Appreciation journal writing promotes positive thinking

In honor of Thanksgiving, here’s a post from the archives on bringing gratitude into your journal writing routine.

You might call your journal a notebook or diary. It’s the handy place where you store your thoughts, ideas, experiences, and your work, either on paper or in an electronic file.

A journal is an ongoing log, usually with dated entries. Some journals are topical (dream journals, travel journals, freewriting journals), while others are left open to explore just about anything.

Many topical journals are meant to improve the quality of life. For example, people who are working to lose weight might keep a diet and exercise journal. Folks who are trying to better themselves might keep a self-improvement journal. Parents may keep a journal of their child’s development. But there’s another type of journal that suits just about anyone, writers and non-writers alike, and that is the appreciation journal.

Journal Writing and Gratitude

The appreciation journal is a daily log in which you write something, or a list of things, for which you are grateful.

Here are five reasons why documenting what you’re grateful for can be beneficial:

1. A great way to start your day. It’s not always easy to roll out of bed and propel yourself into the daily routine. Some days it’s downright dreadful, like when you know you have to attend a long, boring meeting, take a test, or see the doctor. If you write in your appreciation journal in the A.M., it will jump-start your day on a positive note and a day that starts off good is less likely to turn sour.
2. Good for the soul. The process of thinking about what you are grateful for and expressing your gratitude just makes you feel good. This could be contagious, and other people around you might absorb some of that positive energy. This makes life better for everyone.
3. Promote positive thinking. Because the things for which you’re grateful are the positives in life, when you focus on them, you are directing your attention away from the negatives. According to some experts, concentrating on positive things draws even more positive things to your life.
4. Generate new thoughts and ideas. This is especially useful for creative people, like writers. Anytime you force yourself to sit down each day and think about something, the result is a string of thoughts and ideas. Some of these will be great fodder for articles, stories, and poems.
5. A great way to end your day. When it’s time to wind down and shift into relaxation mode, thinking about the good things in life will help you clear your mind and put you in a lighter, brighter mood. That’s a great way to prepare for a decent night’s sleep!

Over the years, I have kept an appreciation journal on and off. I find that after a few weeks of daily gratitude in my journal writing, being thankful becomes second nature. Though some days there’s not enough time to write down my thoughts, I try to start off each day by thinking about at least one thing that I’m truly grateful for. The result? My attitude is more positive, it’s easier for me to put a smile on my face (even when I’m dealing with adversity), and minor annoyances tend to roll off my shoulder. I just feel better overall.

Try it for yourself and see how beneficial journal writing can be!

Do you keep an appreciation journal or any other kind of journal? Have you ever written a list of things that you’re thankful for? What are they? Do you spend much time on your own journal writing?

Everything you ever wanted to know about journal writing

We usually understand a journal to be a place for writing about ourselves, but journals can be used for plenty of other purposes, many of which are especially useful to writers.

I’ve had my share of adventures in journal writing. As a teen, I kept a diary. Later, I had a poetry journal. I tried dream journaling, art journaling, and sometimes I keep a gratitude journal.

I believe journal writing is a huge boon to writers, especially when they are not working on a specific project or when they are in search of their next big project.

Tools and Resources for Journal Writing

It’s been said a million times: If you want to be a writer, you have to write. I would add that if you want to be creative, you have to create. Sitting around and waiting for a big, blockbuster idea won’t do you any good. You’ve got to practice. And keeping a journal is a great way to practice writing and creativity every single day.

What I love best about my own journal is that there are no rules there. It’s my own little creative space. I use it for freewriting, sketching, and writing down my thoughts. I don’t write in my journal every day, but before I started blogging and writing professionally, I was pretty diligent about using my journal for routine writing practice.

