Okay I am actually going to write about writing today. In early May, I started thinking about journaling. I think of myself as keeping one single journal: a leather-bound book where I write about my life. The problem is, the journal tends to lapse for months at a time because it’s boring for me to write about my emotions and I don’t like writing longhand. This can make me feel guilty. After all, everyone knows the importance of keeping a journal if you are a creative person–you have to have some place to put down half-formed thoughts, inspiration, observations, etc.

Recently, I heard a podcast about journaling and it made me realize that it’s not actually true that I keep one journal. I keep many journals. To wit:

1. My main journal–As described above.

2. My Ongoing Work Notebook–I go through one notebook at a time filling it with interview questions, research notes, and anything else work related. When it’s full, I usually throw it out.

3. My Word Notebook–A little Anvil notebook with brown and red dots where I write down things like new vocabulary words, names, imagery from books, potential titles for stories, etc. Each section is separated by a post-it flag.

4. My Idea Notebook–A Mead composition notepad where I jot down all article ideas and sometimes story ideas.

5. My Publishing Organizer–My way of organizing larger projects, usually with lists of publishers or publications, to-do lists, etc., written in an AMPAD Project Planner.

6. My Reading Diary–An spreadsheet of books I’ve read and what I thought of them.

7. My Blog. Written here, in buggy ol’ Word Press.

So in early May, I decided to combine journals 2-4 into journal 1 and try it out for a month. The theory was that if I started writing say, goal lists and story ideas into my main journal, I would also be inclined to write more in the main journal overall. I also liked the idea of my journal becoming a better reflection of my mind with different kinds of thoughts put into it.

However, I was still very skeptical about this experiment working. I thought writing lists and random observations into my main journal would be inconvenient–not to mention a dumb use of a nice leather-bound journal. But after a month of trying it, I found that it works really well. The different functions of the journals “talk” to each other better if the thoughts are side-by-side. Also, it makes me write about my life more. When I open the journal to write a list, I will decide that I might as well jot down this thought or that thing that happened. Overall, I have picked up the journal more this month than I have in the last six month combined.

So I declare this experiment a success. I would rather have one big messy journal than a bunch of smalled compartmentalized ones. Usually the best journals are also the messiest.