The Art of Journaling

How journaling has transformed my creative practice

A few pages from my journal

So, what is ‘journaling’ all about, exactly? According to the Oxford Dictionary, the specific definition of a journal is “a daily record of news and events of a personal nature; a diary”. Journaling, particularly that which involves emotional expression, but which also includes exercises like gratitude writing, has been shown to have positive effects on anxiety (i.e. reducing anxiety), specifically for adults who are highly emotionally expressive¹².

When I first started journaling, my intention was not to seek out emotional relief. After all, I was only 9 years old when I seriously started journaling, and my worst troubles at that age had mostly to do with picking out which headband I’d wear to school that day and making my Christmas list short enough to fit on one page of computer paper. I don’t think I understood what the words stress or anxiety meant. Rather, when I first started journaling, I was excited by the idea of fresh paper waiting to be filled with my writing - and I also found it exciting to document my life in real time. I could write about anything and everything around me! And at that age, the world was so new to me, and so many sights revealed themselves the more I paid attention to them.

I will never forget my first real journal - by which I mean the first journal I chose myself, voluntarily, outside of school - and of all places, I picked it out at my hometown airport before my family took a vacation out of the country in one of those ubiquitous Hudson News stores, where they sell magazines, books, snacks, and other travel accessories (and I guess, journals, too…) to air travelers. When I first saw the journal, I was immediately mesmerized by its fantastical colors and golden leaf patterns on the hardcover - it was truly one-of-a-kind in my eager eyes. In my case, it glittered and was gold - it was advertised as a “Dream Journal”. My mom bought it for me, along with a pen, and sat beside me when I made my very first entry.

When I opened it up to write my very first entry, I found a fancy bookmark tucked in its pages that read the following quote:

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

-Edgar Allan Poe

At the time, I had no idea who the hell that person was. And after dating the very first page, I proceeded not to write, but to draw - I retraced the fancy golden bookmark and wrote down the words inscribed on it. I speculated who this Edgar Allan Poe man might be, even though I think I spelled his name wrong when I tried to copy it. I also didn’t understand what at all the words meant, but they were mystical and interesting - just like a dream, I figured. In my first entry, I proceeded to write about my surroundings, beginning with my mom sitting right next to me, and even writing about how she commented on my handwriting as I was writing. I took my journal through security and onto the plane, where I wrote how nervous I was to go on my first flight - I had also drawn pictures of other planes ascending into the air, their noses reaching into the skies and then disappearing into faraway dots. When we finally arrived in Mexico, I waited for my suitcase at baggage claim with my notebook in hand, writing, where is my bag? I’m waiting for my bag! Over the course of my family’s trip at a resort in Mexico, I asked my family members to write a page - my dad and mom wrote me some sweet passages while I was off playing and left my notebook sitting out, and I think my brother and sister just drew their faces and autographed them as a joke. While we vacationed, I made a point to write every single day, often multiple times a day - I would write in the morning as my mom and sister were getting ready for breakfast, during the day as we sat by the pool - I’d smear sunscreen and spill juice all over the pages - and every night after dinner when I sat on the porch in the beautiful, warm evenings. I wrote about everything, from the type of cereal I ate for breakfast, to the strangers from Canada with whom my sister and I played in the pool one day, to the college kids who challenged my brother and I to a ping pong game, to all the sunburns that progressively got worse over my body, to the number of iguanas and chickens I saw on a daily basis, to the adventurous expeditions my family took across Playa del Carmen to historic sites and remote beaches - I stuffed physical memorabilia in the pages, from event bracelets to stickers to dry leaves and more, until the spine of the notebook was begging for its life. I think one day I was even sitting by the pool when a small leaf was slowly falling towards me in the air, and I captured it in my open notebook (it was normally splayed open, because it was so thick) like it was a butterfly I was capturing with a net. I also wrote down dialogue from strangers, anything I could overhear - such as the lady who spoke to me in Spanish when my dad bought me a dress from a local vendor, to a conversation I overheard between two men in which one man asked if the neighboring island Cozumel was America. “No. That’s an island, not America…” He said. I think I wrote haha in the margins. I didn’t know much Spanish, but I wrote down sounds as I heard them phonetically, even songs playing in the background at restaurants, the pool, in passing cars, the beach, wherever really.

I remember it all so vividly, as if I can see it before my own eyes now as an adult. What was bought as a “dream journal” became a very alive journal - it became as alive as I was, breathing experiences and moments with vivid clarity.

Me at 9 years old with my dad in Mexico, at the ruins of Tulum on the Yucatan Peninsula. I recently uncovered this disposable camera from all those years ago and got the film developed. It turned green, which makes this photo look so much older than it is.