I’ve been poking around the web in search of some of the best resources for journaling with an emphasis on creativity and writing. Here’s what I found:

1. Journaling Saves has tons of great posts about journaling, and many are written in a reflective journaling style. The community there is friendly (and I love the site’s colors and design).
2. Having trouble with your creativity? Suffering from a writer’s block? Wreck This Journal will free you from the chains of inhibition and perfection.
3. Managed by a team of journal guides, Journal in a Box features a blog about journaling, home courses on journaling, and a line of journals that you can buy.
4. Not sold on journal writing? Here are 100 Benefits of Journaling.
5. I love this: 1000 Journals are traveling from hand to hand throughout the world.
6. Here at Writing Forward, we’ve talked a lot about writing groups, but did you know there are also journal groups? (I didn’t!)
7. This is my favorite journal: The Watson-Guptill Sketchbook. I’ve been using these for well over a decade and they house my most precious journal writing material (freewrites, poems, reflective journals, drawings). They come in various sizes and colors, have hard covers and blank pages.
8. If you keep a journal, you have the opportunity to create something every day. Okay, that link isn’t really about journal writing as much as it’s about art journaling, but I love the project (it promotes creativity), so go check it out.
9. Last but not least, this lovely little video explains the art of journaling and the freedom that a journal brings:

People use journals for a variety of purposes — for self-improvement, personal reflection, heritage preservation, creativity, tracking professional progress, and writing practice. Do you keep a journal? How has journal writing helped you? Got any journaling tips or resources to add to this list? Leave a comment, and keep journaling!

Reflective journal writing cultivates greater awareness

Technically, a journal is a chronological log. Many professionals keep journals, including scientists and ship captains. Their journals are strictly for tracking their professional progress.

A writer’s journal can hold many things: thoughts, ideas, stories, poems, and notes. It can hold dreams and doodles, visions and meditations.

Today, let’s explore a more intimate style of journal writing, one in which we write about our own lives.

Personal Journals

Some personal journals are diaries. A diary is merely an account of one’s daily activities and experiences. In a diary we record what we did each day.

A reflective journal is similar to a diary in that we document our experiences. However, reflective journal writing goes deeper than diary writing; it strives to gain greater understanding about our experiences rather than simply document them.

Reflective journals allow us to practice self-reflection, self-exploration, and self-improvement, and through reflective journal writing, we gain greater awareness through observation, contemplation, and writing. By chronicling various aspects of our lives, we become more self-aware.

Reflective Journal Writing

We all have stories to tell. With reflective journal writing, you write about your own life, but you’re not locked into daily chronicles that outline your activities or what you had for dinner. You might write about something that happened when you were a small child. You might even write about something that happened to someone else — something you witnessed or have thoughts about that you’d like to explore. Instead of recounting events, you might write exclusively about your inner experiences (thoughts and feelings). Often, reflective journal writing reveals tests we have endured and lessons we have learned.

The Art of Recalibration (by Kristin Donovan, who is a sisterly spirit but no relation) is a perfect example of reflective journaling in which a stories about our lives are interwoven with our ideas about life itself.

Reflective journal writing has other practical applications, too. Poetry and stories can evolve from reflective journaling. And by striving to better understand ourselves, we may gain greater insight to others, which is highly valuable for fiction writers who need to create complex and realistic characters. The more deeply you understand people and the human condition, the more relatable your characters will be.

Do You Keep a Journal?

I guess I’m a journal slob because my journal has a little bit of everything in it – poems, drawings, personal stories, rants, and reflections. It’s mostly full of freewrites though. I realize that a lot of writers don’t bother with journals at all; they want to focus on the work they intend to publish. But I think journal writing is healthy and contributes to a writer’s overall, ongoing growth.

I once read a comment on a blog by a writer who said she didn’t have a journal because she couldn’t be bothered with writing down the events of each day; I found it curious that she had such a limited view of what a journal could hold. A journal doesn’t have to be any one thing. It can be a diary, but it can also be a place where we write down our ideas or plans. It can hold our thoughts and feelings, but it can also be a place where we doodle and sketch stories and poems.

