Journaling Is for Everyone: Discover Your Own Approach

Like most of us during these turbulent times, I’m chronically online and sometimes I see influencers who try to gatekeep what it means to journal. What I mean by this is that they seem to think that journaling means you must grab a pen and just fill up the pages in your notebook with your thoughts.

Sure, that’s one way to do it, but it’s not the only way. In this blog, I want to introduce the many ways that anyone can use a journal and that there’s no wrong way to go about it. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive guide, but it should provide a good starting point if you’re looking for ways to start journaling. Let’s start with the most popular form of the journal, the diary.

Memory & Life Capture

As part of my 2025 New Year’s Resolutions last year, I decided to start writing a page a day no matter what was going on in my life in a journal. Each evening, I would sit at my desk and take out my journal and start recapping the events of the day. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was creating a diary of my life: a chronological record of the events that happen in my life.

Was I writing for posterity? Did I edit myself in the things I was writing? Was I worried that my life was too boring and uneventful? Nope. It was something therapeutic for me to do and I didn’t care who would be reading in the future. If that is something that worries you though, you can always destroy or burn your diary once it is filled. Or maybe even write in invisible ink, which actually exists and makes it so that your writing is only visible in ultraviolet light.

Regardless, this is a simple way to start writing in a journal: just recap the day’s events.

Brain Dumps

In 1992, Julia Cameron wrote a book called The Artist’s Way that was intended to help people reconnect with their creativity. She teaches various techniques and exercises throughout the book to help people tap into their creativity. One of the things she introduced was the concept of “Morning Pages”: every day immediately after you wake up, you sit down and write three pages by hand about anything, without self-editing. You’re supposed to let your brain wander and just write freely about complaints, ideas, to-do lists, anxieties, etc. The idea is that once you write all this out, your brain is less cluttered and able to focus more on creative projects.

While her method is a bit too prescriptive, you can always adjust this technique to fit your life. Maybe write one page instead of three. Or do it at the end of the day before bed. Whatever works best for you is the right way.

Creative Writing & Solo RPGs

Maybe you don’t want to write about your life or your thoughts and instead, and instead, you’d rather play creatively. You can always create short stories in a journal or write narratives from imagined perspectives. What would an alternate version of you do differently with the day’s events?

There are also several single player RPG games that you can check out for a bit of journaling escapism. One of the more popular ones is called Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings. In it, you play the titular vampire and you use the book’s prompts and your own dice to travel its world, make difficult decisions, and record everything in your journal.

Structured Systems

If you’re a person that desires something more structured to journal, there are a few items you can consider that may provide the motivation to write.

• Prompt-Based Journaling: There are several online resources available (books, websites, subreddits, etc) that can provide daily prompts for you to respond to so that you don’t have to think about what topics to write about. I highly recommend subscribing to Tom Otto’s (aka @inkjournal) daily Inky Prompts emails.
• Gratitude Lists: Make a list of all the things you are grateful for at any given moment.
• “Currently” Lists: Make a list of what you’re currently reading, watching, avoiding, etc, etc
• Habit Logs: Create a space in your journal to keep track of habits and reflect on them at the end of each week.

Visual/Hybrid Journaling

Some people love to decorate the pages of their journals and create stunning displays using scrap paper, stamps, receipts, washi tape, ephemera, and other creative items. They may or may not include actual writing in these pages and that’s ok! Whether people are creating stunning pieces of art or throwing all kinds of junk at their pages to help with record keeping (junk journaling), these are legitimate ways to use journals and express themselves.

Or maybe you like to doodle? You can always keep a journal completely dedicated to doodling. Or how about playing with fountain pen ink and keeping track of them? Those can be journals too.

Reflective/Ideas Journaling

Perhaps you’re working with a therapist or just want to be a bit more reflective about your life, values, beliefs, lessons learned, etc. A dedicated journal for this endeavor will help you keep everything in one place and look for patterns.

Or maybe you have hundreds of ideas for your business, life, or creative pursuits that you want to capture somewhere? Again, keeping them in an idea journal will be useful so that you can go back and refine these ideas in the future.

Again, these are just a FEW ways to get started with journaling and are not meant to be comprehensive. We hope that reading this blog has sparked some ideas for you and if you’re looking for some notebooks or notepads to get started, we got you covered.

Happy writing!