Keep a Journal: The Basics

From the introduction:

A journal is as essential a tool to someone who thinks (as an activity) as a sketchbook is to the painter. We tend not to think of thinking as an activity anymore than we think of breathing as an activity, and yet, thinking and writing and keeping a journal are linked. I often don’t know what I think about something until I’ve written it down, and I often don’t know what I am going to write until I’ve written it. And I do this thinking, writing, and reading what I think in a journal.

A journal is different from a diary, although in paging through an old journal you may discover the story of the journal keeper. Unlike a diary which is a chronicle or log of a person’s life, a journal is the private space of the keeper to work out their thoughts, ideas, fears, and dreams in a visible form. The process of keeping a journal clarifies your thought by exposing it in a way where you can examine it with a degree of dispassion. When it remains inarticulate, it remains transitory and prone to evaporation. Keeping a journal has many practical applications from helping you to recover from trauma, tracking your progress in weight loss, guiding you through lifting weights, improving your memory, helping you learn to write with more grace, to helping you grow your creative skills.

This booklet introduces the fundamental process of keeping a journal. Future books will look at using the process outlined here along with my experience in teaching classes on writing, creativity, and memory. I have also learned a great deal about keeping a journal by teaching classes for people recovering from chronic illnesses.

After you read this booklet, you will have the framework for keeping your own journal.