Five Ways to Make the Most of Your Writing Journal

Writers have been using journals of one kind or another for as long as there have been writers. Among them, Victor Hugo, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway and J.K. Rowling who famously wrote out the first draft of her first Harry Potter book in a journal in a café in Scotland while on government benefits to help support her child – they all used them.

You have a journal, right? Or perhaps you have two? Or three or more? If you call yourself a writer, you keep a journal of one kind or another. (It could even be electronic these days but many modern writers, otherwise technologically savvy, still keep hand-written journals.)

So, you have that journal but are you using it to its fullest capacity?

Here are five ways to use those journals:

• To practice your writing. Just like athletes and musicians, writers need to practice. You need…