All of this to say, journaling from that young of an age has solidified a lot of my memories, and the details of those memories, for years to come. I cherish that time I had with my family as a child, and going back to the journal reminds me of the creative, curious spirit I have carried with me ever since I was a young girl. Reading my old journals feels like seeing the world again through fresh, eager eyes. Since that age, I have accumulated over thirty notebooks of day-to-day journal entries, poems, and other musings which have aided me in documenting my life with the utmost detail and care. I consider myself an archivist of my own life, and I love digging back to see what rich material and experiences were there within the words, which expound in my rich visual imagination. Though I express myself subjectively through different art media (my output), I tend to take in experiences - my input - in my life objectively, putting pen to paper with absolute truth.

What started out as an innocent daily practice as a child has now become foundational in my creative rituals of writing, acting, and more as an adult. With that, I’d like to elaborate on the importance of journaling as a foundational habit for writers, my experience using The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron to revolutionize my journaling, and how inspiration can be found in reading just as much as writing.

I. The Writer’s Diary

Journaling as a Habit

Every writer him or herself has probably heard of other interesting - if not extreme - creative rituals of famous writers. Some extreme writing rituals can be seen in prolific writers: Honoré de Balzac drank an average of 50 cups of coffee a day to get his juices flowing, Aldous Huxley would use LSD to motivate his creativity, Truman Capote would retain extreme superstitions when writing, such as never writing on a Friday or allowing more than three cigarette butts in his ashtray, and James Joyce, as his eyesight continued to fail him, would write on his stomach in a white coat, in order to illuminate the paper before him, which he wrote upon with thick blue pencil³. To some, these practices may seem like the accumulation of compulsive habits by zany, neurotic writers. But I personally see these habits as idiosyncratic cues for getting in to the zone of productive writing. I recognize these habits best in some other writers, who employ more realistic and practical techniques to perfect their writing practice that each of us aspiring writers could hope to implement in our own lives: Margaret Atwood writes only on paper, on a large notebook, in a comfy chair in her writing room⁴, Rachel Cusk isolates herself from her kids in lone hours to make time for writing at her computer⁵, and Jack Kerouac used to light a candle or make a peaceful space at which he could write at a desk or table⁶.

Whether or not you’ve heard of some of these writing rituals of famous writers, and whether or not they actually used journaling as a surefire way to maintain their creative momentum, it is clear to see that habits typically form a foundation for writers to do their best work. I think it is a misconception that habits delude spontaneity and originality in creative work, but in fact, I think it enables such qualities to come out in one’s work. This topic will be important as I later discuss Artist’s Way.

Writers & Journals: The Power of Unrestrained Words

There are some writers who are best known for their journal-keeping. The beauty of these journals or diaries is that they are not ultimately intended or crafted for a public audience, and therefore they reveal much more about a person’s internal nature without the restraint of public decency or censorship.

The first work that made me believe in the transformative power of journaling was The Diary of Anne Frank. What was most transformative about the experience of reading Anne’s journals was that I was thirteen years old when I first read them, which was about the same age as Anne when she wrote them. For the first time, I felt that I could connect with another person’s emotional experiences on a deep level, even if I didn’t understand the totality of her circumstances.

The Diary of a Young Girl, which was published in 1947 by Anne’s father Otto Frank, the only survivor of her family after the end of WWII.

The second work that pushed me to journal more into my adult life was Sylvia Plath’s unabridged journals. The collection was first published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version by her poet husband Ted Hughes - who claimed in the collection’s foreword that he had destroyed her final journals for being too painful and too damning - but a newer version was released in 2007, containing sixty percent material that had previously not been made public. I had the privilege of reading the unabridged version in my early twenties; I was inspired that Plath called her journal her “Sargasso” - her repository of imagination, '“a litany of dreams, directives, and imperatives”.⁷

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

If I did not have this time to be myself, to write here, to be alone, I would somehow, inexplicably, lose part of my integrity. As it is, what I have written here so far is rather poor, rather unsatisfactory. It is the product of an unimaginative girl, preoccupied with herself, and continually splashing about in the shallow waters of her own narrow psyche. As an excuse, she claims these are writing exercises, a means of practice at expressing herself, of note taking for future stories. Yet on the merry-go-round of time there is scarcely enough to spent pondering and attempting to recapture details. In fact, if one has not the imagination to create characters, to knit plots, it does no good to jot down fragments of life and conversation, for alone they are disjointed and meaningless. It is only when these bits are woven into an artistic whole, with a frame of reference, that they become meaning-ful and worthy of more than a cursory glance. Therefore, think and work, think and work.

