7 Reasons To Never Leave Home Without Your Creative Writing Journal

The most effective tool any creative writer can have is a creative writing journal of some kind.
For anyone creative, ideas are our lifeblood, they’re the starting point for everything we ever create. Without ideas, we have nowhere to go, nothing to develop, we’re completely redundant.
A creative writing journal is a fantastic way of capturing, generating, storing and developing your creative ideas. In fact, as a creative writer, you should never leave home without it.
Here are 7 reasons why:
1. You capture ideas when they happen. The biggest reason you don’t have more creative ideas, isn’t that you don’t HAVE enough ideas. It’s simply that you don’t capture them and they disappear forever. With a creative writing journal, you can capture these ideas as they happen, then return to develop them at a later date.
2. You strengthen the belief that you find it easy to have new ideas. Once you start using your writing journal to capture ideas, you’ll realise how many you actually have. The more you realise how many ideas you have, the more confident you’ll be about having more.
3. You can write when you feel like writing. A common excuse for not writing is “I’m not in the right mood”. If you keep your creative writing journal with you at all times, when that mood is right, you can get straight into writing without delay.
4. You can organise ideas more easily. When you start a new journal, you can divide it into a few sections. Depending on what you write, you may have a section for character ideas, a section for scene ideas, another for plot ideas and another for phrases that just come to you. When you have a new idea, jot it in the right section and you organise as you go.
5. You help your ideas to breed. There’s something about having ideas collected together. They breed much in the same way as young rabbits! By keeping all your ideas in one journal, it focuses your creativity and allows related ideas to form more quickly and easily.
6. You give yourself permission to be more creative. By having your creative writing journal with you at all times, you’re sending your subconscious a strong message: “I’m a writer, I’m ready and prepared to write at any time.” Your subconscious responds by feeding you more ideas.
7. You inspire others to write. If you were sitting in a cafe and saw someone take out their journal and start writing, what would you think? As a writer yourself, no doubt you’d admire them, and start thinking about what you could write about the scene around you. The same positive effect happens for others when they see you using your journal.
These are just 7 of the many reasons why as a creative writer you should never leave home without you creative writing journal.
If you don’t have a journal, get one and start using it as soon as possible. The impact it will make to your creative writing will amaze you.