journaling Archives - Page 3 of 3

Journal Prompts: Small Talk

Small talk is to conversation with new people what a warmup is to exercise: it’s not the point, and you don’t want to spend an excessive amount of time on it, but if you skip it you’re more likely to have a bad experience with the main event.

Prepare descriptions of your work, hobbies, and family/living situation that are suitable for any audience. (Clearly only the parts you’d be interested in discussing!)
Write about what kind of first impression you’d like to make. What would you like someone to say about you after the occasion? “That person seemed ___.” What attitude and actions would convey that impression?
Find a list online of conversation openers and prepare answers to them as you would for potential interview questions. Which such questions would you feel comfortable using? Can you come up with others?
If you are anticipating a specific event: Write about your relationship to the event. How are you connected to the host(s) or to other expected guests; have you been to past editions of the event or comparable other events? Do you know any related trivia that others might find interesting?

Journal Prompts: Faceted Life Story

There are likely thousands of lists of journal prompts available online, some of which are very good. I have found, though, that if you are looking to journal for self-discovery, there are a lot of prompts out there that are either shallow (describe yourself in three words… okay, now what) or beg the question (what needs are going unfulfilled in your life… um, if I knew that I wouldn’t be looking for self-discovery journal prompts?). As I read both prompts and general writings about purpose and happiness and values, I have been taking notes and reconfiguring the various ideas into my own spin on the prompts, which I think of more as journal exercises – but to rename them from prompts is splitting hairs. I thought I’d start sharing them maybe every other week in this “Aside” post format.

First up, faceted life story. Write your life story through the lens of:

Religion & Spirituality: [Here I use the word “religion” as a shorthand for all varieties of spiritual practice.] How were you raised and what relationship did you have to religion as a child? How did your experience and relationship change over time? Are there any particular events that deepened or distanced your relationship to your childhood religion? To a new adopted religion? What has kept your belief strong, or what brought you back if you spent time away, or what prompted the change to a new religion or to no religion? How has the whole process felt? Is there anything from a past religion you miss?
Education & Career: What did you expect to do for a living when you were a child? What was your experience of and relationship to school? How did your career plans change as you grew into young adulthood? Did they change your relationship to school? Did your plans when you finished high school turn out? Your plans at 21? At 25? If not, was the change something you wanted or was it due to things not working out as you hoped? What has happened in your career and education since? Is there still something you’d like to do and haven’t yet?
Relationship & Family: As a child, how did you envision your adult romantic and family life? Big wedding, small wedding, no wedding; lots of kids, few kids, no kids? Tight ties to siblings and other family members or a separate life elsewhere? How did it come to pass? Did you find a discrepancy between what you thought you wanted and what you actually wanted, and if so how did you find it? Is there anything you wanted as a child and haven’t gotten, but still want?

First Steps into Art Journaling

I have been drawn to the idea of art journaling for a long time. It was always a combination of overwhelming and frustrating, though, until recently, when I found I had sort of taken it up by accident. It started with the decoupaged notebook craft night – I ended up with a lot of inspirational clippings that didn’t fit onto the covers of my notebooks (physically, or thematically), and decided to glue them into the smallest of my notebooks, making it a sort of “mood board for life.”

I’ve kept adding roughly a page a week to the notebook. Here are some materials and techniques that I’ve used:

Magazine, catalog, and other clippings – the cover of my tiny notebook is actually out of a credit card offer, and the ampersand in the photo below is out of a newsletter from my health insurance company.
Printouts from the internet – sometimes I look up a specific image that I want (since I’m unlikely to draw it to my satisfaction!), and sometimes an image crosses my path that’s worth hanging on to.
Stickers – I especially like letter stickers because I have limited skills with hand-lettering, but any stickers with suitable symbols or messages are welcome.
Crayon resist watercolor – write a message in light-colored crayon (assuming you’re using white paper), and then paint over it with very wet watercolor. Makes a mess of neighboring pages but a really nice effect; slide waxed paper underneath the page you’re painting to protect the next ones down. If you can go really wet, put drops of paint onto wet paper and the crayon marks will (imperfectly) contain them as they spread. The photo below is that effect, done on index cards.
Sharpie with colored pencil background – the permanent marker will lay down enough color that you can color in the background afterward with just about any colors and still be able to read it.
“Crayon resist markers” – this doesn’t really work the same way as with paint, but you can write with crayon and color over it with markers and get a somewhat similar effect.
Just writing, but with colorful pens – I have a set of gel pens I’m mildly obsessed with (Pilot G-2 Metallics), so sometimes I just write whatever it is I’m recording with them.
Marked-up writing – however your message is recorded, you can underline, circle, put arrows to, or otherwise highlight the key words with doodling.

I keep some newspaper and waxed paper with my art supplies to protect neighboring pages and my desk from my various experiments. None of my art supplies are “artist quality”; most are Crayola products aimed at grade schoolers.

I think my problem before was two pieces: overly high expectations for what I could/should produce, and expecting to just know what to put into the art journal. You see pictures online of people who art journal extensively and they appear to fill two facing pages of a large sketchbook every day with renditions of the thoughts and events of their lives — that’s not going to be me, and I should recognize that! Two-dimensional art has never been my medium, and I’m not going to suddenly know how to draw or paint by magic; I’ve also never maintained a diary for more than two months at a time, so why would it suddenly be easier to maintain one that requires a lot more effort?

For me, art journaling is more about making things that stand out in my mind also stand out on paper – and I don’t have two pages a day of that kind of content.

In fact, for a long time I had very little of that content. I have found, however, that adding “non-art” journaling to my life – which is still not diary-style, and about which more in future posts – has created the contents to put into the art journal. Funny, that – taking time specifically to think about my life has allowed me to articulate the things I want to remind myself of. Kind of a big duh but it was only clear to me in hindsight!