This is my journal. I haven't written anything in it since the beginning of last semester. I've never really been able to commit to a journal. This one contains bits and pieces of my freshman year. I was really good about writing in it every night at the beginning of freshman year, since that was a rough few weeks for me (band camp... so intense), but then I got out of habit. I wrote intermittent entries that were weeks apart from each other, and then for a few weeks I wrote one every night. That was fantastic. I completely let loose in this journal and wrote honestly about my feelings. I complained about my friends, my roommates, my teachers, my life... If you've never done this, I really recommend it. It allows for a lot of harmless venting and self-reflection, which I consider very important. Just don't let your journal fall into the wrong hands.
The great thing about personal journals is that you get to make your own rules. You don't have to write every night if you don't want to. If you want to rant and rave about people, you can. It's better than saying it to their faces, anyway. And if you happen to get so mad one night that you feel your journal would catch fire if you tried to write in it, you're perfectly at liberty to take a hiatus until you've beaten up whichever dumb friends pushed your berserk button.
Not that I would know about that.
This is my Poetry Notebook, capitalized because it is a project for my poetry class. I have to write poetry in this bad boy for fifteen minutes every day for a hundred days. The goal is to generate a bunch of raw material to work with and to develop good writing habits. I've had many a creative writing teacher tell me it's a good idea to sit down and write something every day. Now I have to. It's been kind of fun so far. I've come up with some pretty strange poetry, that's for sure. A lot of it sounds like a stream of consciousness. If I come up with anything good in here, maybe I'll share it on this blog.
I feel like I've had this notebook since the dawn of time. It was a gift when I was in sixth or seventh grade. It's full of doodles, sketches, maps, character details, plot points, notes, quotes... I used it for planning and reference. It's a really good idea to keep one of these around when you're writing. If you forget something, you can just look it up. If you're having trouble describing or visualizing something, you can reference your sketches. I don't pull this notebook out very much anymore. Every now and then I'll pull up an old project and need to look something up in it. It's very good for when I'm feeling nostalgic about my early writing career.
This is the more modern and mature version of the pink notebook above. I call it my Little Black Notebook, and yes, that is houndstooth. I take this notebook with me on trips and sometimes around campus. If I think of something important or hear something interesting, I write it down in here so I won't forget. Like in the pink notebook, I keep character notes, plot details, and quotes in the LBN, along with a smattering of poetry and observations. I only write in it with black ink, usually with the same pen. I will be very distraught if I ever lose that pen. I'm very protective of this notebook because it's brand new- I got it for my last birthday and I love it. I never take it with me if it's raining and I most certainly don't let other people look inside it.
I have tons of other notebooks and journals that I use at various times, all depending on the circumstances and subject matter. But if I told you about all the notebooks I own, this would be a much longer and more boring blog post, so I'll just spare you all and end it here.
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