job
applicant. Assign this persona a wardrobe, a history, a reason
why he or she wants this job. Write your new employee's entries.
Let him or her react to the world and the people around him or
her.

Idea 21: You Are of Age
-----------------------
Use the journal to write whatever it is you want to write! There
is no wrong way to keep a journal; it is for your eyes only or
for the eyes of exactly who you want to see it.

However you do it, you will probably come to an understanding as
the poet does in Lydia Davis' novel, The End of the Story
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). She considers a title for her
collection of material and thinks:

"The best possibility may be MATERIAL -- TO BE USED, which does
not go as far as to say that it is ready but only that in some
way it will be used, though it does not have to be used, even if
it is good enough to use."

If you learn to look at journal material the way Davis' character
does, keeping a journal becomes the best kind of inventory --
always there and never taxed. It might need some dusting off,
but that is part of the pleasure for a writer who reaches into
old material and begins to use it for essays, poems, articles and
stories.

>>-----------------------------------------------------<<

Sheila Bender is a writing teacher, poet, essayist, columnist and
the author of many books, the best known being books on personal
essay writing and journaling. She runs
http://www.writingitreal.com -- an online instructional and
informational magazine for those who write from personal
experience. Her latest book is "Writing and Publishing Personal
Essays". For more information, visit http://www.sheilabender.com/

Copyright (c) 2006 by Sheila Bender