Creative Journal Ideas Beyond Writing Paragraphs

Most creative journal ideas on the first page of results are one of two things. Paint, gelli plates and napkin collage on a page that records nothing, or twenty-one kinds of notebook that turn out, once you read them, to be paragraphs. The board with four hundred pins is the first kind with the captions removed.

Here's the middle, which is where I think the useful version lives. A creative journal idea, on this page, is an entry that still records the day but isn't made of sentences. Twenty of them below, sorted into five modes by what the pen does instead. Draw it, chart it, map it, cut it, score it. Each idea says what it records, roughly how many minutes it costs, and one rule. Before the list there's a test for telling creative from decorative, and a short section on the two studies that actually bear on drawing instead of writing, with their limits stated, because neither was done in a journal. After the list there's a full drawn-data week with its legend written out, which is the one technique here I'd push on anyone who's tired of their own handwriting.

What The Ranking Pages Are Doing

I read the three text pages properly. The rest of the first page is Pinterest, Instagram and a supplies video.

The craft blog is honest about its purpose, which is variety. "I like to keep my journals varied so that they always hold interest for me," and the eight spreads are that, with a writing prompt beside each one so the words and the art share a page without touching. The fifty ideas are art exercises, good ones, with no day in them anywhere. The Substack list is the best writing of the three and it's about writing, a failure resume, an arguments journal, a decision journal, every one a notebook of paragraphs.

So the two halves of the SERP are art with no record and record with no art. Nobody's standing in the gap, and nobody gives a time.

Creative Versus Decorative

This site already has a cute ideas page about decorating a written entry and a page ideas piece about what a single page can be, and I'm not going to repeat either. The line I'd draw between those and this is a three-question test.

Is the mark itself the record? On a decorated page the border is around the words and the words carry the day. On a creative page there may be no words at all, and the drawing, the chart or the cut-out is the entry.

Could you reconstruct the day from it a year later? A tangle of patterns can't be reconstructed into anything, which makes it art rather than a journal entry, unless there's a date and one word under it. A strip of twenty-four coloured boxes can, if the legend's on the page.

Would the page exist if nothing had happened? If yes, it's practice. That's fine, and it isn't what this search is asking for, and to my eye it's why the art journal pages feel empty when you flip back through them.

Everything below passes all three. The aesthetic piece is where to go if the question is how the notebook looks.

What Drawing Does That Writing Doesn't, As Measured

Two papers, and neither is about journals, so read the limits.

The first is a set of seven experiments published in 2016 in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. People were shown lists of words and asked either to draw each one or to write it out. The drawn words were better recalled than the written ones, and the abstract reports that the advantage survived when the researchers cut the encoding time and made the lists longer. The authors' proposal is that drawing pulls the meaning of a thing, its image and the movement of the hand into one memory trace.

The second is older and smaller. In a 2009 paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology, forty people listened to a deliberately dull mock phone message about who was coming to a party. Half of them shaded printed shapes while they listened. The shading group did better at the listening task and, on a surprise memory test afterwards, recalled 29 percent more. Forty people, one phone call, one study.

What that licenses, as I read it, is modest. If you'd otherwise write "the blue mug", draw the blue mug, since the drawn version seems to be the one you keep. And doodling while you listen isn't the distraction it looks like, at least when the doodle is shapes. What it doesn't license is any claim about mood, health, or what the drawing does for you beyond remembering, and I haven't found a paper that measures that for journaling in particular.

The Five Modes

The minutes are my timer settings and not measurements. Everything in the table adds to just under two hours for all twenty, which nobody should do in one week. Pick one from the mode that suits the evening.

Draw It

The first mode is the one the research reaches, and the rule for all five is the same. Draw the thing that was actually there.

