Surrealmuse Studios

ONE YEAR DIARY FORMAT
If you have ever seen a one year diary, you’ll remember that they only allow so much space to record your thoughts. So you either have to be quite precise and capture the essence of your day in three to five sentences or you will spill out onto the next day. While sometimes we feel as though we wouldn’t give our diaries justice in writing only a couple sentences, the one year diary format can be an important tool to utilize when you want to log those significant moments in your life, but you either do not have the time or energy to go into the details.

PICK A WORD
Pick a word that represents the times of your life. If your life seems “mundane”, write about the mundane. Ask yourself, what’s good about a mundane existence? Security? Comfort? What’s bad about a mundane existence? Boredom? Do you enjoy your mundane existence? What keeps you from changing? If you could change something, what would you alter? So pick any word and play with it. Toss it around. Ponder it.

LET YOUR FINGERS DO THE WALKING
One of my books on intuition, once had exercises where you would try to listen to your intuition and let your fingers do the walking. You can do the same when it comes to your journal writing. Walk over to your bookcase. Close your eyes and let your fingers wander across the different book titles. Slowly or fast, whatever feels right, let your fingers pick something out and then open your eyes. What did it pick out? A school book? A book on poetry? Use the experience as inspiration and see what words come to mind when you sit down to write. You can even take the exercise further by letting your finger pick out a passage in the book.

LISTS
Too busy? Too overwhelmed? Make a list of the events in your life. Make a list of your feelings. Just short and sweet. One. Two. Three.

QUOTES
One of my standby favorite ways to start a journal entry when I don’t have anything in particular on the surface to write about is to pick out a quote that calls to me. Then I would usually write a little bit about the quote and pretty soon, I would feel inspired to write a whole journal entry.

MIND MAPPING/BRAINSTORMING
If you have a topic that you want to explore in your journal, but you don’t know where to start . . . mind mapping aka brainstorming is a good method to get yourself warmed up. It helps capture your subconscious thoughts by using key words, which allows your mind to flow and not get boggled down in details. Start with getting yourself a blank piece of paper–the larger the better. Then write down a key word for the topic at hand in the center of the paper. When an idea comes to mind, branch the idea off by drawing a line and writing down the next key thought, continue to do this until you have a page full of spider web thoughts. By the time you are done, you will have a possibly messy yet organized list of thoughts to capture in your journal.

COLLAGE
Our minds communicate thoughts to us in many different ways. Sometime our thoughts manifest themselves through typing, but sometimes our inner most thoughts hide from the keyboard even the pen. Sometimes we need a different method to capture our thoughts, and it can be frustrating when you don’t feel like the creative type to draw or paint. However, you can still give your subconscious a chance to reveal itself. One way you can do this is by creating a simple collage.

As an artist, I am always finding visually stimulating images that call out to me, but I don’t always have the time to make a collage. So in between projects, I have a box where I store these found objects. They can be clippings from a magazine, leaves from your garden, a piece of paper found on the street, even a greeting card that you purchased but never seem to mail to anyone.

In some of my recent projects to simplify my clutter, I threw out all my old jewel cases, placed my cds in a travel case, and kept the cd inserts. I have also been known to use old books that I no longer use. The text can add a nice background element to the collage.

Once you have selected a couple images for your collage, you can either paste away using whatever glue you have on hand or pre-arrange the collage. (As for recommendations for glues, you can use paper cement, paper-mache paste for a smooth finish, or acid free glue found in the scrapbooking aisle.)

QUESTIONS TO PONDER
When I was growing up, I always seemed to look towards the future. I always seemed to ponder, what’s next? And there will be moments in our lives, where there seems to be more questions that answers. So don’t be afraid to ask questions in your journal. While there might not appear to be an answer in sight, give yourself time. And come back to the questions occasionally. Maybe the answers will comes to you in a dream or even when you’re doing chores around the house.

UNSENT LETTERS
Unsent letters are a common journal writing technique to address the rough issues with people that are either no longer in our lives or sometimes unsent letters a god sent method for us to vent about the people in our daily lives that seem to drive us nuts. While it has been awhile since I have last written an unsent letter, I have been mentally writing them in my head. From the impatient driver today, where I wrote this morning in my head, “Do you really have to be such bitch first thing in the morning? Is it really my fault that you are running late so you have to drive like a maniac on coffee overload?” to my new upstairs neighbors, “I know it must be exciting to get your first new pad. I know that a girls’ gotta party. But for goodness sakes, turn down your god damn bass at 3am, some people have to work the next day.” While I would never send these letters or even utter them in real life (well, my husband did warn the neighbors the other night), but either way, whether the letters help you find your voice just are just an outlet to let it all out, unsent letters can be a good way to just tell it the way it is.

BLESSINGS
In times where you seem lost or your feel overtaken by negative thoughts, taking a moment to count your blessings can be a “blessing in disguise”. But don’t let the moment overtake you with guilt (i.e. for being a bit self-involved for forgetting to count your blessings). Just be thankful and proud that you did acknowledge them.