We hear it time and time again. Start a journal and write in it regularly. Write in your journal every day. Keep a daily journal. Journaling is the best thing you can do for your writing.

Sure, daily journaling helps writers by giving them a place to clear their head and let thoughts spew out on the page without worrying about even the most basic of writing rules. Writers can then test out different ideas and play with those ideas over and over again as they write each day and discover their authorial voice.

Unfortunately, it took me a long time to practice what I was reading.

My excuses were many and varied.

“I have no time for this.”

“I would rather sleep in and skip the daily sob-fest/rant/whine in written form.”

“Why should I focus on all these negative thoughts in a journal?”

“How would this help me?”

“What’s the point?”

Until finally, I stopped making excuses and just did it.

For thirty days, I wrote every day. I wrote three pages of anything, first thing in the morning while drinking my first cup of coffee. And after every journal entry, I clipped the pages with a paper clip so I couldn’t go back and read through them. And here is what I discovered.

• After the first week, the tenor of the journal entries changed from whiny rants to observations and ideas.
• I felt lighter. Mentally lighter and ready to face each day.
• I gave myself permission to NOT write three pages or to write MORE than three pages. Freeing myself from self-appointed rules and expectations helped me use journaling to create better stories, interesting characters, and creative plot twists.

It was a freeing experience that helped me grow my own writing practice. Writing in my journal every day provided me with five important benefits.

1. Journaling Clears Your Head

The more you dump your thoughts, the more room there is in your brain to create and play with story ideas or new characters or whatever.

Writing every day (mostly) with my first cup of coffee helps me clear my head of anything left over from the previous day and night. So anything that irked me or made me sad or made me wonder gets thrown in to the daily entry. But the best and most fun part is that my daydreams and ideas for stories that always hit me most brilliantly right before I doze off (of course), get recorded, too.

2. Thoughts Can Just Flow

Write your thoughts as they appear in your head at that moment. This stream of consciousness method of writing allows you to move from idea to idea without worrying how each relates to the other.

Since I journal in front of a window, I usually start with a comment on the weather or the creatures who are flying, buzzing, or walking outside. As I write and sip at my coffee, my thoughts move constantly and I write them all down. That free flow of thought and ideas more often than not leads to writing about fictional ideas that I can use or “What if?” statements that lead to more musing. For me, it is the equivalent of a random walk down a wooded path or a walk on the beach. There is no goal other than letting my thoughts wander.

3. No Rules To Bog You Down

The best part of journaling is that there are no rules that you have to follow. Even the rules that you make for yourself can be broken.

There are no transitions between thoughts or ideas. There are no grammar rules or penmanship rules or structure rules. And even though it is a good practice to write every day at least three pages every day, you can skip a day or a week or write two pages or five pages.

No pressure. No stress.

4. You Can Test Your Ideas

You can play around with your thoughts and dreams. Throughout the day and most of the night, people come up with great ideas, whether it is subconscious or not. The problem is you can’t really play around with those ideas until you get them down.

So many times, the genius ideas that I come up with right before I fall asleep or when I wake up in the middle of the night, end up in my journal. I write what I remember or riff on the feeling that I had. I play with different plot lines, knowing that in my journal, I don’t have to commit. My journal gives me a place to write different things in different ways. No judgements, no punishments, no editing.

And the nice thing about a journal is that it there are no such things as crazy ideas or boring ideas or half-baked ideas. Your journal pages are the best place to lay out concepts or storylines and let them hang out. You can always come back and check out how it feels in a few days or a few weeks or never.

You can use those ideas, revise them, or simply leave them.

5. More is Better

The saying is “Practice Makes Perfect.”

I don’t believe that. I say that the more you write, in any genre, in any form, the better you get at writing. Writing helps you hone your writing style. It helps you become more comfortable in your voice.

The more you write in your journal, the more you discover who you are as a writer.

Let’s face it.

There are no downsides to journaling every day. It’s the perfect way to clear your head, play around with different ideas, and find your voice. In fact, the more you do it, the easier it gets.

Now get out there, grab a notebook and any pen or pencil that you have laying around, and get going!