Journal Writing Ideas

This list of journal writing ideas is meant to inspire you intrepid keepers of journals to find a little variety in your entries. Most people who journal tend to write about their days: what happened, who was involves, where and other key questions. The problem is, that most of us tend to live pretty similar days over and over again. Aside from trying to go out there and live your life (which is totally recommended) the best way to spice up your journal is to look about your standard day in a different light for each journal entry. Here are 10 examples of methods you can use to turn your stale journal entry into a piece of art.

Journal Writing Ideas

1. Write about your day from the perspective of the person you spent the most time with today. If you were alone for most of it, make the narrator a fly on the wall. What did this other person think about your actions and how did they make him or her feel?

2. Hundreds of years in the future, a historian has come upon your journal and wants to document it for a discussion he's leading about the 21st century. He's not exactly the most moral of researchers, however, and he opts to spice up your entry with falsely exciting passages. Write the entry that he comes up with in an effort to wow his colleagues.

3. Create a journal entry about your day from the point of view of you, five years in the past. How would the past version of you look differently at your actions and circumstances than you do currently?

4. Create a journal entry about your day from the point of view of you, five years in the future. Would this wiser and more mature version of you make fun of how much you cared about certain things and people?

5. Write about your day in the form of a song, poem or advertising campaign.

6. Imagine that as you are sitting down to write your journal of the day's achievements, you are given a time machine to go back and change as many aspects of the day as you can. Write your entry as if you have already changed the day until it was perfect.

7. Create the movie version of your day in the form of a screenplay. Who would play you and the people in your life? What aspects of your day would Hollywood cut out, which would they play up and what would they add that never happened?

8. Take a break from writing for the day and try to represent the events of your day in a drawing. See how well you can make the drawing stand for your day's circumstances in a single frame.

9. Write your journal entry as if you were being interviewed by a famous celebrity interviewer like Barbara Walters. What kind of questions might the interviewer ask you that would make you think of your day in a different way?

10. In the midst of your journaling, you have fallen asleep, only to wake up and discover your day was a complete dream. Write as much of it down as you can and then write a story about what actually happens during your "real" day.

I hope you thoroughly enjoyed these journal writing ideas and have found them useful for your personal record keeping. There are over 1,000 prompts on this site that can be used for journaling if you so please. I have also created a book that is perfect for using for journal writing ideas called 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More that is available for Amazon, Nook as well as in PDF and paperback form.

Done with Journal Writing Ideas? Go back to Creative Writing Prompts..