50 Fun Journal Prompts For Days You Need Lighter

The largest list of fun journal prompts for adults on the first page of results asks, at one point, whether you hate anyone. Then who you need to forgive. Then what you fear most in life. The word fun is in the title, and the list underneath it is the same heavy inventory every other prompt page carries, with the lighting turned up.

So here's what this page is instead. Fifty fun journal prompts, written out in full, sorted into five kinds of fun because they're five different activities. Funny things that actually happened, rankings, what-ifs with a rule attached, small fiction and inventions, and games you play on the notebook itself. Each kind has a minute budget. Before the list there's a three-part test for telling a light prompt from a heavy one in a costume, and after it there's the one kind of fun prompt that's been through a placebo-controlled trial, which is writing down three funny things from your day for a week. If you just want the prompts, they start under Funny Things That Actually Happened.

What The Fun Lists Actually Contain

I loaded the pages ranking for this phrase and read three of them properly. Here's the audit.

The 90-prompt list is the most honestly fun of the set. It's mostly hypotheticals, a hundred thousand dollars appearing in your account, telekinesis or telepathy, and memory prompts like the funniest thing you've ever seen happen in real life. No structure, no timings, but nothing on it will ruin your evening.

The 188-prompt page is the one I'd warn you about. The title says having fun. The list contains "Do I hate anyone? If so, why? Could I let that hate go?", "Who do I need to forgive in my life?", "What do I fear most in life?", "Is there something I feel guilty about?" and "If I had one day left to live, what would I do on that day?" Some of those are decent prompts. None is fun, and whoever came looking for fun and got the forgiveness question at nine on a Tuesday night was sold the wrong thing.

The writers' page is for people with a stalled manuscript, and the rest of the results are lists for kids and students. This page is for adults.

The Test For A Light Prompt

Nobody on those pages says what makes a prompt fun. Here's my version. Three questions, and a prompt has to pass all three.

Could an honest answer tell you something you didn't want to know about yourself? If yes, it's heavy, however cheerful the wording. That's the stakes test.

Does the prompt end on its own? A top five ends when you've written five. "What do I fear most" ends when you decide you've suffered enough, and that's the finish test.

Would you read the page out at a table? That's the reread test, and it catches the hypotheticals everyone answers the same way.

The right-hand column is sillier, on purpose. The pillar page on prompts goes through why the grammar of a question matters more than its topic, and the short version is that "why am I like this" questions relate to low mood in a direction you don't want. Fun prompts are the far end of the same rule. They ask you to describe, rank, invent or play, and they never ask you to diagnose.

Funny Things That Actually Happened

Five minutes each, and these are records rather than jokes. The funny thing already happened. You're writing it down before it goes, which is the whole job.

1. Three funny things that happened today, each with one line on why it was funny. If you can only find one, write one and count the others.
2. The funniest thing anyone said to you this week, verbatim, with who said it and where you were standing. No explanation after it.
3. The last time you laughed on your own, with nobody there. What set it off, and would it work on anyone else?
4. A misunderstanding that resolved in your favour. Write what you thought was happening, then what was actually happening, then the moment the two met.
5. Something a child, a pet or a very old relative did this month that you've already told twice. Write it a third time, plainly, in the order it happened.
6. The most ridiculous object you own. How it got here, and the reason it's still here.
7. A word you mispronounced for years. Who finally corrected you, and did you believe them?
8. The strangest thing you've overheard in a shop, a queue or a waiting room. Write the line, then your best guess at what happened next.
9. A plan that went wrong in a way that turned out better. The plan, then the mess, then the ending.
10. Your worst haircut, outfit or profile picture, described by a kind friend who's trying very hard.

Number 1 is the prompt with the trial behind it, and the trial gets its own section below. I'd do number 8 more often than any of them, because overheard lines are the only free material that improves with age.

Rankings

Five minutes. A ranking finishes when the list is full, which is the property that makes it safe on a bad evening. No item needs more than a line.