1. The seven-seven-one diary. Two columns and two boxes. Seven things you did on the left, seven things you saw on the right, one thing you overheard in the bottom left, and a quick drawing of something from the saw column in the bottom right. Six minutes. This is Lynda Barry's classroom diary as documented on the Near-Sighted Monkey blog, which is tied to her University of Wisconsin course and doesn't sign her name on that post, so I'm attributing it to the blog. Its version is five to six minutes. The rule is that the drawing comes from the saw column and nowhere else.
2. The plate. Draw what you ate, from above, no labels. Three minutes. Do it after the meal from memory rather than during it, and the gaps in the drawing are the entry.
3. The object within reach. One thing on the table, drawn without lifting the pen. Five minutes. Date it, and draw the same object again in a month on the facing page, because the two drawings together are a record of your hand as much as of the object.
4. The doodle during the call. Shade shapes while you're on a call, and after it write three things you heard. No extra minutes, since the call was happening anyway. The rule comes straight from the study above. Shapes rather than pictures, because shading is what was tested and a picture wants the attention the call needs.
5. The tangle with a date. A square of structured pattern, in the style the Zentangle Method describes as "drawing structured patterns" from "dots, lines, simple curves, S-curves and orbs," with the date and one word for the day written under it. Ten minutes. Their rule is no eraser, and I'd keep it. Without the word underneath this fails the reconstruction test, so the word isn't optional.

Number 3 is the one I'd argue for. A pen that never lifts can't be tidy, which takes the question of whether you can draw off the table before you start.

Chart It

Marks placed by a rule. This mode has a lineage, and it's the section I most wanted to write.

6. The drawn-data week. Choose one thing to count for a week, keep tallies as you go, then on Sunday draw the whole week as marks on one page with the legend beside it. Fifteen minutes on Sunday plus the tallying. The method is Dear Data, a year in which two information designers on opposite sides of the Atlantic each "collected and measured a particular type of data about our lives, used this data to make a drawing on a postcard-sized sheet of paper," and posted it to the other, with "detailed keys to our drawings" squeezed onto the back. Fifty-two weeks. They call it a "personal documentary" rather than a quantified-self project, and that's the distinction I'd hold onto. There's a worked week further down.
7. The day strip. Twenty-four small boxes across the page, one per hour, each coloured by what you mostly did in it. Two minutes at night. Four colours at most, or the strip stops being readable across a month.
8. The conversation circles. One circle per conversation, sized by how long it ran, placed along a line by the hour it happened. Three minutes. No names, and the empty stretches are the point.
9. The spend dots. One dot per thing bought, sized by amount, placed on the hour. Two minutes. No totals anywhere on the page. The total is what the bank statement is for, and the dots tell you something the total can't, which is when.
10. The sky square. One small square, coloured with whatever pen is closest to the colour of the sky at the same hour each day. One minute. Thirty squares in a row is the month's weather without a single icon.

If you keep a dotted notebook, the grid does half the work for 7 and 10, and the dot journaling piece has the layouts sized to it.

Map It

Things in relation to each other, drawn from memory, with the phone face down.

11. The day as a map. Every place you were, drawn as a box, connected in the order you moved between them, with the arrival time on each line. Five minutes. Not the route on the ground, which is a different page, and not from the phone's location history. From memory, which is the entry.
12. The argument, diagrammed. One box per thing that was said in a disagreement, arrows for what replied to what. Ten minutes. No adjectives inside the boxes. Once it's drawn you can usually see which box the whole thing turned on, which is rarely the one that felt biggest at the time.
13. The table from above. Where everyone sat at a meal, drawn as a plan, with one line each person said written beside their seat. Four minutes. Better than a photograph in one specific way, which is that a photograph doesn't know who said what.
14. The sketchnote of one thing you listened to. A talk, a podcast, a meeting, taken down as sketchnotes rather than lines, which Mike Rohde, who coined the term in 2007, defines as "a mix of handwriting, drawings, hand-lettering, shapes, and visual elements like arrows, boxes, and lines." The time is the length of the thing, call it fifteen minutes. His rule, and it's the right one, is "You don't need to draw well." Capture the ideas and let the boxes and arrows carry the structure.

Cut It

Someone else's words, edited down. Two of these need a marker, one needs scissors.

