Mary J. McCoy-Dressel

Week 20: Does journal keeping help with the writing process?

Doggone. Before we know it, we’ll be typing week fifty-two. Eek. Slap me now for thinking so far ahead but my point is: the year is moving too fast.

This week, I’m not sure how to answer the question since I haven’t journaled in years. What I do remember about journaling is how writing everyday became a habit and a need to write in it daily. We can’t call writing everyday a bad thing. Can we? Not me.

It doesn’t take long to fall into a habit… What do I know other than how I fall into a habit? After writing the last couple sentences, I became curious to find out how long it takes to form a habit. There are many links, but I jumped on the first one in Bing Search by James Clear at the site James Clear who explains research others have done in an article called “How Long it Really Takes to Build a Habit.” I don’t know James Clear nor do I know of his work, but kudos to him for popping up first in search. I want to investigate further.

Sorry, I let the habit thing get off track.

I’ll go back to say journaling, for me became a habit, encouraging me to write daily. I write daily now. It might not always be novel writing, but I’m writing something.

Do you think journal writing is only done in freehand and not on a computer? We can’t speak for everyone, but I always wrote my journal freehand and had fun with my notebook and pens since I collect both. I’ve explained more about my journaling in a previous post for our 52-Week Blog Challenge titled “Lighthouses to Love Notes: Journaling.” One thing I mentioned in the previous post was how I did then and still do now keep a journal for book related “stuff.” The quote is from the post and explains another way journal writing helps me as a writer:

Now I keep a photo-journal for images of people, clothes, animals, places, etc., links, and a future title and character name journal for my books.

Without journaling for so long, I don’t have the right to say much more on this topic.

Other authors do though. Hop on over to Marketing for Romance Writers Blog to find their links.

Thanks for reading! You guys and gals have a great weekend. Yeehaa.

Spring finally came to my area.