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Life Journal Workshop Series – Writing Prompts

Welcome to part two of the Life Journal workshop series. If you missed last week’s introduction, you can read it here. If you read last week’s post about creating a life journal and you are ready to get started, you are in the right place! Last week we talked about supplies, setting up the space and the importance of making time for ourselves. A life journal is a great place to take care of you. We all know that as women and mothers, we have a tendency to put ourselves at the very bottom of our to do list. When we do that, we are doing ourselves and our families a disservice. No one is getting the best of us, which is what we deserve. We deserve to be our best and our family deserves to see us at our best. This week, I want to focus on writing prompts for your life journal. Sometimes it is easy to sit down and just sit writing. Any one ever do the “morning pages” made so popular by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way? It’s a fantastic book for self-discovery and recovering your creative self. The morning pages were intended to get you jump started by just dumping all of your thoughts on to the page. If you want to do more creative writing, I encourage you to check out her book!

Here are some of my favorite places for finding writing prompts:

A line from a movie or a song (here‘s a blog post I wrote about Maroon 5)
A line from a novel, book or poem
A favorite verse from the Bible or other spiritual text
A quote I saw on Facebook or Pinterest
A headline in a magazine

In the page below, I decided I needed to write a letter of apology to my body. I wrote the letter in my journal and then decided to collage over it. You can see the writing peaking through in a few spots. I don’t love the final “product” but I don’t think that matters very much if I focus on creating for the sake of finding a safe place to release some of the thoughts, emotions and feelings I am struggling with every day. Writing the letter was something I needed to do.

After I did that page, I made this page below. I used more elements of collage, some of my Zentangle-inspired art on an image from a magazine and words cut from magazine articles. The background is a page from an old dictionary of American slang that I found at a used bookstore for $1.00. My writing prompt for this page was “5 Key Talking Points.” The 5 key points illustrate where I am going personally and what I want to change about how I talk to, treat and focus on my body.

These pages were not planned. They just came out the way they did. This is what I want to encourage you to do in your life journal – be honest, be authentic and tell yourself the truth. You can handle it! Your life journal assignment for this week is to write your body a letter. It could be a love letter, a letter of apology like mine or just a get back in touch with yourself letter. I have decided to set up a Facebook page for the Life Journal Workshop so that you can easily share your life journal pages, see other ideas I am working on or where I find my inspiration. Please come and join me!