by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: February 10, 2009

Writing and maintaining a journal on a regular basis is an excellent idea for any writer, in any genre, of any level of experience or standard of ability. It serves as a permanent record of the writer's thoughts, feelings and experiences and can be used to great effect even years down the line to assist in a wide variety of literary creations and circumstances.

A journal is essentially a log of events which have taken place in someone's life. People write in a journal what has happened to them that day, how they feel about what has happened and perhaps even what they are going to do about what has happened. They record details of places they have visited, people they have met and activities they have undertaken. A journal is for all intents and purposes an autobiography in its most basic form.

So what are the benefits to the writer in keeping a journal? The first and perhaps most obvious is that a journal allows the writer to practise his craft. It teaches him, perhaps even without him realising it, things like sentence structure, descriptive text, narrative skills. It teaches him to be expressive in his writing and to relate facts as and how they happened. It teaches him to inject real feeling in to his writing in the sense that it is his own feelings which he is recording in the journal and there can be no feelings more real to us than the ones we ourselves are experiencing at any given time.

We should therefore view a journal as a summary - and the closure almost - of each day. A journal should ideally be written last thing at night before we go to bed and each new day should essentially see the start of a new chapter in our journal. A journal maintained in this way will also help the aspiring novelist for example to structure his work in to separate and defined chapters, each relating its own significant section of the overall story.

In the longer term, a journal can prove to be an excellent point of reference to the writer. Imagine we are writing about a character who has suddenly lost someone very dear to them and the experience is one which we had earlier in our life. We may think that we remember how we felt at that time but the reality is that time does numb if not necessarily heal pain. If, however, we are to refer to our journal entries made immediately after the event occurred in our lives, we may find ourselves capable of injecting far greater authenticity in to the description of the character's feelings and emotions.

Similarly, we may find ourselves writing about a place we once visited and that our memories of same are at best sketchy. Once again, out comes the dusty old journal and we find ourselves virtually revisiting the place of which we are writing. Naturally, in this instance, we have to be careful about writing of a place as it was perhaps ten years previously and finding that it has changed beyond recognition in the interim!

These are but a few musings as to how a journal can prove useful to a writer both in the short and long term. Hopefully, you will think of many more and perhaps even be inspired to keeping your own journal in the fashion herein described.

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