11. Your top five sandwiches, in order, with a one-line case for number one.
12. The five worst names you could give a boat. Then the one you'd actually paint on.
13. Everything in your bag or pockets right now, ranked by how awkward it would be to explain to a customs officer.
14. Five things from your life that belong in a museum, with the little card of label text for each one.
15. The rooms in your home from best to worst, and the deciding factor for each.
16. Ten small things that are better made than they need to be. A hinge, a spoon, a bus route, a lid.
17. Your five most-repeated sentences, as your friends would quote them back to you.
18. Five songs you'd play at a party you were quietly trying to end.
19. Every vehicle you've ever been a passenger in that wasn't a car, a bus or a train, ranked by how soon you'd do it again.
20. The five best free things in your town, ranked by how far you'd walk for them in the rain.

If a ranking spills past five minutes, you've started justifying the order. Stop. The order is the entry.

What-Ifs With A Rule

Ten minutes, paragraph shape. Every hypothetical on the ranking pages is a wish, and a wish produces the same page every time. These have a rule bolted on, so they behave like a puzzle instead.

21. You get one extra hour every day, and it's always between three and four in the morning. What do you do with it once the novelty's gone?
22. Your home has to lose one room. Which one goes, where does everything in it end up, and what happens to the wall?
23. You can bring back one discontinued product, but you have to buy a year's supply up front. What is it, and where in the house does a year of it live?
24. You're given a shop on your street, rent-free for a year, and it can only sell one thing. Name the thing and write the sign.
25. Everyone you know will read your search history for one day of your choosing. Which day, and what happens the night before?
26. You can trade one chore for one you've never done, permanently. What's the swap, and who else has to agree to it?
27. A very small, very polite dragon moves in. Write the house rules you'd stick on the fridge.
28. You have to teach a one-hour class tomorrow on the thing you know most about that nobody has ever asked you about. Write the first ten minutes.
29. You can rename one street in your town and have to justify it to the council in under a hundred words. Go.
30. You wake up able to talk to one kind of animal, and only that one. Pick the species with the best gossip and write the first conversation.

The rule is doing the work in all ten. Take it off number 24 and it's a wish about owning a shop. Leave it on and you have to decide what a shop that sells only one thing looks like at four on a wet Wednesday, which is a better ten minutes.

Small Fiction And Inventions

Ten minutes. I've self-published a few books, and the one thing I'd pass on about very short fiction is that a scene needs one person who wants one thing and one obstacle in the way. Each of these hands you at least two of the three.

31. A stranger leaves an umbrella at a cafe with a note tucked into the handle. Write the note.
32. Invent a kitchen gadget nobody needs. Name it, write the copy on the box, and set the price.
33. A holiday that doesn't exist yet. Give it a date, a food, and one rule everybody breaks.
34. The first paragraph of a mystery in which the only crime is that someone's mug has moved.
35. The review a cat would leave for your home. Star rating first, then the grievances.
36. Instructions for a Sunday afternoon, written in the style of flat-pack furniture directions, including the step where a part is missing.
37. Two people who keep missing each other in the same building by two minutes. Write the day the timing changes.
38. A weather forecast for your week, except it forecasts your moods instead of the sky. Five days, with percentages.
39. A board game based on your commute or your kitchen. Write the objective, one card, and the way you lose.
40. A short, formal letter of complaint to the moon.

Number 34 is the hardest and the best. A mystery with no stakes forces every trick of the genre to work on nothing, and it's the closest a journal gets to a crossword.

Games On The Notebook

Five minutes. These are for the nights you've got nothing to say and want to write anyway, because the constraint supplies the content.

41. Write today in exactly twenty-six words, one starting with each letter of the alphabet, in order.
42. Describe your room as an estate agent. Then describe it as a deeply unimpressed teenager.
43. Write about your morning with your other hand. Keep whatever it looks like.
44. An entry made only of questions. No answers allowed until tomorrow.
45. A six-word memoir of this week. Then five more attempts, and circle the winner.
46. Fill a page with one sentence, changing a single word each time, until it means something else entirely.
47. Write the day backwards, from this minute to waking up.
48. Find the ten longest words on any labels within arm's reach, then write one paragraph that uses all ten.
49. Write the day as a menu. Starters, mains, desserts, with the day's events as dishes and a price on each.
50. Draw a map of your day with a compass rose and one region marked "here be dragons". Labels only, no sentences.

Number 43 gets skipped because it looks like a gimmick. It isn't, quite. The wrong hand slows you right down, and at that speed you can't perform, which is sometimes the whole problem with a journal.

