The Art & Practice of Journaling free mini-course from Simple Scrapper offers a guided path to better scrapbook journaling.
Lesson
Not everyone connects with the concept of a daily free-writing practice like morning pages. Some need more structure, guidance or support in exploring words on paper. Others like to combine the two. This is where journal prompts can be of assistance.
A quick Google search for journal prompts or writing prompts does not lack in results. There is little need to generate ideas on your own, but forming a routine will help you utilize these inspiration sources without getting distracted. Without a plan for accessing and using prompts, you could spend your writing time wandering around the Internet!
To effectively leverage prompts for your journaling, make a selection of prompts and carve a boundary around those ideas. It can be choosing one website to work from or creating a journal jar full of ideas you can pull out, one by one. There is no right way to create that structure, but it is needed.
Remember, we’re exploring the idea of journal-keeping as a way to practice writing (without an audience). This practice, in whatever form best resonates with you, will assist you in creating scrapbook pages with more meaning and depth.
Assignment
Choose one prompt from the Simple Scrapper Member Library or from one of the websites below to try writing from a prompt. Do this sometime after your morning pages, if you are participating in the two week experiment.
- Have you used prompts for journal-keeping? for layout inspiration?
- Is there a particular style of prompt that you are drawn to, such as those that begin a sentence or those that ask a question?
- How does the experience of journaling with a prompt compare with the less-constrained writing of morning pages?
Further Discovery
119 Journal Prompts – These selections are grouped by theme, which is helpful for using exercise repetition to develop your skills.
130 Journal Prompts – This collection (and others linked on the site) are excellent for exploring “about me” themes in your journaling.
Thank you so very much for the mention!
Quite a few summers ago, when my kids were in elementary school, I got them each a small notebook (made a new cover for each book, so it was personalized for them.) I printed out journal prompts on address labels. I cut them up and put them in a jar. Each day the kids would reach into the jar, pull out the prompt, and stick it to their page. My girls did better with it than my son did. My oldest daughter would do a mix of both. Some days she would write on her own, some days she would use a prompt.