How To Use an Ideas Journal to Enhance Your Creative Writing

Creative ideas are the raw material from which all creative projects are built. Without any ideas, you have nowhere to begin to write from, no starting point, no direction to focus your creative writing talents.

So it follows that one of the most effective ways you can enhance your writing and let your full creative writing talent come to the fore is to keep a ready supply of great ideas to develop.

Here are 3 important steps to using an Ideas Journal to keep your writing ideas flowing:

1. Understand why you think you don’t have enough good ideas. Before you get started with your Ideas Journal, you need to accept that ideas are all around you and flow just as much as you want them to. The reason it often feels like you never have any good ideas is not that they don’t appear in the first place. Rather, it’s because you don’t capture them. How many times has an interesting idea come to you when you were doing something other than writing, and you’ve thought: “Interesting idea, I could use that to write about, I’ll remember it and work on it later...” Then, days or even weeks later, you suddenly remember having the idea, but have no clue what it was! Using a journal to record your ideas as they appear overcomes this.
2. Using your Ideas Journal. Get yourself a simple notebook, small enough to carry with you wherever you go. When an idea comes to you, take a moment to jot it down in your Ideas Journal. You want to capture the idea as fully as possible, so get the juicy core of the idea down as vividly as you can. Then when you return to it, you’re reminded of its full intensity. Once it’s captured, close your journal and return to what you were doing. Another important point – don’t analyse every idea and make a judgment as to whether it’s “good enough” to go in your journal. Capture now, then decide if and how to use it later.
3. Developing your ideas into creative writing. So now you’ll have a growing stack of ideas in your journal, but how can you use them to start writing? The common mistake to make is to go through your Ideas Journal chronologically and try to force yourself to expand each and every idea into some amazing piece of writing. Instead, go with the natural energy and flow of your creativity. Scan through your captured ideas until you see one that catches your imagination. Transfer it to a new sheet of paper or a new document on your computer, close your journal and start writing. You’ll find some ideas you captured don’t get developed, and others you thought little of when you recorded them turn into some of the best writing of your life. Remember, go with what feels natural and where the energy is.

Follow these steps and you’ll have a steady supply of creative writing ideas for the rest of your life. The more ideas you capture and use, the more ideas will come to you, and the better they’ll become!