Brave New World: Move Your Writing Beyond the Journal

You’re journaling regularly, doing morning pages or free writing. Your notebooks and pages begin to stack up, and you feel good about the writing habit you’ve created.

Still, you yearn for more. You want to move beyond the journaling stage, but you don’t know how. This leap in the writing process can be daunting. Without direction and focus, you can stay in journaling mode forever. Which is fine, unless you have a different vision for your writing.

It seems simple, but my clients and students have used this to graduate from journaling to writing polished, publishable pieces.

Ready? It’s super simple: choose a specific project to work on.

I know. It’s too easy, right? But we often need a nudge out of the safe privacy of our journals to take our writing to its next phase.

So, choose a project. An essay you want to write. A nugget of an idea that you discovered in a journaling session. An idea for a story or play or poem – you may not know its form yet, but you know it’s a good idea and you want to develop it.

Once you’ve chosen a an article, short story, essay or poem, follow these steps:

• Commit to developing the idea.
• Give yourself a deadline.
• Give it a stab.
• Assess what help you need to develop it.
• Drive past the fears that will show up when it’s 80% complete.
• Don’t stop until you’re done.
• See what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown as a result of going a bit further.

What has helped you go from journal to finished pieces? Share your success stories in a comment below.