“So far as I am able to judge of what talents I have, for benefiting my fellow creatures by word, I think I can write better than I can speak.” —Jonathan Edwards
Timed Writing Practice: (These are suggestons for writing practice; you give yourself a set amount of time–five, ten or fifteen minutes– and then write whatever comes to mind.The idea is to free your subconscious to help you write and to clear some of the clutter from your brain so that you can write.)
1. Keep your hand moving.
2. Don’t cross out.
3. Don’t worry about spelling.
4. Lose control.
5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
6. Go for the jugular. Write with passion.
Taken from Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.
14 kinds of journals you might want to consider:
1. Diary. My father-in-law kept a diary-type journal for about thirty years. He wrote in cheap spiral notebooks.
A typical entry: 28 Wednesday 9:06 PM. Home again. Church was extra good, but it’s good to be home. Nothing unusual today. Oh, yes, W. (his son) got a temporary job at the Post Office.
These diaries are not profound, but they are treasures, giving a beautiful picture of the ordinary life of a godly man who has gone to be with the Lord now.
2. Recipe or homemaking journal. Along with copies of your favorite recipes, write down names, occasions, and anecdotes associated with each recipe. Your recipe book could also become a family treasure.
3. Sketch book, with written notes to go with the pictures. I don’t draw, but I love looking at the sketch books of those who do.
4. Scrapbook with stories to go with the photographs. Lots of people do scrapbooking; writing stories to go with yur photographs makes the scrapbook that much more valuable.
5. Book of lists, to do lists, book lists, lists of things to study or think about.
6. Nature journal.
7. Vacation journal.
8. Idea journal or brainstorming journal. Keep a small notebook in your purse or pocket to jot down ideas as they pass through your brain. As I have learned to my dismay, those ideas may never pass this way again. Capture them while you can.
9. Commonplace book. A commonplace book is a repository for quotations from novels, fragments of poetry, lines from speeches or sermons that you may want to remember.
10. A journal written for someone else. For example, you may write a journal to be given to your baby when he or she gets married or a journal of all your memories about growing up. I have a journal for each of my eght children in which I try to write down things they have said and done. I plan to give these to them when they are grown.
11. Prayer journal. Write down your prayers and read back to see how God has answered.
12. Bible study journal. Write down what God is saying to you through His Word as you read the Bible each day. The prayer journal and the Bible study journal could be combined.
13. Reading journal. I have kept a reading journal, off and on, for many years, The idea came from a class I took in college called Advanced Reading Survey. In the class, I was required to read about thirty or forty pieces of literature that I picked out in cnference with my professor. For each book (or poem) that I read, I wrote an entry in my reading journal. These entries had five parts: a bibliographic title of the work, a paragraph about the author, a list of major characters (if the work had characters), a list of quotations from the work that I liked or wanted to remember, and a one or two sentence evaluation (whether I liked it and why).
14. Blog. My blog is my most useful and fulfilling writing journal at this point in my life. I keep or have kept some of the other kinds of journal in the list above, but I find that writing in my blog replaces some of them and draws on others for content and inspiration.