Sylvia Plath, Unabridged Journals (Entry 102, 08/01/1951)

The passage above is one that I highlighted and returned to time and time again as I read Plath’s unabridged journals. Some may see the passage as depressing and bleak, and of course I can see the influences of Sylvia Plath’s poor mental health on her writing, but I also find inspiration in her words. Her resilience in the act of journaling to capture and weave fragments of life together is at the heart of her work, and I can see clearly how this process contributed to her creation of The Bell Jar (published 1963). I truly believe Plath was a victim of a patriarchal and invalidating society and home environment, which likely contributed to her depression - however, the act of her journaling and writing look to me as an act of rebellion on her part, in that by committing to consistent work, she maintained her artistic integrity and reasserted her inherent worth.

II. The Artist’s Way

If you haven’t heard of the Artist’s Way, well, that’s a shame. You may be wondering, how is this work relevant to the aforementioned writers?

The Artist’s Way is a very useful guide for anyone who wants to learn how to make the most of their journaling, or for those who have never journaled before. One of my close friends Kevyn, herself a very talented artist, introduced me to the Artist’s Way in my early 20s. I bought the workbook, and it practically sat on my bookshelf for months. Anytime I see the words “spiritual” or “discover” on a workbook, my eyes glaze over in a classic “I’m better than needing a self-help book, I can figure it out myself” fashion.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

It all changed when I decided to read the Introduction. From there, I set out on reading the entirety of Artist’s Way, which is designed as a 12-week program. I didn’t know that working through this book would not only change my life, but it would also transform my creativity, by quite literally making my dreams and imagination more vivid than ever before. There are two specific tenets of Artist’s Way, Artist Dates and Morning Pages (aka, the Artist’s Way version of journaling), which I will discuss in depth.

The Inner Artist & Artist Dates

Julia Cameron centers the workbook on pleasing your 8-year-old self. To her, creating has to do with connecting with your inner artist, aka your inner child. Is it a substitute for therapy? Perhaps not. But you realize as you are completing the workbook just how much societal influences place certain blocks on your creativity over the course of your life, and how removing those free you up to create uninhibited art that is most in alignment with your soul.

The Artist Date is a required weekly expedition in which you seek out solo adventures that would excite your 8-year-old self; Julia Cameron encourages you to write down a list of ideas: “If I weren’t too embarrassed/scared/nervous to try this, I would [fill in the blank]”. The adventures are meant to be slightly out of your comfort zone in order for them to work. For me, solo adventuring itself was a whole new source of anxiety, as I am a very introverted person. So I would start out slow - I would take myself to new coffee shops to explore New York City, bookstores, museums, thrift stores, book readings (at the Strand, Stella Adler), and then I would go see new movies at the IFC or Roxy Cinema, or attend art galleries. Among my friends’ more interesting artist dates included taking a pole dancing class, a ceramics class, or singing an original song in front of a large audience. Speaking for my own adventures, not only did they strengthen my confidence, but they also filled my mind with inspiration for writing. I would write about all of these rich adventures in my morning pages, which seemed to expand me in every direction.

Morning Pages

Insights, Action Items, and Synchronicity

Every Sunday as I worked through each of the 12 weeks of Artist’s Way, I would take myself to my favorite coffeeshop in Greenwich Village to do my morning pages. This was my typical set up below - my Artist’s Way book (for reference and wisdom, of course!), my notebooks (I had two - my morning pages notebook and my notebook for inscribing other notes), and scripts/books for the former.

My typical, yet overly ambitious, “Morning Pages” set up. Note: you only need a notebook for this, not all this extra stuff.

The morning pages are required every morning, before you even have your morning coffee - they are three full pages of stream of consciousness journaling. They are meant to capture you in that liminal state between sleeping and waking, where your mind is relatively clear. Julia Cameron says that the pages are usually filled with fluff, just like our minds, but the truth usually comes in about a page into writing. You have to promise yourself to complete all three pages - even, Julia Cameron says, if you have to write “I can’t write anything, I don’t know what to write, blah blah blah” for all three pages. You have to fill it with anything, something, in order to create that habit and honor yourself by keeping that commitment. The actual writing of the pages shouldn’t take more than 15-30 minutes; sometimes, speed is needed to push past your blocks and write what is on the surface in order to expose and expunge it.

