How To Start Journaling
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
For six years, I have journaled every day. In 2026, even if it isn’t every day, you should start journaling too.
This guide has advice you haven’t heard before, because you wouldn’t be reading this if the suggestion to ‘make time every morning’ and ‘start with a sentence a day’ actually bore fruit.
In truth, if journaling is meant for you, it will eventually stick. I say this as someone whose starting days felt like reusing the same piece of tape. Equipping myself with the common and conventional journaling advice wore down the adhesive so much that for a long time, journaling simply would not stick.
Copying and pasting suggestions that didn’t resonate with myself was far from the transmutative hopes I had for journaling; instead of truly engaging and embodying the craft, I was filling a Pinterest board with words, rituals and meanings that weren’t mine. In cultivating my own personal relationship with journaling, I created the most sacred ritual in my life.
There are five suggestions that I expand upon in this guide that I have developed over the past six years. At the bottom of this newsletter, I have compiled a graphic of all thirteen journaling prompts for your first entry which I am so excited for you to try.
Happy reading and writing,
Jada
✷ The First Step Is The Only Step
Prompt 01: Start writing about the first thing that comes to mind.
A fitting place to start this guide lies more in the how as opposed to the what. Notebook or fountain-pen brands have nothing to do with the soul of journaling, and instead amass clutter and decision paralysis. The symbiosis between materialism and journaling is poisonous and really unfortunate to witness, but this newsletter is a space that will not be advertising an ideal to you– a Louise Carmen is not going to grant you the journaling revelation you think it will.
The divinity of journaling is a simple equation: pen, paper, and thought. Pen and paper is not the first step, it is the only step.
We are incapacitated by this pressure to set the stage perfectly that we become stuck in a prologue that never ends, like flailing jesters juggling notebook brands, fountain pens and leather covers in place of processing emotions, documenting memory and archiving wisdom. Is journaling not the dynamic, messy unfurling of a stage with endless possibilities? The unsure yet constant rearranging, gluing and painting of props behind the scenes?
We are fools if we hope to devote ourselves to such a craft that is built on image.
When you undertake the simple task of pen to paper, rest assured that in taking this first step, you have already done all that is required of you.
✷ Access Physicality As A Bridge
Prompt 02: Imagine your surroundings as a still life. What would the painting look like?
If only the above were that simple! It is a comfort to realise that the more you journal, the simpler (and yet more profound) it becomes. There are already an insurmountable amount of sources and commentaries about journaling that give sound advice and recommendations. For most, the first to come to mind is Julia Cameron’s esteemed Morning Pages:
“Pages clarify our yearnings. They keep an eye on our goals. They may provoke us, coax us, comfort us, even cajole us, as well as prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. If we are drifting, the pages will point that out. They will point the way True North. Each morning, as we face the page, we meet ourselves. The pages give us a place to vent and a place to dream. They are intended for no eyes but our own.”
These sentiments, and the ideal of commitment to our goals, yearnings, and finding our True North are equally as fantastic as they are damning. When I began journaling, I too aspired so desperately to achieve these things; dedicating time every morning to write is the correct advice. But that desperation was a major reason why I wasn’t engaging with the practice of journaling.
On the daybreak of that first morning, when we open our journals to the beginning, how do we “face the page” and in turn “meet ourselves?” What terrifying undertakings.
Prompt 03: Write about all of your senses and what they are experiencing right now in as much detail as possible.
Recently, my partner and I were sitting at our favourite park, after my suggestion that he start journaling. We both had fresh journals spread skyward across our laps– mine being my seventh in comparison to his first. This diorama clearly contrasted two people at differing stages of their journaling journey. I noticed he kept drawing a blank. How could this be when he had done all the right things? He had a journal, a pen, and a fine morning.
I am of the firm opinion that you do not have to be a writer to be a devout journaler.
For some guidance, I said, “Start with admitting you don’t know what to write.” Despite having journaled every day for six years, even I sometimes don’t know what to write. “Start with your physicality. What can you see, hear, feel, smell?”
Our senses are always available to us as a starting point. Here’s what he wrote:
“I’m sitting on a bench in our favourite park. Jada is next to me, journal in hand, furiously scribbling between bouts of laughing at ducks. To be fair, these ducks are ridiculous. They’re chasing each other across the pond, wings flickering at the speed of a machine.”
What a sweet memory!
The idea of morning pages is something I wholly agree with, but in place of developing a habit out of writing, what I’d like to encourage is developing a habit out of noticing. Cameron writes about provocation, comfort, coaxing, cajoling, about finding our True North. She references journals as a place to vent and a place to dream. When we first start, how on earth are we supposed to know what our True North is?! First, we must give ourselves permission to access these parts of the practice and ourselves. It is in the intangible spaces that we discover our True North, and getting into the habit of writing about our corporeal realities builds presence, and in turn builds the bridge to meeting ourselves on the other side.
When I first started morning pages, like my partner’s first time journaling, I found that my introspection was a journey I had to slowly map out. There is a lot of pressure for journaling to be beneficial in hyper-specific ways– more productivity, more healing, more meditation, more clarity. It’s always about the more; there’s always a reason, always something more to uncover, but if we have not previously nurtured these parts of ourselves in writing before, we cannot expect to begin there either. Sometimes, laughing at ducks is medicine enough.
One of the most rewarding aspects of journaling is crossing this threshold. The starting point is to utilise journaling as a grounding practice that focuses on what is directly in front of you. This creates a tangible relationship between you and your journal as they begin to witness the same things.