15. The blackout entry. A page of today's newspaper or today's junk mail, a permanent marker, and you black out everything except the words that say what kind of day it was. Ten minutes. This is Austin Kleon's method, a book of poems "made by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker," as his page for it puts it, published in 2010. Use something dated so the page carries its own date without you writing it.
16. The cut-up. Take one paragraph you wrote last week, cut it into strips of two or three words, shuffle, and glue the strips back down in the order they land. Eight minutes. It's a way of rereading an entry you'd otherwise never reread, and the accidental version is sometimes closer to what you meant.
17. The redaction. Write the day's list in the morning, then at night black out every line you didn't do. Two minutes. The lines left standing are the entry, and the bars are the rest of the day.

Score It

A line that moves with time. The cheapest mode on the page and the one I'd try first on a bad day.

18. The sound map. A dot in the middle of the page for you, then five minutes of marking every sound where it came from, bigger marks for louder. Eyes closed for the first minute so the ears get there before the eyes. Five minutes, and do it in the same chair once a week.
19. The line of the day. One continuous stroke across the page, left to right, rising and falling with how the day went, with the hours ticked along the bottom. One minute. Drawn in a single stroke, no going back, and a month of these stacked down a page is a record I'd rather have than a month of mood words.
20. The walk as a score. Take a walk with the notebook open and draw one line that thickens with noise and thins with quiet, with a small mark wherever a smell arrives. Ten minutes, or the length of the walk. Musical notation for a street you already know.

A Drawn-Data Week, Worked

Number 6 is the one people bounce off, because "collect data" sounds like a spreadsheet. Here's a full week designed on paper, and I should say plainly that it's a design rather than a record of anyone's actual week.

The variable is conversations. Every time you talk to someone for more than a minute, one tally in the notebook with the hour, how long, who, and how.

On Sunday, the legend goes on the page first, because a chart without its key is decoration.

Then the marks. A Tuesday might read as two small blue squares before nine, one large dark circle around one o'clock, and a medium pencil triangle at eight in the evening. Wednesday, nothing until a large blue triangle at four. Saturday, four pencil circles stacked through the afternoon. By Sunday night there are somewhere between thirty and sixty marks on the page, and you can see the week's shape from across the room.

What it shows after a month is the thing no sentence would have told you. Which days go quiet. Whether work is blue triangles at four every single day. Whether the pencil marks, the people who aren't family and aren't work, are there at all. That's the "personal documentary" idea in one page, and it costs fifteen minutes on a Sunday.

The next week, change the variable. Doors opened. Times you said thank you. Things you almost bought. Anything countable, and the smaller and odder the better.

The Questions Under This Search

What are the 3-3-3 and 3-2-1 journaling methods? Page templates, three gratitudes, three prompts and three affirmations for one, and three thankfuls, two excitements and one task for the other, defined with sources on the starting guide. Both are writing, and both ask the same thing every day, which is what this whole page is a way out of.

What are the seven different types of journaling? My sort. A log of what happened, a list book, a planner, a sketchbook, a chart book, a collage or glue book, and a letter book of pages written to someone and never sent. The twenty ideas above live in the middle three, and the prompts pillar covers the written ones.

What are some good journaling ideas, and some beautiful ideas for a journal? Good, the twenty above, starting with number 3. Beautiful, the aesthetic piece linked earlier, since that's a question about the look of the page and the answer there is margins and repetition.

What are common journaling mistakes? From this page's own argument, three. Making the page pretty and calling it creative, when the words underneath are still the only record. Doing the art exercise with no date and no word on it, so it can't be reread as a day. And collecting data with no legend on the same page, which turns a chart into a pattern within about a fortnight.

Where I'd Start

Number 19 tonight, because it's one stroke and one minute. Number 3 tomorrow, with whatever's on the table. Then a Sunday for number 6, with conversations as the variable, and the legend written before a single mark.

That's three modes in a week and under half an hour, and by the end of it you'll know whether you're a person who draws the day, charts it or scores it. My guess is that you'll be one of those and not the other two, and that the notebook gets better the moment you stop trying to be all three.