I started journaling regularly again last year after a 3 year hiatus. The couple of days I followed Lynda Barry’s technique were really interesting when I reread them but in the moment were sort of painfully difficult to do.
Actually I’m going to be real here: ANY constraints of ANY kind are painful for me and I realized I needed only four things:
- A good felt tip pen
- A large-ish unlined sketchbook whose pages didn’t warp or wrinkle in the event I wanted to go crazy with ink or watercolor or whatever one day
- A small pad of some kind to jot thoughts onto in the event I didn’t have the sketchbook on me
- About 20 minutes every morning to go to town writing about the previous day
That’s it. Any attempts to further hack this process have all ended in utter failure and resulted in a book with 4 pages filled before getting abandoned. I’ve considered getting stamps to make more structured options (i.e. moods, to do lists, etc) but for now this is working pretty well.