As a child, my mom taught me how to paint by strengthening my mind’s creative eye first. Before I began painting from imagination, she would arrange a series of still lifes. Fruit was the popular option, but we explored shape, composition, light, colour and contrast in vases, plants, ceramics, and even everyday objects. Any inanimate still object can be arranged in a still life. And any physical moment can be immortalised through writing and in turn transform into the metaphysical.
The more you journal about presence and physicality, the more attuned you will become to delving deeper into a more introspective path.
✷ Introduce Yourself
Prompt 04: Write a page about who you are in this moment as if you were a character in a book.
Write everything you could possibly think of about yourself. Create a snapshot of who you are in this present moment, as if you’re telling the universe "this is me right now, this is my experience, this is my life.”
Some whimsy ways to get you started:
Go to a photo booth, take a polaroid, or print out a picture of yourself. Bonus points if in the photo you’re holding your journal! Write about that person.
Put a baby photo and write child you a letter about who you are now.
Prompt 05: If you had to put five items in a pentagram to summon yourself, what would they be and why?
Prompt 06: If you had a museum, what would you exhibit, and what does this tell you about yourself?
Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician noun that most closely translates to longing. This feeling is akin to when you’re doing your spring cleaning and come across a box of photo albums or mementos. We all have this box, and we are all familiar with the feeling of stopping what we’re doing, sitting on the edge of bed, and making a new mess as you go through everything.
Journaling offers the same unfurling of memory and is an output for saudade or nostalgia. It is a wholly unique documentation of time and who we are in the moment. That’s not something we will ever truly get back, so we might as well enshrine it in writing.
✷ Solitude Is Not Performance
Prompt 07: Are you afraid that other people will read your writing, or are you scared of being honest with yourself? Discuss.
Truth is a difficult mirror to look into. We see things we don’t want to admit, things we choose to ignore, things that hurt us. But there are multiple strains to truth– honesty about what’s important to you; how you feel; what you think.
A journal is obsolete if it is filled with an ideal of who you want to be. The last place you should play pretend is in a space that is reserved for you and you alone.
Nobody is going to read your journal. Write without an audience or mask– you are not performing, you don’t need to uphold decorum, and you don’t need to be polite or proper. Journals are vessels for all our experiences, including and especially the negative ones. When you write from a place of pure honesty and without censorship, you encourage the process of transmutation.
In alchemy, transmutation has multiple definitions:
Chrysopoeia and argyropoeia, the turning of base metals, such as lead or copper, into gold and silver
Magnum opus (alchemy), the creation of the philosopher’s stone
Mental transmutation, the transformation of a mental state
If you’re the only person reading your journal, who or what are you actually scared of? Not every entry will be positive or affirmative. How can you transmute, transform and learn from your personal truths if you are not first honest with yourself?
Fostering a writing space where we can be completely honest with ourselves becomes the ultimate catharsis. This is the most radical action of self-acceptance, wherein we live more aligned with our inner compass through the sheer integrity of facing our demons. That is how we begin to find our True North.
✷ To Be Loved Is To Be Changed
Prompt 08: What is your relationship with perfection?
Whilst we want to retain its pristine, untouched condition, as one of my favourite memes states: to be loved is to be changed. One of the biggest obstacles to a sustainable journaling practice is how tightly we cling to perfectionism. Wanting to keep our pretty journals in pristine condition preserves the wrong thing. What we should be protecting is experience, and getting our journals dirty is a vital part of the process.
Prompt 09: What is an example in your life of something changing the more it is loved?
Our own personal legacy is documented with the endless, unavoidable passing of time. Why would you want your journal to retain its brand-new sheen, when that was the lacklustre version of your notebook at a stage before you brought life to its pages?
Think about how leather journals develop a patina. This is a visual language, one of change, exploration, and companionship; the ultimate influences on dialogue of your journal.
✷ A List Of Reasons To Journal
Prompt 10: Write an entry or paragraph about: a recent event, an emotional realisation, and something you’ve learnt recently.
As you start to journal, curiosity will lead you into new avenues and structures that you can explore in your journaling practice. And exploration is the key here– an exploration of self can look like many things:
Crónicas: Portugese for “chronicles.” This refers to a popular Latin American literary genre that you can draw inspiration from. The genre blends journalism, essays, and fiction and focuses on every day life from a personal perspective. A favourite of mine is Clarice Lispector’s Too Much of Life.
Catharsis: Emotional release. Stream-of-consciousness. Venting. The process of unpacking, of undoing a piece of string until it is one continuous line on paper.
Curation: Taking note of what defines us and how we engage with the things we enjoy.
Prompt 11: Discuss your favourite story.
Archive: Systematically preserving, dating and documenting past writings, conversations, mundanities.
Prompt 12: Discuss the last piece of art that resonated with you.
Memorabilia: Recounting memories onto pen and paper.
Prompt 13: Write about a physical object with a memory attached to it.
Consider what is on your mind a lot and the structure of how you think. Model your journal in the same way.
What I don’t recommend is being so hung up on structure and layout, and instead using the above as a guiding star. Make it happen first, you can always make it perfect later. Perhaps what works best for you is a mixture of all of the above, perhaps it’s having different journals compartmentalised for different uses. Maybe the usual model of journaling every day isn’t suitable, and you instead journal about the books you read and the media you watch (like a physical Pinterest or Letterboxd).
For me personally, my ultimate advice is to commit to one journal before (and if you decide to) expand into an ecosystem.
Explore all of these forms using these prompts as a funnel. Take note of what your favourite entry to write was, and when journaling, keep doing what you enjoy.