What Fifty Prompts Cost

Nobody prices these lists, so here's the price. The budgets are timer settings, and they're mine.

Five hours and fifty minutes if you did every one, which nobody should. Seven minutes on average. The realistic use is one prompt on the evenings that need one, and at that rate fifty is most of a year.

The One Kind With A Trial Behind It

Most of this page is my judgment. Prompt number 1 is different, because it's a study protocol with one word changed.

The three good things exercise, writing down three good things that happened during the day, is one of the original online positive psychology interventions. In 2013 Gander and colleagues changed the instruction to three funny things that happened to you during the day, kept the seven consecutive days, and reported gains in happiness lasting up to three months against a placebo group. That's as recounted by Sara Wellenzohn, René Proyer and Willibald Ruch in a 2018 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, which also walks through their own larger trial from 2016.

The 2016 trial is the one I'd trust more. Of 1,472 people who started, 632 adults completed everything, 117 men and 515 women. They were randomly assigned to one of five humour exercises or to a placebo condition that wrote about early childhood memories. Everyone was measured before and after the week, then again at one, three and six months. On the three funny things group, the 2018 paper's own summary is short. It "was effective in increasing well-being, but there were no effects for depression." Two of the other four exercises also raised happiness scores, one of them being the plain version of counting the funny things that happened each day and writing down the total, and those effects were reported as lasting up to six months.

Now the caveats, because they're real. Everything was self-reported. The sample is mostly women who chose to sign up online and then stuck with it. In a smaller reanalysis of 104 women, extraverts got more out of the exercise than introverts did. And the authors say plainly that "we do not know what exactly the participants in our study wrote down," which for a journaling page is the caveat that matters most. Nobody checked whether the funny things were funny.

The practice page at Greater Good, run by the science centre at Berkeley, sets it at ten minutes a day for at least a week, writing out the three funniest things you heard, saw, did, or experienced today and why each was funny. Their summary claims a little more than the paper's own sentence does, so I've stuck with the paper.

Run it as a week rather than a habit. Seven evenings, prompt number 1, ten minutes if you're following the study and five if you're following me. On an evening with fewer than three, write the number you found and go to bed. That's the counting version, and it was in the trial too.

Questions That Come Up Next To This One

What are some silly essay prompts? An essay prompt wants an argument with a shape, so the what-ifs and the inventions above convert best. Number 24 (a shop that sells one thing), number 29 (rename a street and defend it) and number 33 (invent a holiday) are already essay questions with a silly premise. The rankings don't convert, because a list isn't an argument.

What is the 3-3-3 journaling method? Two things, depending on who's describing it. One version is three things you're grateful for, three prompts to reflect on and three affirmations. The other is a grounding exercise, three things seen, three heard, three felt. Neither has a study attached that I could find, and both are laid out properly on the starting guide.

What is the 3-2-1 method? Three things you're thankful for, two you're excited about and one you'll get done today. A morning template. It asks the same thing every day, which is the problem the five kinds above are built to avoid.

Is it healthy to journal daily? The one frequency experiment I know of favoured once a week over three times a week, and the 30-day set goes through it with the caveats. Fun prompts are the easiest kind to do daily without going stale, because a ranking of sandwiches doesn't ask you to feel anything on demand. Even so, I'd keep them for the evenings that need them.

What is gratitude, three things a day? Listing three things you're grateful for each day. Three funny things is its lighter cousin, same shape, and if the gratitude version has started to feel like a chore, swapping the word for a week is a reasonable experiment.

What are some cool ideas for a journal? If you mean the pages rather than the prompts, the spreads and trackers and layouts, that's the page ideas piece, about what to build on a page rather than what to write.

The Two I'd Actually Use

I don't keep a fun journal, and I'd rather say that than pretend. What I do keep is a lot of projects in one place and a habit of writing things down when they go wrong, and the honest finding from years of that is that the light entries are the ones I reread. The heavy ones I wrote to get rid of.

So if you take two prompts from the fifty, take number 8 and number 1. Overheard lines, and three funny things from the day. One is free material and the other has a trial. Neither will tell you anything about yourself, and on the kind of evening that sent you here, that's the feature.