By Lynda Monk, MSW, RSW, CPCC
Every writer knows the feeling when you sit down to work on the novel, the essay, the memoir, and instead of words, you get static or feel stuck. The inner critic shows up first. The doubt shows up second. It can feel like the actual writing that matters seems to wait somewhere just out of reach.
Here’s what twenty-five plus years of working with writers, creatives, coaches, and helping professionals has taught me …the way through that static isn’t more discipline or a better outline. It’s a private, unpolished, judgment-free page. It’s your journal.
Journaling and “real” writing are often treated as separate activities as if one is for feelings and the other is for craft. I believe that separation sells journaling short. Used intentionally, your journal isn’t a warm-up act before the writing begins. It is part of the writing. It’s where your voice gets expressed freely and where your truest draft might actually live.
I have been an avid journal writer, and at times a sporadic journaler (which is also fine), all my adult life. Journaling has helped me write books, prevent burnout as a social worker, explore issues related to my identity as an adoptee, and so much more. The transformative power of journaling is also at the heart of my work as leader of the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW.org).
Why Every Writer Needs a Private Page
Published writing is, by necessity, shaped for an audience. You’re thinking about structure, pacing, what the reader needs to know and when. That’s valuable work but it’s also work that happens under observation, even if the observer is only the version of you that imagines future readers.
A journal removes the audience. There’s no one to please, impress, or explain yourself to and that absence of an audience is exactly what makes it powerful. When you’re not performing on the page, you write differently. You write truer and freer. You stop reaching for the clever phrase and start reaching for the honest one and honest is almost always more interesting.
This is why so many working writers keep a journal alongside their "real" writing, not instead of it. It’s not a lesser cousin to the manuscript. It’s the foundation that both you as the writer, and the project you are working on, can grow out of. Journaling can be a powerful practice for both your personal and professional growth as a writer.
How Journaling Sharpens Your Writing Craft
The reality is journaling is writing. It is using the written word to express your thoughts, feelings and experiences in your life. It is a meaning making practice. The more we write the better we get at writing. This simple truth is part of the reason journaling can help you sharpen your writing craft and skills.
I believe, and have witnessed in my own writing and that of others, many concrete benefits of journaling for writers including the following:
Journaling builds fluency. Writing regularly, even badly, even in fragments, keeps your writing muscle warm. Writers who journal daily report far less friction when they sit down to their "real" work, because they haven't neglected the act of writing in their lives.
Journaling trains observation. A journal is a place to practice noticing. For example, you might notice the exact color of a sky, the specific thing someone said, the small detail that reveals character. That noticing transfers directly into scene-building, dialogue, and description in other writing projects. Journaling creates distance from perfectionism. Because a journal entry was never meant to be shown to anyone, it lowers the stakes. When the stakes are lower, our nervous system can calm and the internal editor quiets down. Many writers discover their strongest, most alive sentences not in a polished chapter but in a scrawled journal entry they never intended anyone to see. Journaling is about the process and not about the product or perfectionism!
Journaling helps you metabolize what happens to you. Writing is fed by lived experience, and unprocessed experience tends to stay stuck rather than becoming material. A journal gives you a place to move difficult or complicated experiences through you and, often, into your work. It is a place to write to know, grow, and care for yourself. This not only supports your other writing, it supports you as an individual.
How Journaling Helps You Know What You Want to Say
Many writers don’t struggle with how to write. They struggle with knowing what they want to say. This is where journaling does some of its most important work.
A journal is a discovery tool, not just a record-keeping one. When you write without an agenda, without trying to be right, consistent, or profound, you often surprise yourself. Themes you didn’t know you cared about start repeating. Questions you didn’t realize you were asking start showing up on the page, again and again, until they’re impossible to ignore and you start to see what they have to offer you.
This is how a journal becomes a compass. It won’t hand you a finished thesis or a tidy premise but it will show you, over time, what keeps pulling at you and that pull is usually the real material. The book, the essay, the story you’re actually meant to write is rarely the one you planned. It’s the one that keeps showing up in the private pages of your journal, insisting on your attention.
5 Simple Journaling Practices to Try
You don’t need a special approach to start or benefit from journaling. A few reliable practices can keep you going, for example:
- Mindful moments. Sometimes people don’t know where to start with journaling. My favorite place to start is in the present moment. You can use simple mindful prompts such as “Right now, I feel …” or “Right now, I notice …” and use these sentence starters to begin your journaling.
- The unsent letter. Write to someone, living, gone, real, or imagined, saying the thing you’d never actually send. This is a powerful way to practice self-expression and access new material that might be sitting just beneath the surface of your awareness.
- Follow the repetition. Re-read a few weeks of journal entries and circle any word, image, or worry that keeps reappearing. That repetition is often pointing you toward your real subject.
- Five-minute free writes. Set a timer, pick a single prompt or image, and write without stopping or editing until the timer ends. Momentum matters more than quality here.
- The “what I’m not writing about” entry. Ask yourself directly, what am I avoiding putting on the page? Or what is that I don’t want to write about? Then write towards it, even briefly, and see where the journaling takes you.
None of these writing activities needs to be elegant. The goal isn’t a good journal entry. The goal is an honest one. The purpose is to put pen to page as freely, openly and honestly as you can. The benefits of doing such will begin to appear.
Bring the Page with You
Journaling won’t replace the discipline of drafting, revising, and finishing a piece of work. As writers, we all know nothing replaces that. However, journaling does something very important that drafting alone can’t – it keeps you connected to your own voice while you do the harder, more public work of shaping something for readers
If you take one thing from this, let it be this … your journal isn’t separate from your writing life. It’s the root system underneath it. The more you tend it, the more it can support everything else you write. The more it can nourish you as a writer!
I’ll be exploring how journaling can help you unlock the writer within along with a set of practices you can start using immediately — in my upcoming workshop for WNBA on the power of journaling for authors. I hope you’ll join me there.
Visit the event page to register today!
About the Author
Lynda Monk, MSW, RSW, CPCC is an author, speaker, registered social worker, certified professional coach, and Director of the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW.org). For more than 30 years, she has helped people harness the power of writing for self-discovery, healing, creativity, and personal growth. Lynda is a recognized leader in the field of journaling and co-editor of The Great Book of Journaling and Transformational Journaling for Coaches, Therapists, and Clients. She is also the author of The Adoptee’s Guide to Healing, Wholeness & Growth. Through her workshops, courses, and global journaling community, Lynda inspires people to connect more deeply with themselves, their stories, and their creative potential.
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