What's the Best Journal to Use?

I was on the tanglepattern.com website and ended up responding to an article about papers and pens.  I wrote so much that it seemed more like a blog entry, and I decided to include it here. Writing my thoughts made me realize that I need to get back to including my doodles, collages, figurework, etc. in my blog on a daily basis.  Practice is the doorway to personal magic.  Anyway, here's my response...
There are two differnt notebooks/journals that I use. The first is Miquelrius. It’s the Spanish version of Moleskine. The second is the GIANT JOURNNAL made by Michael Roger Press.


The Miquelrius that I use as a grid. It’s looks like it’s glued, but it opens fairly flat. When opened to a full spread, the journal is a little smaller than a full sheet of paper. The pages are thin, however the journal has 400 pages. I love this. I’m a writer, composer, and visual artist. I tend to be a magpie and use my journals as catch-alls. The small size lets me carry it everywhere.

The GIANT JOURNAL is spiral bound. It’s pages are 5.5″ x 8.5″. It comes lined or blank. The paper is typical sketchbook paper. It’s selling point–500 pages! The drawback is because the paper is thicker, the journal dimension a little bigger, and the addition of 100 more pages; it’s harder to carry in my purse. (Notice that I didn’t say impossible.)

If I could only have one I’d get the Miquelrius. I originally got it as a replacement for my GIANT JOURNAL. Barnes and Noble were out of the big one and didn’t know when another shipment was coming in. Apparently, I was one of a select few who appreciated its size. The Miquelrius came closer with the page count, so I decided to try it. Having that many pages and being able to fit it in my purse make it my number one choice. I get around the thin paper by glueing in a blank behind my tangle page. Then I use that sturdier blank page as a collage/gluebook page. When I’m in a waiting room or watching TV, I sometimes go back and tangle in the nooks and crannies of those pages. I like the layered effect.

Keeping Character Journals

I first heard about character journals in Script Magic by Marisa D'Vari. In that book she sugggested writing a journal entry for each of your main characters daily. That seemed like a lot of work to me.

However, Lou Willett Stanek in So You Want to Write a Novel offered similiar advice. She suggests doing writing exercises from your character's POV. So that's two pings for the character journal/exercise route.

We all know three is the charm. PBW talked about character journals and posted a journaling excerpt. She also asked people how they get to know their characters and did her customary - comment on the post, enter a drawing thing. I was too late for the drawing, but I did look through the comments. Lots of good ideas.

I was probably hasty (read-LAZY) in my initial assessment. There's something to this Character Journal/Exercise thing, and I'm jumping into the deep end. I've started a list of websites that have writing exercises and/or journaling prompts that I can use...

• Writer's Digest has prompts for every day of the year.


• Bella-Online has a page of links to prompts.


• There's actually a website called Creative Writing Prompts.


• And there's a site called Journal Writing Prompts.

These are just a few of the hundreds of websites that have prompts. While I like the idea of prompts, I'm not going to overlook the obvious ideas

• asking what if?


• pulling one, two or three words at random out of a dictionary, thesaurus, textbook, etc.


• using a line from a poem or song


• using a first line, last line or random line of text from a book


• using a quote


• using a headline from a newspaper or magazine


• using a title


• using a question from The Book of Questions

These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are many other sources that I'm not thinking of right now.

Will I post my character's journals? No. I tend to do a lot of free-writing in the early part of my story writing. I know that no one else is going to see it, so I'm free to go anywhere I want to go in the writing. I might start sensoring myself if I start posting character journals. I will DEFINITELY post the prompts I've used that day. Someone else might find them useful.