I’ve been keeping a journal for at least 10 years.
On the bookshelf near to my bed 12 black leather-bound journals are neatly stacked on one side. I started writing in the oldest one when I first went away for school in 2007. Most of the pages are full of anxieties and worries, but there are also novel insights that I gained and recorded personal histories.
There are several reasons to start journaling. Here I’ll highlight a few of them from my own experience and reading, but this list is certainly not conclusive or in order of importance!
[The images here are commercially licensed stock photography]
1. Become a better writer.
”I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write.”
Madeleine L'Engle
The more you write, the better a writer you’ll become. That’s the theory, anyway. They say that practice makes perfect, but I say it depends on if you’re practicing the proper way. Writing for yourself, with no audience to worry about, can have a good effect on your style and voice. You may start to notice little things that make your writing unique, and you’ll increase your vocabulary by searching for better ways of describing things.
If you write consistently over a period of time, you'll likely be times more proficient than the person now putting thoughts to paper for the first time.
2. Meditation / Focus
Sometimes I get anxiety.
I’ve always found that when my mind is racing with worry, it helps to just focus on one thing instead of flying wildly between thoughts making things worse. Especially if you are journaling by hand, the slow and steady formations of the lettering takes more concentration and has the potential to slow the whirring mind.
Plus, it’s an added bonus that you can write our your anxieties and place them one side. It’s very therapeutic.
Cultivate mindfulness by being present with your thoughts rather than trying to ignore them.
3. Personal History
“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Have you ever thought back on a particular time in your life and wondered “what was I thinking?” Well… if you’d been keeping a journal, you’d know exactly what you were thinking at the time, provided you wrote openly and consistently!
You can use the journal as a way to track a certain activity, or progress in a new hobby or skill. Look back on these things after a few months, years, decades!
4. Family Heirloom or Historical Document
Following on from the Personal History, a journal can become a family heirloom or an historical document that people many years in the future will find captivating.
“For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen year old schoolgirl.” — Anne Frank, Diary
How wrong she was!
My great-great grandfather kept a journal between 1881 and 1884. How precious those pages are to me! The mundane life of a Victorian era man, it must have been so dull at the time. But he was excited about electricity and the city lit up with street lights! He marvelled at the medicine and science of his day, and recorded his thoughts about the ancient past as well.
These things are so interesting to us today, and I know that the seemingly mundane aspects and routines of our lives in the 21st century will be fascinating to a 25th century reader. Provided that we don’t destroy ourselves before then!
Give your descendants that gift. How amazing is it to sit and get to ‘know’ the intimate thoughts of your ancestors, as if they were sitting right in front of you. As an historical document, you are preserving the world at a specific point in time with specific points of view.
5. Problem Solving
Writing things out helps you to work things out. When we externalise problems we are more capable of seeing the solution. Looking at things objectively is a good practice for figuring out the next steps that we’d like to take. This is especially true with making lists! I love to make lists, once I made a list of all the reasons to love lists. So meta.
You might be surprised by how new creative solutions to problems just ‘come to you’ when you put them out on paper. Try it some time. If they don’t magically appear, well hey you can’t win ‘em all.
6. Handwriting
When was the last time you wrote a sentence with a pen or pencil?
Call me archaic, but I take pleasure in handwriting. I use a nice fine-nibbed gold plated Cross fountain pen that was given as a gift years ago.
There’s something meditative about the formations of each letter making up a sentence, making up a paragraph, making up a page. Who knows, handwriting may become a lost art in the years to come, although I very much doubt it. It has already lost popularity in the “modern” world with our tick tick ticking on keyboards all the time.
That’s okay, though. I’m not an old man yelling for kids to get off my yard strewn with empty fountain pen cartridges. If you find it easier and more interesting to write with a computer, have at it.
There are some drawbacks and disadvantages to both, so just choose the medium you are most comfortable with and gives you the most advantages.
7. You can get creative
Journaling doesn’t have to be just words, it can include sketches and photographs, anything you want. I don’t know where the line is between Journaling and Scrapbooking, and I don’t really care. My wife uses a journal without lines so that she can make doodles anywhere and write around them, that works out really well for her. I prefer the structure of lines, I don’t doodle.
There’s a really great book called 1,000 Artist Journal Pages that highlights, well… a thousand artist journal pages! Lots of drawings, sketches, cartoons, comic strips, photographs. It’s fun to look at.
How to get started
Any old notebook will do. But personally I like to have a nice ‘special’ journal, so I got myself the Obsidian Journal from Peter Pauper Press, because it’s just beautiful. There are a few different styles from the same maker, and I’ll probably work my way through a few of them! Before those ones, I used to get a simple black moleskin which works just fine. I use BookDepository for the free international shipping.
I like to write before bed, to decompress after the day. You might find it more appropriate to wake up fresh and then write, and I can see the benefit of that. If you’re a vivid dreamer (which I am) you can record your dreams right after waking. That’s apparently a good way to increase lucid dreaming, which is super duper fun. Write more than once a day, why not!
Keep your journals secure. Not only don’t you want prying eyes reading your intimate thoughts, but you also don’t want those words to be lost. There’s no back up! That’s one of the major downsides to ‘traditional’ journaling, but it also is what makes them so precious if they survive. Keep your journals off the ground away from the damp, even better if you keep them in watertight containers stored away so that nothing can eat them and they won’t be destroyed in case of a flood!
That’s just about it. Make it a daily habit to write in your journal about the things that happened during the day, your thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears. Write about the past, present and future. If you like, write letters to your future self, or your children or grandchildren or great grandchildren. I guarantee, they will appreciate it one day, and so will you.
Do you journal?
What other benefits are there to journaling?
