Writing Ideas & Journal Prompts
The following ideas and writing prompts are great ways to continue your journaling practice or to get yourself “unstuck” if you’re not sure what to write about next.
For instance, you could try the five writing exercises from this blog:
- Writing a letter to yourself
- Writing letters to others
- Writing a poem
- Free writing (just writing everything that comes to mind)
- Mind mapping (drawing mind maps with your main problem in the middle and branches representing different aspects of your problem)
If those ideas don’t get your juices flowing, try these prompts:
- Journaling with Photographs – choose a personal photo and use your journal to answer questions like “What do you feel when you look at these photos?” or “What do you want to say to the people, places, or things in these photos?”
- Timed Journal Entries – decide on a topic and set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes to write continuously.
- Sentence Stems – these prompts are the beginnings of a sentence that encourage meaningful writing, such as “The thing I am most worried about is…”, “I have trouble sleeping when…”, and “My happiest memory is…”
- List of 100 – these ideas encourage the writer to create lists of 100 based on prompts like “100 Things That Make Me Sad,” “100 Reasons to Wake Up in the Morning,” and “100 Things I Love” (Farooqui, 2016).
Psychologist Margarita Tartakovsky provides a handy list of 30 prompts (2014). Some of these include:
- My favorite way to spend the day is…
- If I could talk to my teenage self, the one thing I would say is…
- Make a list of 30 things that make you smile.
- The words I’d like to live by are…
- I really wish others knew this about me…
- What always brings tears to your eyes?
- Using 10 words, describe yourself.
- Write a list of questions to which you urgently need answers.
If you’re still on the lookout for more prompts, try the lists outlined here.
Exercises and Ideas to Help You Get Started
As great as the benefits of therapeutic journaling sound, it can be difficult to get started. After all, it can be a challenge to start even the most basic of good habits!
If you’re wondering how you begin, read on for some tips and exercises to help you start your regular writing habit.
This list of ten handy tips can help get you started:
- Start writing about where you are in your life at this moment.
- For five to ten minutes just start writing in a “stream of consciousness.”
- Start a dialogue with your inner child by writing in your subdominant hand.
- Cultivate an attitude of gratitude by maintaining a daily list of things you appreciate, including uplifting quotes.
- Start a journal of self-portraits.
- Keep a nature diary to connect with the natural world.
- Maintain a log of successes.
- Keep a log or playlist of your favorite songs.
- If there’s something you are struggling with or an event that’s disturbing you, write about it in the third person.
- Develop your intuition and learn to listen to yourself (Hills, n.d.).
If you’re still having a tough time getting started, consider trying a “mind dump.” This is a quick exercise that can help you get a jump start on therapeutic writing.
Researcher and writer Gillie Bolton suggests simply writing for six minutes (Pollard, 2002). Don’t pay attention to grammar, spelling, style, syntax, or fixing typos – just write. Once you have “dumped,” you can focus on a theme. The theme should be something concrete, like something from your childhood with personal value.
This exercise can help you ensure that your therapeutic journal entries go deeper than the more superficial diary or journal entries.
More prompts, exercises, and ideas to help you get started can be found at this link.
A Take-Home Message
In this piece, we went over writing therapy – what it is, how to do it, and how it can benefit you. I hope you learned something new from this piece, and I hope you will keep writing therapy in mind the next time you find yourself considering a visit to a therapist’s office.
Have you ever tried writing therapy? Would you try writing therapy? How do you think it would benefit you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
Thanks for reading, and happy writing!
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