Category: Writing Tips

We all know that journaling has many benefits. It can help relieve stress and anxiety, provide clarity, strengthen memory, improve mood, and more! Research is finding that it can improve your physical health as well.

These are enough reasons to journal, but if you’re a writer, there is another important reason you should consider: journaling provides inspiration!

Your present and past journals possibly contain a wealth of story ideas, and it’s a great way to help create characters! If you’re a children’s writer, this is especially true if you read through your childhood journals. What experiences did you have in your youth that would work well in a story? What was your writing voice like as a child? Perhaps your character might “sound” the same. Scrapbooks are another potential source of inspiration.

I, personally, am getting ready to dig through my old journals in search of inspiration. I am both excited and a little nervous at what I might find. Perhaps I’ll let you how it goes.  

Caution:

Reading through old journals can stir up past emotions that may be painful. But, what you wrote in those journals is part of your life experience and helped shape the person you’ve become. If it hadn’t been important to you—at least at the time—you wouldn’t have written it down. So, before visiting the past, it’s a good idea to mentally prepare yourself for what you might find in the pages of your life story.

Parents:

Encourage your children to spend a bit of time journaling each day. (Perhaps a new journal would make a great Christmas present.)

Question:

Do you journal? If so, what have you found to be most beneficial about the process?

If you found this post helpful, let me know in the comments!

The strongest and most interesting protagonists are those who grow or change in some way throughout the story, which stands to reason if they are working to solve the story’s conflict.

The change doesn’t have to be big, especially if you’re writing a short story or picture book. In most cases, these protagonists often gain new information or learn an important lesson about themselves, about life, or about others—and they need to reach these conclusions on their own rather than being told what to think by another character (although other characters can certainly help lead them to these conclusions) .

The lesson learned by your main character is the same lesson you want your reader to get from the story, and your protagonist needs to be the one learning it right along with the reader. This will help your reader relate to and make connections with your main character, thus connecting with the story as a whole.

Conflict is arguably the most important literary element in any story, for it is what drives the narrative.

What many don’t realize is that conflict is not always with another character.

Conflict can be internal or external and is often categorized as six types:

1. Character vs. Self
2. Character vs. Character
3. Character vs. Nature
4. Character vs. Society
5. Character vs. Supernatural
6. Character vs. Technology

Example: In my book Oh Deer! my main character faces two different types of conflict: the external conflict against nature and the internal conflict of whether to intervene or allow nature to run its course.

What is your favorite type of conflict to read/write?

For you authors out there, what type of conflict will we find in your stories?