An Introduction to Creative Journaling

Discussing my fave!

Good morning dear friends.  Today I decided I would like to touch on a topic near and dear to my heart, journaling.  Wait! Don’t scatter!! I am not talking about your typical style of journaling rather creative journaling.

In the linked article you will find the author goes into a brief history about creative journaling, proper strategy’s that result in therapeutic benefits, as well as her personal experience with creative journaling. I have yet to define what it is creative journaling is for me. At the moment I would say that it is more so me combining designs and techniques in search of my own individual style. I am finding that I struggle to actually journal over the pretty collaging and choose to add my journaling to a separate piece of decorated paper and attach it or put it in a pocket on the page I came up with.

The more and more I practice I seem to improve but I have to be honest when I say I still struggle with perfection and achieving desired results. I am too hard on myself and I am an unforgiving critic. I assumed that such creative journaling would come easy to me because of the habit I have developed over the course of 30 years of journal writing but that hasn’t been my experience. Others compliment my work but I am not to the point of where I am satisfied. I put creating journals on hold in order to focus on my own development whuch in return will improve those I look to sell.

More and more I am noticing how badly I screw things up by not allowing them to be. How do I stop this cycle and just be free?? Please leave your suggestions in the comment section below. Please do not allow my experience to keep you from giving this a go. I refuse to stop and I will continue to work through this.

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Still here??

You may have found yourself needing an outlet to release your fears or worries, your personal struggles or you may simply enjoy writing for memory purposes.  Whichever the case, I would love to introduce you to creative journaling.

Give me a second of your time and I’ll explain in further detail what creative journaling means to me.

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If you search on Instagram you can hashtag search creative planning and millions of photos will be at your fingertips.  I first discussed creative planning at the beginning of the new year.  It is where you decorate your planner pages using sticker kits, markers, washi tape, decorative paper clips… you get the picture…

It isn’t that this form of journaling/planning is more productive or has superpowers that take you to Oz but what it does do is it adds character to your pages and breaks the monotony of a blank, white page.  

There are a million ways you can approach this style of journaling. Personally I achieve unique pages by layering bits of ephemera from my day to day life or by pulling from my insane collection, where I go on to create a background for my writing.

 You can either hide your writing under the layers of paper so that only you know what lies beneath or you can add your writing to a separate piece of paper and then add it to the college of papers you’ve glued down.  Here is a more visual description.

A random yet brilliant idea for you authors out there!

This doesn’t have to be exclusively for your personal info.  You can use the idea when creating a piece of fiction writing.  Sketch what each character looks like, to you, on a piece of paper and adhere it to your page.  From there you can write out ways to describe them using specific adjectives that make your character come to life.  

You can do this with each setting, every character, and you will have a visual and written representation of your ideas.  Begin a fresh page with a new chapter and this will help to organize your thoughts for the book you are writing!! Buy a cheap notebook and dedicate it to use for this idea!!

My thoughts

It creates interest when you layer specific papers to your pages.  The papers used do not have to mean anything because it is about writing your thoughts.  Or..you can be like me and use a mixture of meaningful papers and decorative papers. That’s the beauty of it.  It is all personal preference and totally up to you. What’s even better is that you can make a mistake and cover it up with a layer of paper 🙂 The sky’s the limit.

My tendency to become obsessed with ideas that include bit and pieces of paper that accumulate from everyday life is off the charts.  From my earliest years, I’ve held on to notes written from friends, tickets from concerts, wristbands from waterparks, movie ticket stubs and anything else that brought back to life a moment in time that I enjoyed.  Due to an invasion of privacy, any memories kept prior to my sophomore year went up in flames.

Keeping journals and other bits and pieces of paper became a routine of stuffing in designated drawers and writing in code so that if there were another breach in privacy, the perpetrator would not know specifics. These pieces of my life remain in a trunk stored in my storage unit while my journaling is scattered among notebooks.  Since stumbling upon creative journaling I have made it my mission to gather any and all papers and combine them to best of my ability. My ultimate goal would be to bind them together in one book for my daughter to have when I am gone. Will that happen? I hope so.

Other forms of creative journaling

My code writing days have become more elusive with my give a damn and my life of collecting papers along the way has doubled with an influx of ideas.  Using everyday papers collected from your experiences and adding them to your journaling is referred to as junk journaling.  Oh, the possibilities paper holds!!  Hours upon hours have been spent watching YouTube videos of creating memory masterpieces transforming my love of paper into an idea catalog that I haven’t quite yet to organize but I am getting there.  Much to my surprise, this creative endeavor has led to the discovery of art journaling, glue books, and a travelers notebook system. Talk about paper heaven!!  I can’t get enough.

I have made it my mission to combine vintage and modern designs with designer paper as well as daily junk paper to create memory keeping books for others to record and store their most precious moments.  May 2, 2018, I declared my beginning of a creative journey and boy let me tell ya a journey it’s been. The hours I have invested in research, trial and error, practice using my own life’s memories, creating a studio, organizing and reorganizing my new space, shopping, purchasing, disassembling books and magazines, cutting, gluing…can not be totaled.  The best part is that I have LOVED every minute of it!!

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