153: The Simple Creative Practice That Can Help Your Writing
Free Guide:
5 tips to help you write your book
This writing-related practice can help your creativity, inspire you, and also help your mental health. Learn three different ways to approach this practice.
------
Mentioned in this episode:
- Click here for ways to work with me + a free character profile template: www.thekatiewolf.com/info
- The last Tuesday of the month is a Q&A episode! Submit your questions for me HERE.
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@katiewolfwrites
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katiewolfwrites
the simple creative practice that can help your writing
Hello, welcome back to your big creative life. I'm Katie Wolf. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We're coming up on wait two years, no three years of doing the podcast, I think, I think it's been three years. Oh my gosh, which is insane. So anyways, thank you for listening. Just a reminder, if you have not left a review, that would be really appreciated. It helps other people discover the show. You can leave a review on Apple podcasts or on Spotify, and also, if you are enjoying any episodes in particular, you can always take a screenshot or just share it directly to Instagram stories and tag me. That's always fun for me to see as well. Yeah, let's get into what we're discussing this week, which is this creative practice that can really help your writing, and it's like kind of a deceptive title, because it's a creative practice that can help your writing, but it is also writing. So yeah, it's journaling.
We're going to talk about journaling in this week's episode, because it's a form of writing, but it's something that can have a real strong impact on your creativity when it comes to your creative writing, when it comes to writing a short story, a novel, whatever it might be, and I found it's also a really good thing For my mental health, my groundedness and presentness in my life, my gratitude anxiety, just like all of those things. So I think it can accomplish a lot. And I want to talk through three different options, like three different types of journaling. And everyone knows what journaling is. It's not like anything that I share in this episode will be particularly new information for you, but I'm going to share how these different types can be done, how I've used them, and how they've impacted and supported my writing and my creative processes, just overall, with anything in my life. So journaling number one, the option that I do most frequently is something that I just call mood journaling. I think people who don't journal and want to or like I don't know, there's just this idea that if you journal, it's something you have to do consistently every single day, and that's one option. We'll talk about that later.
But that's not the only way to do it, I can be a very perfectionistic person when it comes to doing things like this, and I can often get into this mindset of, if I don't do it perfectly, then I might as well not do it. And what's the point? Because I'm not going to get the benefit. And for a while, like in the past, I tried to make myself do it every single day, but it just doesn't it just doesn't work for me. My energy ebbs and flows, my schedule changes. How I'm feeling, physically and mentally changes and doing morning journaling or even evening journaling.
It's just it's not something I've ever been able to be super consistent with. So now what I do is I only journal when I'm in the mood to journal. If you listened to an episode that came out a couple of weeks ago, we talked about myths about writing and how the muse, like waiting for inspiration, is a myth, because there is no Muse that's going to come visit you every single day, every time you have to write and give you a great burst of inspiration, like sometimes you just have to sit down and write, even if you're not really feeling it, and you feel like you have no ideas and you're not feeling motivated. But that's not true for journaling, because journaling can be I mean, you can write about whatever you want to write about. And for me, I've found that being a mood journaler fits it just works the best for me.
So what this looks like in practice is I have a journal, I have a notebook, and I journal when I feel a poll too. Usually this is because there's something that I'm I'm having some ruminating thoughts. I'm obsessing about something that I really want and I don't have yet. I'm worried about the future. I'm thinking about I'm feeling frustrated with something. Usually, there's some sort of, like, negative reason why I feel like I want to journal. Occasionally, it'll be because I feel super grateful and I'm in a really good place that day. And. Want to write and just document it like sometimes that can happen, but most of the time it's for a negative reason, and I know that journaling will help me process it and help me get it out. So often, this is in the morning for me, but not always. That's not always the case, and what I try to do when I journal is write a full page. My notebook is not huge. So a page does not take me long at all to do, but I try to do at minimum a page as a way of processing my thoughts, getting them out on the page. So I always just put the date down. When I'm journaling, I'll write it out whatever it is I'm struggling with, sign it. For some reason, I put my name at the bottom, and then that's it.
And I might write if I'm in a particularly stressful period or anxious period, or I just am feeling pulled to journal a lot. It might be a couple times a week, or it might be like once every two months. I don't place any restrictions on it. I don't put pressure on myself. I've kept this journaling practice this way for years, like I've journaled on and off my entire life. I think the first journal I kept was when I was I want to say in second grade. So this is something that I've done for years. I have a bunch of notebooks in a box up in the closet for that I've done over the years, or that I've had over the years, and so, yeah, you can just do this when you feel like it. It can be as frequently or as infrequently done as you want, and it's just a great way to have something that there's no pressure on, because writing can feel if you're writing a book, there's an end goal in mind. You're doing it for a reason. There's an end point. You're checking off your progress. It's very like goal oriented, but with journaling, and particularly mood journaling, I mean, I guess you can get to the point where you fill up a notebook, but otherwise there's no there's no end point to it. So that takes the pressure off of it. It can just be a helpful release that way.
