The One Book to Improve Your Writing

That title is probably too long.

*sigh

Anyway…

Do you journal? If you’re like most writers, you’re probably pretty reflective. Whether it’s a Moleskine journal that serves as a running record of your day-to-day life, a sketch book where you jot ideas or a hardbound leather book where you catch snippets of poetry as they drift out of your brain, journaling is a mysterious and powerful tool for improving your craft—and for supporting your wellbeing.

Journaling helps you deal with your emotions.

It’s the reason most of us pick up a pen in the first place—to make sense of what’s going on both inside us and in the matrix around us. We lay out events, ask questions, examine our motives, reflect on our learnings. All of these are ways to process our experience of life.

 It’s powerful, too: journaling is an act of energy transfer. When you write, you’re shifting the energy that’s circling around inside out onto the paper. This is so very different from stuffing things down or locking them away and refusing to think about them. That stuff makes people sick. I would wager that my journaling habit has supported my mental health all across my lifespan because of this cathartic act of energy transfer. It’s a form of sharing, just like when you and a good friend hit the trails or the coffee shop for a catch-up. Sometimes it’s a form of venting to take the pressure off of a difficult emotional experience.

And just like when you talk with a coach or therapist or a great friend who knows how to listen deeply, “hearing” yourself helps you better understand what you believe in.

Your brain works differently when you write by hand.

Research shows that there’s a different process at work when we write by hand. It’s much less easy to be lazy. University students have been shown to process and retain information better when they take handwritten notes in class.

Writing by hand taps more of our brain, as it’s a complex motoric activity that also connects to the limbic area and the prefrontal cortex. Our base emotions generally arise in our deep brain, sometimes referred to as our reptilian brain. But to make sense of them (to the extent we ever can, which actually isn’t much at all, since our society doesn’t teach nor talk about emotions), we need to filter those impulses through our prefrontal cortex, where our executive functioning lies. The whole time we’re doing this, our motor area is deeply involved.

You write better when you journal.

I know for myself my writing tends to be better when I journal. Given how slowly I move when writing by hand, I am compelled to choose the best words to convey my thinking. I have to pause a lot to rest my wrist and hand, which prompts clearer expression.

 A second aspect to this point is that you’re practicing your craft. The more you write, the better you become as a writer. Remember Malcolm Gladwell’s research in Outliers that correlated mastery with having put in a minimum of 10,000 hours of effort?

Journaling lets you examine events in a different light.

It’s an empathetic act. Spilling your perspectives down onto the page and reading back over them encourages us to look at them in a different light. We read back over what we’ve just written, add more information, refine what we really mean to say, add detail. Sometimes a different perspective will emerge as you write, or you’ll be able to see someone else’s worldview a little more clearly.

Journaling helps you find your voice as a writer.

This is perhaps the greatest practical value of keeping a journal. You’re only writing for yourself; there’s no one else on the other end of the line. That’s how you’re going to get the most honest view. If you write self-consciously, i.e. with the expectation that somebody else is going to read it, you’re already monitoring and editing yourself in a way that restricts the full authentic truth.

Think of your journal as an ongoing letter to a best friend who doesn’t exist, who never will, and who accepts every single molecule in your being with no judgment whatsoever. This helps you be both truthful and entertaining. Write as though that invisible friend is sitting across the table from you. Use the same words you’d use if you were speaking out loud—that’s your voice as a writer.

Journaling boosts creativity.

It gives you a place to empty your brain of the relentless thinking that the mind busies itself with. Dumping all your worries down on paper opens space for ideation, and over time, solutions will sometimes emerge to the things you’re wrestling with, either in your own life or in the lives of your characters.

Plus, journaling is in itself a creative act, where you’re generating something—a story, a recounting, an analysis, an argument—from nothing. Think about that for a second. There is nothing less creative or artsy about journaling than there is about the stories or essays you write. Journal is canvas.

There is no one right way to journal, just like there is no one right way to be human. What matters most is that you seek journaling out as a safe space to release emotion, examine your experience and loosen your mind’s grip on thought. This in turn hones your voice and opens up space for creative ideation.