Journaling 101
This won’t make you money. Yes, yes. I know. I’m sad about it too. It will however help you down the road to making you money…or at least I hope that’s what it’s doing for me. It’s posted under my alter ego (and vaguely familiar site) Norway Writes.
There are so many ‘keys’ to be a good writer, that generally none of them are key. Because the word key insinuates some tempestuous journey with a lock at the other end for which you will require said key item. There isn’t any such lock.
You will not find at the end of your rainbow a pot of gold. It’ll be a half of a single piece of gold and the beginnings of a thousand more rainbows. There is no key to good writing. It’s in the feel, in the talent, in the observation, and most of all in the practice. You just have to keep writing, all the time, about everything.
And I, like millions of others have only thing to tell you: Journal. Do it often, and do it everywhere. Make it an integral part of your day. Put it on par with showering and breakfast, lunch breaks and sleeping. Just write. This is very important though and don’t forget: it’s only for you. The sole purpose of journaling is to write, a private record of your thoughts for any given day. I’m not going to tell you how it should look, or how you should write it, what you should write about or any of that.
I’ll share my basic routines with you. I have two moleskin journals that I keep on me at all times, usually one in my back pocket, and the other in my coat pocket. The first is a sort of diaryesque journal. It’s the day’s events, thoughts and rants. Mostly rants. I date it and write whatever comes to mind during the day that has to do with the day. It vents my frustrations, elaborates my laudations and catalogs my endeavors. The second notebook is a less organized one. It’s written in whenever, and contains all of my thoughts pertaining to random observations, a story I’m working on, any poetry I feel like writing on a bus somewhere, and so on. It’s covered in drawings, random lines, fragmented sentences and broken grammar. Whereas my first one reads like a finely tuned letter to myself, a time capsule of sorts for some future date to be decided, the second is a reflection of my brain, of everything going on inside creatively. It’s a chance to let loose and write away.
It’s a good habit if nothing else. Gets you used to writing asinine amounts of stuff every day. And from the looks of it, if there’s any way to make money writing, it’s by writing asinine amounts of stuff every day.
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