The second type of journaling is more of a strict diary. I think of the difference between a journal and a diary as a diary as more like an account of what happens to you, what's going on in your life, and a journal is just you processing your feelings and writing about whatever you want to write about. So when I'm journaling, occasionally, I will write about something that happened that day, if it's something I need to process, but otherwise, I'm not like writing about what I did that day. I'm not documenting I went to work, and today, went into my coworking space, but then I had to go pick up Audrey early because she got sick, and then we came home and made dinner. Like I'm not documenting my day to day, because I just don't feel like that's helpful for me. But you can do a more strict diary if that's something that you're feeling pulled towards, if that would be helpful. And this is where I mean I say strict, but it's like I'm putting that in air quotes, because really, I Okay, I'll share this, and I feel kind of weird about sharing. I don't even know should I say this? Yeah, I'm gonna share it. I have always felt like someday I would write a memoir. I'm not ready to yet. I'm 37 I feel like I'm still too young. I have too much life left to live before I write it, but yeah, at some point I would like to write a memoir.
And I've always felt like having my journals, having these notebooks, would be helpful if I ever need to look back at something. And I could see there being a case where, if you are someone who writes down a more factual event based kind of diary that that would be helpful if you're doing a project like a memoir or some kind of nonfiction where you're like, looking at your own life, I could see that being extremely helpful to be able to go back and refer to that. Oh, sorry, y'all this. Cough. Oh, okay, so yeah, you get to decide how strict you want to be with this. You get to decide if this is at the end of every day. You write down what you did that day, what you worked on, who you talked to, how you felt. It doesn't have to be so cut and dry, like I just did this, this, this, you can also write how you felt about it, how you were feeling. I've seen a lot of journals advertised online that are more structured this way, where there's like, it's almost like you fill in lines. So instead of having a blank notebook, notebook page, it's like, you can track, okay, what did I eat today? What exercise did I do? What was my schedule like? Do I owe anyone an apology for how I behaved? Do I was I frustrated by anything? What do I want to remember for tomorrow?
So it's it's documenting what you did, but there's also a level of reflection and processing with it too. So you can always look for a journal that offers that. Structure if you don't want to just have that blank page. And that can work well for like, the more strict, disciplined, doing it every day kind of thing. I do have a five minute journal that I found helpful. I'll link it. I'm going to link my Amazon store in the description of this episode, you can check out that if you if you want to see the five minute journal, I go through periods where I use it a lot and then periods where I don't.
So, yeah, it just depends. The Five Minute Journal is, gosh, now I can't remember. I'm out of the habit of using it. It's been a few months since I've opened it, but I think it just asks you a question, some questions about, like, you know, three things you're grateful for, maybe, like, some affirmations. And then there's an opportunity at the end of the day to do some reflection. It has a couple questions on the bottom of the page for you, too. So the third option for this practice of journaling is to do morning pages. Morning pages is a concept that comes from The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, and it's the idea of it is to kind of like, clear out the cobwebs and get all of the stuff swirling around in your head onto the page before to kind of like unblock you before you do your creative practice. In this case, for most of us, creative writing, writing a book. I did a morning pages experiment a couple years ago where I did it for, I can't remember how long, maybe three weeks every day I would do three pages.
And the idea is, you do it longhand, so you just do three notebook pages and it's you just word vomit, whatever you're thinking, whatever you're feeling, no one's ever gonna see it doesn't even matter if it's complete sentences, just get it down on the page. I didn't really find it that helpful for my creative practice, for writing, but I found it extremely helpful for my anxiety, meaning that it just was helpful to get all the crap out of my head. And it really, for me, it really shed light on how many repetitive thoughts I have. And I know that's a lot of what my own personal brand of anxiety is. It's the rumination. It's the obsessing about something over and over and over and like giving all of this worry and all this attention to it. And so when I write it on the page and I get it out, that helps take some of the power away and some of the obsessive energy from it, which can be super helpful. So you can check out The Artist's Way if you want a more deep dive, or you can listen to that podcast episode that I did, I want to say it's an earlier episode of the podcast, but it's like my morning pages experiment or something.
So yeah, so those are, those are the journaling options that I think are most helpful. Obviously, there's a ton of different ways you can do this. There are all kinds of, like, really interesting journals for available online, for different purposes. I've also, oh, I'm blanking on who it is. I think her name's Chelsea. What's her last name? She's an indie author, and she created an author's journal. I'll link that in the description of the episode as well, so you can go check that out. I've never, I haven't bought it, so I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I I've seen her post about it on her Tiktok, and I think it's kind of cool concept, so I'll check that out too. So whether you want, like a more writing specific journal for helping you write your book, or if you just want a journal to reflect and process and whatever, either one's great. Inspired by this episode, I think I'm going to try to get back into the practice of doing journaling a little bit more often when I feel the pull, because I miss it. So I'm glad we did this episode.
Okay, I just had to stop because I had a coughing attack. Oh, I thought I was recovered enough to record some episodes, but apparently not. I'm gonna cut it off here and go have some tea. But I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you try, if this inspires you to try a journaling practice or pick one back up, or if you have one that you really enjoy, you know, feel free to share about it with me. I love hearing about what works for other people. So all right, catch you next week. Thank you so much for listening.