I’m curious about your journal. Do you keep one? What do you write in it? Is your journal private or public? Is it a spiral-bound notebook or a hardcover sketchbook? Does journal writing inspire or inform your other writing projects? Tell us all about it by leaving a comment, and keep on writing!

Journal writing can help you develop good habits

The more you write, the better your writing becomes. That’s not an opinion; it’s a fact. Experience breeds expertise, so if you write a lot, you’ll become an expert writer.

Ideally, you’ll write every day.

Writers who come to the craft out of passion never have a problem with this. They write every day because they need to write every day. Writing is not a habit, an effort, or an obligation; it’s a necessity.

Other writers struggle with developing a daily writing habit. They start manuscripts, launch blogs, purchase pretty diaries and swear that they’re going to make daily entries. Months later, frustrated and fed up, they give up.

When weeks have passed and you haven’t written a single word, when unfinished projects are littering your desk and clogging up your computer’s hard drive, you can give up entirely and take out a lifetime lease on a cubicle in a drab, gray office. Or, you can step back, admit that you have a problem, and make some changes.

Journal Writing

One thing sets successful writers apart from unsuccessful writers: commitment. When you’re committed to the work, your chances for success increase exponentially. And one of the easiest, most natural, and creative ways to commit to your own writing is to keep a writing journal.

Writers who are not working at the professional level are juggling their writing projects with a full-time job, families, school, and a host of other obligations. Writers also get stuck. You’re working on a manuscript and then one day, the ideas just stop flowing. You decide to step away for a day or two, and three months later, you’ve practically forgotten all about that book you were writing. In fact, you can’t remember the last time you sat down and actually wrote something.

Journal writing is many things, but first and foremost, it’s a solution. Journaling is best known for its artistry and highly recognized for its self-help (vent-and-rant) benefits. But few young or new writers realize that a journal is a writer’s most sacred space. It’s a place where you can jot down or flesh out ideas, where you can freewrite or work on writing exercises when you’re blocked, and where you can tackle writing prompts when you’re short on time. It’s a space where you develop better writing skills and learn new techniques through trial and error.

Inspiration and Productivity

The three biggest barriers to a writer’s success are writer’s block, time management, and procrastination. If you’re working on a big project and writer’s block sets in, a good solution is to take a break and work on something else for a while. Too many writers take “something else” to mean “a different novel.”

Instead of breaking from one big project to launch another big project (and ultimately ending up with several unfinished projects), use the break for journal writing. This gives you time to step away from the project that is stuck and provides a space for you to continue writing (and possibly to work through the problems you’re having with your project).

Everyone wants to write a book, even people who don’t consider themselves writers and who don’t want to be writers. But who has the time? Aspiring writers often complain that they’d love to take their writing hobby to the next level, but they are too busy. Journal writing is an ideal way to bridge that gap. Journal writing is a great way to keep skills sharp and to develop ideas, so that when there is time to write that book, you’re ready for it.

You can keep a journal on your computer (or you can use an old typewriter, if that kind of thing appeals to you). But most writers use a good, old-fashioned notebook: pen and paper. While we can certainly crank out more words when we type, we are also at risk for the many distractions of the computer and the internet. When your journal writing sessions are offline, your productivity may increase tenfold because you spend the entire session writing. After all, your journal doesn’t have Twitter or solitaire on it.

Good Writing Habits

The truth is, you don’t have to write every single day to be a professional or published writer. Daily writing is the best practice but many writers keep a regular, five-day work week. A few writers get by on the binge-and-purge model, writing heavily for a few months, then not writing at all for awhile. But one rule remains firm: those who succeed treat their writing as a job and they commit to it.

Journal writing is an ideal way for writers to fulfill that commitment. When you have a journal, you rid yourself of excuses. You can no longer say that you’re stuck on a plot twist because you can write in your journal until the plot becomes untwisted. In fact, writing in your journal may help you do just that. When you’re short on time, you can always turn to your journal for a quick, ten-minute writing session, even while larger projects are sitting on the back burner. And your journal is distraction-free, so you can stay focused during your journal writing sessions.

