In this guest post, author Vince Guaglione shares some great tips to help you spark your creativity and gain some inspiration through the act of journaling each day.
Most of us recall keeping a journal or diary to collect our thoughts at some point in our lives. For me, writing in a journal was part of a nightly ritual I performed throughout most of my early teenage years. I regularly spent fifteen to thirty minutes before bedtime putting my thoughts to paper; reliving my day, exploring my emotions, and professing my belief that my dreams would someday come true.
In reflecting on those evenings of years long past, and then in digging out a few of those worn and tattered notebooks that were collecting dust in an overhead storage bin, I felt the urge to open the pages of my journals and scan a few of my entries. And in doing so, I found that what I’d written as a youth, over thirty years ago, would become a form of inspiration and creativity in my writing of today.
What Is Journaling?
At its simplest, journaling is the act of putting your emotions, feelings, and experiences to paper. It’s a written record of your true self—one that can be typed out using a keyboard, or written longhand on paper. There are no rules when it comes to journaling. All it takes is a willingness to put pen to paper and letting your thoughts guide you. Journaling can be structured or unstructured—can be written as an essay or nothing more that sentence fragments reflecting thoughts and emotions. How we journal is unique to each of us, but what matters more than the how, is why we journal in the first place.
There are many reasons why people choose to journal, from gaining some much needed quiet time to be alone with one’s thoughts after a hectic day, to keeping a record of a significant event that occurs in one’s life, to providing an outlet to explore one’s emotions, particularly, when the need to vent becomes paramount. But regardless of the reason we chose to journal, the common thread that links it for all of us, is that it’s a form of self-expression. And through self-expression, we sometimes find inspiration.
Journaling Sparks Your Creativity
Because journaling is a form of self-expression, we get to be creative with it. We can write about anything that’s important to us without being judged or critiqued. It’s a stream-of-consciousness exercise that in itself is a form of creativity. Because we are exploring our thoughts, feelings, and emotions in an unfiltered and uncensored manner, we sometimes find some of the answers to questions we ask ourselves as human beings, and then become inspired to explore those revelations further.
There are many ways that journaling can inspire us and get our creative energies flowing. First, journaling is a form of narration, so it lends itself well to structured essays. Most times when we journal, we work with one thought or concept at a time. We write about that thought and bring it to some sort of conclusion, whether we resolve what it is we are pondering or not. This type of entry makes for a great essay that can easily be encapsulated in a blog post or a book. The core of what I write in my Narratives series of works follows this format almost exclusively.
Next, journaling can provide the foundation for interesting fictional works. In going back through my journal entries of years past, I came upon a few entries that I’d written about a girl I had a crush on as a young teenager, and then a few others that documented the heartache I felt when I learned she was dating another young teen. After rereading those entries, I came up with the idea and basic plot for my fictional work, Chasing Angels.
Also, because journaling sometimes involves reaching within and pulling emotions to the surface, entries that capture those raw emotions lend themselves well to poetry. If poetry is your genre, try doing some journaling. You might find that the stream-of-consciousness type of writing you are doing in your journal takes your writing to a new level of creativity as a poet.
Journaling Gives Your Writing More Depth
Finally, one general note about journaling that I’ve learned with practice is that any form of self-reflective writing automatically gives your pieces more depth. The act of expressing your thoughts in written form takes your writing to a new level. It’s never easy to translate what we think and feel into words but through journaling, you are essentially practicing this each time you sit down to write. Readers are drawn to emotion, and the further you can get those readers emotionally invested in your characters, the easier it becomes to keep those readers coming back for more.
Writing in a journal is essentially just another form of literature. Entries you write in your journal may not have all the bells and whistles you normally would expect of a piece of literature that you’ve created, but each entry does tell a story—the story of you. They might be raw, might be unstructured, and they might be disjointed. But within each journal entry, you will find something of value, and will be able to morph it into something concrete. Sometimes, translating your entry, or concepts taken from your entry, into your chosen form of literature is challenging, but if that light bulb in your head has flipped on, and you’ve pulled a great idea for a piece from a journal entry, then you are already one step ahead in the game.
Every piece of writing we do has value, and that includes journaling. Our journal entries give us things to ponder, and help us make sense of our thoughts. And sometimes, they springboard us to new levels of creativity through the inspiration we find when taking up the exercise of translating our thoughts into words. The important thing to remember is that journaling is about you. When you journal, write without any filters. Go back and reread what you’ve written. You will certainly learn something interesting about yourself each time you put pen to paper, but might also find that inspiration you desire to take your writing in a new direction, and to a higher level.
Vince Guaglione is a guy who asks lots of questions, not only of himself, but of his society and the world around him. Although he claims he’s found no real answers, that hasn’t stopped him in his quest to gain perspective on a little something we call life. The core of Vince’s work lives in the personal transformation genre, but he also writes short fiction and dark poetry. His Narratives collection of works can best be described as his unique brand of personal journaling focusing on humanism, consciousness and thought, philosophy, and self-discovery.
