Writing the Seasons (and other writerly uses for a journal)
The crispness and anticipation of Autumn; the outside chill and indoor warmth of winter; the green awakening of spring, and hot summer days—every season has it’s joys and fans.
In the midst of winter, you might yearn for a warm summer day. In the fall you might fondly remember the spring showers that turned your lawn a luscious green. Do you look back through the season’s journals for the sights and scents of days past?
The more experienced we become at writing descriptive prose in our journals, the more valuable the prose becomes to us later on. While writing a short story set in a different season, use your journal entries from last summer for the flavor of the weather and summer attitudes. It works the same for novels and essays. Re-reading your journals can take you back in time well enough to write it now. Use your journal.
Need to describe how someone felt in a difficult day or the elation of a success? Get in the moment by finding similar entries in your journal. When the emotion re-kindles for you, use it to write well.
Often it takes just a short descriptive phrase to return our minds and senses to a moment in the past. By using our journal to do so, we can relive moments and events more fully. For writers, this is human emotion at your fingertips. Conflicts, serene moments, excitement, fear, weariness, even the sensations of a head cold are there for you to draw upon.
You can use the information in your journal in so many different ways beyond getting to know yourself and effecting change. Admittedly, sometimes the best thing you can do with a particular journal is to burn it, but most can be kept, learned from, gleaned, and harvested many times over.
Journal for yourself. Always for yourself first; then consider the many ways a journal can give back or be passed on. Keep your eyes open to new and hidden benefits. Enjoy the process and your words will take on the flavor of your life, seasons, and growth. Use them, learn form them. Utilize them. Journal on!
Image by *L*u*z*a*
[...] to take special care of your creativity too. Feed your imagination and keep a journal so you can store inspiration for later use. Try some creative writing exercises to get yourself going in new directions. And [...]