Journaling | Why Writers Should Make It A Habit

As an aspiring author, writing comes naturally though not always easily. Creative writing is so much more than just simple writing. It’s detailed plotting and careful word choice, it’s dreaming up worlds and characters and making them as real and believable as possible. It’s loaded with stress and pressure and often bogged down by self doubt. Writing is hardly ever simple.

But what if it was? 

What if writers made an effort to dedicate part of their day to simple writing that is without pressure and not worth doubting themselves over? And what if it actually improved their creative writing? 

For many people, journaling has always been a practice worth dedicating their time to. My impression is that it’s had a bit of a surge in popularity in more recent years with much more conversation surrounding it. The journal itself has become an artistic expression for some people with the rise of bullet journaling to track, plan and muse over life and its happenings. For others, just filling pages with words is where the magic lies.

Journaling can be beneficial for every single person who tries it. It helps reduce stress and anxiety, improves memory and more. For writers, journaling can be particularly beneficial. 

 

Why Every Writer Needs to Keep A Journal

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Write Without Worry

How much time do writers spend not writing? Too much, from my own personal experience. It’s all too easy to sit staring at a page, trying to figure out where to go next in a story or where you’ve already gone wrong. It can be difficult to just dive right into a project when stress and self doubt pollute the experience and make it something you want to avoid. 

Journaling provides a way for writers to flex their writing muscle without any of the expectations. There’s no pressure to write well, to sound smart or funny or eloquent. A journal is completely private—your eyes are the only ones who should ever see it. Write about your day, write about ideas you have for other projects that are completely unpolished and undefined, write about how you feel, write about anything. You can keep a designated kind of journal (ex: a dream journal) but I’d recommend letting yourself explore any topic that comes to mind without any restrictions. It does not matter what you write, so long as you are writing. It will keep you sharp and there is a joy in doing what we love as writers solely for ourselves—no finished project or deadlines or expectations to keep in mind. You may even surprise yourself with what you end up writing about when there are absolutely no guidelines or pressure influencing you. Allow yourself the freedom to enjoy writing for the sake of writing.

Beat Writer’s Block

Writing freely without commitment to a project is a great way to beat writer’s block. Of course, if your writer’s block stems from concrete issues within your book, it won’t fix that. But if you sometimes find yourself staring at the page knowing full well what you need to accomplish within your WIP but just can’t get started, try journaling. Allowing yourself to write freely can be exactly what you need to get started. As I said, journaling can help reduce stress and anxiety, which may be a contributing factor in writer’s block, but it also gets the words flowing and can inspire creativity. You can write about anything or try writing about your issues within your WIP, just get the words out.

The extremely popular creative self help book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (which I own but have yet to read) popularized the idea of “morning pages” in which you write completely freely for three pages first thing in the morning. The idea, as I understand it, is to get the words and creativity flowing as well as emptying the mind of whatever is rattling around in there in stream of consciousness style journaling so that when you sit down to write (or to begin your day in general) you’re focused and ready to go. Many, many people (not just writers or “creative” people) swear by this method and have seen positive effects from incorporating it into their daily routines.

Improve Your Writing

As all writers know, the only way to become a better writer is to write. Write what you know and what you love, but don’t be afraid to go outside your comfort zone. For many writers, I can imagine journaling seems like a waste of time that could otherwise be spent writing something with an end goal. But journaling is practice. It’s an opportunity to explore different types of writing and expression that don’t revolve around a plot or genre. Any exploration of writing is a chance to improve.

Forming a habit of writing about yourself can be incredibly beneficial to fiction writing. Conveying thoughts and emotions of characters in fiction isn’t always simple. We’ve all read books where it feels shallow or just off like the author missed the mark with their own character. Journaling requires a focus on expressing yourself on paper in a way that feels true to your emotions and ideas. It’s a challenge, but one that makes you grow familiar with expression and articulating emotions firsthand which gives you a better understanding of how to best and most realistically express characters’ emotions. 

Journaling is often a very introspective experience. As I mentioned, it can decrease stress and anxiety because it’s reflective and focused, an opportunity to work through the experiences and feelings you have in a contemplative way. In working through them, you can begin to see things a little differently. A focus on relaying real life emotions and situations as you write through them (what happened, what set it off, how people reacted, how you reacted, what you wish you’d said, etc.) can help you see and write things in a big-picture way, which can benefit you as a storyteller. 

I would recommend journaling to every single person I meet. There are so many positives that come from it. Spending time writing about your day, your goals, your feelings, your plans—literally anything—is something I think everyone should make time for. It’s a way of spending time with yourself, to focus on yourself. It’s not silly or selfish, it’s healthy and so worth the time you give yourself. 

Especially for writers. 

Let me know what you think of journaling in the comments. Do you already do it? Would you try it?

Thanks for reading, 

Madison