Except for keeping a diary as a child, writing a joural for a college course, and another during a vacation to a few countries outside the US, I’ve never kept a journal.
I don’t care much for writing in detail about what’s going on in my life. I prefer to keep “snapshots” of moments by regularly writing haiku and other short poems. I read the poems fairly often to bring back memories, but I rarely look back on the journals. The childhood diaries I have long since thrown away.
Journal keeping itself hasn’t helped my writing, unless it was in a way I’m not aware of. A lesson I learned in that same college class did help my writing, however. At that time, I had problems writing short stories. I had written mostly novels and developed sort of a short story phobia. The instructor told me that writing a short story was no different than writing a long one. You need a beginning, a middle, and an end. From that, I wrote a short story about a camping trip I had taken with my brother. After that, I no longer feared writing short stories and have spent much of my life since writing novella-length romance fiction.
It seems that in a roundabout way, journal keeping helped my writing, even though it has been decades since I’ve kept a journal.
To find out whether journal keeping has helped other writers in the MFRA 52-Week Blog Hop, please click here.
Powered by Linky Tools
Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…
Social
You collection of haiku might count as a sort of bullet journal of meaningful moments. Happy writing, happy weekend!
Your Haiku and poems are an awesome idea. When I was a teen I wrote a lot, now I just can’t seem to do it. I also like the advise that short stories are the same as longer ones. Have a great weekend.
I struggle with writing short stories and novellas. I took a Novella writing workshop via RWA, I think. It had useful advice. Like you, I haven’t written in a journal in a long time, but it did teach me to write daily.