/lit/ - Literature

>>12351541
OP you should read Robert Olen Butler's book From Where You Dream and try the techniques he describes in the workshop section. They are very difficult if you take them seriously. Here is his advice about journaling. There is more to it and I do recommend reading the whole book though (several times) and really seriously practicing what he promotes. If you do this the stories will start coming to you from a deep place instead stuff that you write "from your head" which is not going to connect with readers

>At the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only -- only -- moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions -- signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity -- which are therefore the best way to express emotions.

Then after a couple of weeks of this...

>From then on each day's journaling should have two parts to it. First, write a new entry. Then, when you've finished, go back and read the journal entry of two weeks ago, and with a marker pen slash through all the examples of abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation you see in the text, leaving only moment-to-moment sense-based events and impressions.

Another book that I recommend, though not as strongly, is Method Writing by Jack Grapes.