Creative Journaling

Journaling is not only a great way to add information to your layouts, it’s an opportunity to be creative and show your personality. For Lisa Moorefield, journaling used to be more of an afterthought until she realized that putting words to moments was a wonderful way of revisiting events in more detail. Today, Lisa shares with us some of her favorite tips and tricks for adding journaling on your pages.

Hi everyone! I’m Lisa and my class here at Big Picture Classes is all about Creative Journaling.

Some of my favorite journaling topics are about the funny things said by my family – especially my children. Rather than writing all of those stories in paragraph form, I like to include exact quotes and conversations. It can sometimes be a more effective (and easier) way of journaling.

Here’s an example:

Recently my son was trying to convince me to let him get a video game (he is always negotiating), while my daughter practiced speaking Spanish (she is always practicing).

Now, I could make the above paragraph my journaling, but instead I made a transcript of the conversation:

This conversation is more than just a back-and-forth exchange of words. It shows how my son tries to negotiate, shows how my daughter practices speaking Spanish, shows how my children typically interact with each other, and it references what’s popular right now (video games and slang). In other words, I am showing rather than telling.

To format the text, I made each person’s part of the conversation a different color. I only added our names to the first few lines to indicate the corresponding color. Omitting the names on each subsequent line (and omitting quotation marks) made the conversation easier to read.

It’s almost impossible to predict when a good conversation will occur, so I try to either write them down as soon as possible or record with my phone.

I encourage you to document an everyday conversation – at home, at school, at work or anywhere else. It doesn’t have to be funny or witty or even interesting. It can simply be a peek into your daily life.

Check out my class, Creative Journaling, for more creative storytelling ideas!

-Lisa

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