Reflections on Brainstorming and Inspiration

Reflecting on reading and journaling for inspiration

Reflection on journal entries 5/17/23: one-page, 5 poems, and a creative brainstorm

One-Page

What exactly is a one-page? What is it a page of?

For me, when I sit down to write my journal entries, I usually start off with one blank page for me to write out whatever is on my mind at the time. It can and usually is about what I’m working on or reading. I try to keep it to one page because it helps me get out what I want to say or need to say and move on to the other journal entry prompts I set for myself.

Picture this:

Me alone at my desk or out in my car parked at some park or waiting for a friend on a bench. I’ve got my journal and my pen and all the surrounding world. Before I fall down a hole of blank pages and empty lines, I date at least 2-3 pages sometimes as many as 5 if I’m feeling extra writey or think I have the time to do 5 pages of journaling.

I set my pages and my dates, leaving one page for my one-page journal entry, and think up other prompts from the remaining pages. When I first started keeping the journal back in April, I usually made the other entries a creative writing prompt and an ideas space.

But as I grew into my journal, I would sometimes get bored or tired of the same old prompts and started coming up with new ones. New ones that led to writing my bucket list and manifesto.

There are times where I’ll expand my one-page and have it run on for several pages if I have a lot on my mind I need to work out, but having the one-page of general journaling helps me shake loose some webbing and find footing on the page and in my craft. Sometimes I do have to ask myself, what am I working on, what is important to me right now.

The journal entry for 5/17 was all about Chainsaw in the Night, my recent horror novelette. I was still in the process of revising it during that journal entry. For the story, I had to do a total rewrite that took me about a month or so to work through, but where it landed is nowhere near where I thought it would. The summary in the entry is a bit off from what the actual story is about, but it’s close enough.

Looking back on these noodlings about stories helps me remember that a story can grow, can change, can be something better and other than what it originally was. For a long time, my stories used to come to me, fully formed with the characters, world, title, and problem all neatly packaged. I’d write out these stories in a day or two and edit them in a month or so.

Now, when those fully-formed stories come to me, I catch them but I don’t write them.

I wrestle them.