Connect To The Youth In Your Family By Connecting Them To Their Family History


Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Taking the Pain Out of Journaling, Part 2


As promised, here is the first half of my prescription for painless journaling.  I hope you'll feel the itch to write down at least one thing about yourself or your day after reading this.  If not, come back tomorrow and we'll up the dosage.  In the meantime, take at least one of these and comment in the morning:
  • Make it fun! While we all know how invaluable those personal histories with dates, full names, locations, and intimate details are, they can be a bit of a drag to actually pull together. Be sure to play around and match your journalistic styling to your personality. 
  • Short and sweet. Sometimes bullet points are all we have time for. That's okay. Really! Something will always be better than nothing. 
  • Interview yourself. Write down a bunch of questions as if you were interviewing someone you've always wanted to meet. Set the list aside for a week or so and then come back to it. (Or, better yet, I have a list already compiled in my Zap the Grandma Gap Power Up Workbook.) Answer those questions as if someone were interviewing you. Show your personality - answer candidly with whatever humor, sass, or passion you can muster. You're descendants will thank you! 
  • Scour social media. Have you seen some of the great ideas folks are posting all over the web under the hashtag or title of "journal prompts"? It's gold, I tell you! You'll never look at journaling the same way again. 
  • Make it a work of art. Along with the above tip, really look at the different ways people make a journal prompt their own. Find a great pen and some nice paper and go crazy with calligraphy or plaster your page with pictures. Write names, dates, and places as shape outlines and then interlink them to create a geometrically pleasing design. Make a journal entry entirely out of pictures taken from magazine clippings. Really, this list could go on and on and on.
Now, do you feel inspired yet?

2 comments:

  1. Janet,

    I want to let you know that two of your blog posts are listed in today's Fab Finds post at http://janasgenealogyandfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2014/08/follow-friday-fab-finds-for-august-1.html

    Have a great weekend!

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  2. Thanks Jana. I appreciate your vote of approval. Your Fab Find posts are such a great contribution to the community. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete