One thing that most people don’t know about me is that I keep a personal journal (no this is not my personal journal), and I am always looking for ways to keep it new, fresh, and exciting so that it does not become a chore for me. This quest has led me to an article by Peggy Kurilla at www.fmwriters.com called, “On Keeping a Writer’s Journal.” And for the most part, I enjoyed reading it.
Ms. Kurilla describes four common journal-types that she feels will help writers improve their skills:
- A smörgåsbord journal where everything you find interesting is dumped.
- A project journal where you keep track of the development, the problems, and the successes of your writing project.
- A specific-area writing journal where you write about one specific topic (like gardening , the weather , or the semantics of html code ) each day and can be used later as a reference for specific descriptions that moves the plot of your story forward.
- A compost journal where you list your ideas for future stories.
As much as I relish Ms. Kurilla’s ideas about how writers can keep their creativity flowing, I’m disappointed that she chose to view her one sentence idea—“...a romantic suspense between a small-town sheriff and the big-city pagan who comes to live in his town.”—as a lesson on being specific. Without a doubt, it is very important to be as specific as possible when jotting down your notes and/or ideas, however; Ms. Kurilla’s one sentence idea, with its missing details, could have been an opportunity, on her part, to create new details about it. Then again who’s to say Ms. Kurilla hasn’t created new details about that one sentence idea.
In the end, it does not matter how Ms. Kurilla sees her one sentence idea, or even whether or not she has taken advantage of the opportunity to develop that idea further. What matters is that a writer’s journal gives you the space to save your ideas , and cultivate your imagination.
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