Do you have to keep a journal in order to succeed and become a professional or published writer? No, of course not. There are many paths to success and journal writing is just one trail on the mountain, but it’s a trail that is entrenched with the footprints of millions of successful writers who have benefited from journaling.

Do you keep a journal? How do you use journal writing? How often do you write in your journal? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Harvest your dreams for journal writing inspiration

There’s something mysterious and magical about dreams. In the dreamworld, anything is possible. Our deepest desires and greatest fears come to life. Whether they haunt or beguile, our dreams represent the far reaches of our imaginations.

Journals can have similar qualities of mystery and intrigue. If your journal is full of freewrites, doodles, cryptic notes, and random ideas, then it might read like a road map through your imagination, or it may feel like a crash course through your subconscious.

Journal writing is a great tool for dream exploration. You can tap into your daydreams or your sleeping dreams as sources of inspiration:

• Record your dreams so you can better understand them.
• Capture the images in your dreams and turn them into poems and song lyrics.
• Transform the monsters from your nightmares into the creepy villains in your short story or novel.

Dreams are an excellent source of insight and ideas.

Dreams and Journal Writing

Dreams have been a subject of great interest in the fields of neurology, psychology, and spirituality, to name a few. Yet we still know relatively little about the nature of dreams. Where do they come from? What do they mean? In one dream, you’re working out problems from your subconscious, and in the next, you’re a character from your favorite TV show. The white rabbit in your dream symbolizes a call to adventure but the white rabbit in your best friend’s dream represents fertility.

According to Wikipedia:

Dreams are a succession of images, sounds or emotions that pass through the mind during sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of speculation and interest throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is known as oneirology.

Like I said, we know relatively little about dreams. But that doesn’t mean we can’t put them to good use. Throughout history, dreams have often acted as catalysts for artists, writers, musicians, and inventors. Here are a few famous literary works that were affected or derived from authors’ dreams:

• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Stephen King’s Misery

Keeping a Dream Journal

There are many ways you can use dreams in your journal writing. The most obvious is to keep a dream journal. Just keep your journal by your bed and jot down your dreams as soon as you wake, before you even get out of bed (otherwise you risk losing or forgetting the dream). It only takes a few minutes.

You can also jot down a few notes and later use your dream as the foundation for a piece of writing. Your dreams can provide you with characters, scenes, imagery, and even plot ideas.

Journal Writing with Daydreams

Let’s dive right in to what Wikipedia has to say about daydreams:

While daydreaming has long been derided as a lazy, non-productive pastime, it is now commonly acknowledged that daydreaming can be constructive in some contexts. There are numerous examples of people in creative or artistic careers, such as composers, novelists and filmmakers, developing new ideas through daydreaming.

The imagination is a bizarre and wondrous thing. Humans have the capacity to conjure up incredible things, but contrary to popular opinion, using one’s imagination requires time and energy. It might look like you’re sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing. But who knows? You could be plotting the next Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

In some ways, daydreams are a better source of inspiration for journal writing than nighttime dreams. Since you’re awake, you can take breaks from your daydreams to jot down notes. You’re also more likely to retain a daydream because you are awake for it. Many people have a hard time remembering the dreams that they slept through.

The Source

Dreams are borne of human consciousness and imagination, which provide an endless stream of ideas and inspiration that can inform your journal writing. Your journal can function as a repository for all of these visions, and you can revisit your journal as an incredible idea warehouse anytime for any type of writing project.

Explore More

Below are some links you can follow to learn more about dreams:

• Twelve Famous Dreams
• UC Berkeley has made an entire course on the Psychology of Dreams available online (audio format).
• Do you have a hard time remembering your dreams? Try a few techniques for better dream recall.

Discussion Questions

Do you ever write down your dreams? Have you ever kept a dream journal? Has a dream (daydream or night dream) ever provided inspiration for your writing? Is journal writing a habit for you? How often do you write in your journal and how do you use it with your other writing projects?