An important part of writing the morning pages is going back and reading them once you have completed the journal. Julia Cameron challenges you to highlight insights in pink highlighter and action items in green highlighter; for example, for months I kept having the insight I think I need to be more free/loose in my body while I am acting and I kept having the action item I should create my own short film or work to show the acting I want to do/the types of characters I want to portray - this insight and action item reappeared, like a pattern, in my morning pages, serving as my North Star towards the truth of what direction I needed to take in my life.

Another interesting component of morning pages is synchronicity, which is a phenomenon in which you start recognizing patterns in your environment - much like happy coincidences. The more you commit to writing the morning pages, the more you will see recurrent details popping up in your writing and in your real life - I keep a list of all of the synchronicities I witness on my phone. It may sound like a bunch of malarkey, but it is almost frightening to see coincidences synchronize in multiple areas of your life - Julia Cameron says this is a sign that you are going in the right direction. For example, harping back to Sylvia Plath, I happened to watch a Bell Jar documentary at my friend’s apartment, only to see it in the window of a bookstore as I walked home. I went in and bought the book, read it again, and found so much inspiration in it a second time. Other wacky synchronicities can be singing a song in your head and then hearing it play just as you are walking into a coffeeshop nearby. Another time, I kept seeing the word Pierce pop up all around me on the street, the subway, everywhere - on clothing, bags, billboards - and then I met a man named Pierce who signed me onto an acting project.

Overall, I think it is so helpful to complete Artist’s Way if you’re looking to overcome a static period/plateau in your creative life, through Artist Dates and Morning Pages, specifically. You never know until you try!

Writing my Morning Pages in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. Sometimes, I would film myself doing my Pages just to keep myself accountable. No matter where I am, without fail, I do my Morning Pages.

You don’t know before you start what kind of writing you will have…[I am] writing about life as it went through me, and I just see myself as a relay of the feelings and the things that happen. And in the end, reporting on that has been my sole ambition.

-Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize recipient in Literature 2022

III. How Imitation Can Transform into Originality

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to genius.

-Oscar Wilde

I by no means believe in copyrighting, forging, or manipulating another person’s intellectual property. But I do believe this quote has some valid truth in it, particularly for young writers. When I was a very young girl, I yearned to write, but did not know how to write or even understand a lot of the material I read. So, ever since I was around twelve or thirteen, I began copying passages of books I admired and put them in my own journal as a way of being able to forever return to the passages or quotes I loved most about my favorite books. This practice intensified as I got into my twenties and started reading the classics- between giving my books away to others to read, or loaning them back to the library, I wanted to have a way of keeping all of the words I loved the most right in one place to read whenever I felt like it. I most often copied quotes from the works of George Eliot into my notebooks, circling and highlighting the words I loved the most, looking up terms I didn’t know and elaborating on them in my notebooks. Often times, the passages and quotes I chose to copy were ones that felt emotionally salient to me at the particular time of my reading them.

I know it’s awful that I literally cut out these quotes from the book, The Myth of Sisyphus by one of my all-time favorite writers Camus, but it was a used book and I was too lazy to copy them. But typically, I rewrite quotes that speak to me in my journal. I also do collages where I cut out pictures/images/text, so I think that’s why I also did this.

Why do I bring this up? Well, to go back to my adoration of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, I want to share another story of how I had the opportunity to visit the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in 2019. I was able to tour the Secret Annex I had read about over a decade prior and see Anne’s living quarters during the Occupation. Somehow, in comparison to her words - which had created a strong visual in my mind of what the Annex would look like - the space looked very dim and small. Through her journals, she was able to magically transform her space in the eyes of a young girl and of a writer. At the end of the tour, I actually got to see her “Book of Beautiful Sentences”, in which she herself had copied quotes from books she loved, or artworks she had seen. She even had pictures of herself pasted in, much like how I did the same in my first set of journals - instead of a mass-produced piece of text, here was a unique, three-dimensional crafted journal made special by her own creativity. I burst into tears, remembering how growing up, I did the same.

My point here is that it is important as an artist to fill your well of inspiration in order to create your best work. At some points or another, we all need a push towards creative momentum. The important thing, though, is just to do it, regardless of the outcome. And more importantly, regardless of your own fear and self-imposed limitations.

Anne Frank’s Diary, housed in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Netherlands, the site of the Secret Annex.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing.

Anne Frank

1. In a study in which expressive writing cohorts were compared with control writing cohorts (i.e. writing about the most traumatic event that occurred in that person’s life vs. writing about day to day life) - NIH.

2. The benefits of gratitude writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. - NIH

3. The most unusual writing rituals, according to Penguin.

4. I saw this firsthand while watching her amazing MasterClass.

5. Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel. The New Yorker 2017.

6. Daily Routines of Great Writers.

7. See the abridged version description here.