In a post on Lit Hub, Kate Folk examines how keeping a journal helps with her fiction writing. “Journaling forms the shadow side of my writing practice, an ocean of private words running beneath the public ones,” Folk says. Folk writes 1000 words every day to loosen up. Journaling has made her more disciplined and strengthened her observational skills, she adds.
While journaling in the morning, she often captures small events, images, and metaphors that happened the day prior, literary tidbits that otherwise would have passed unremarked. Re-reading past entries also helps Folk avoid romanticizing her past or forgetting mistakes. “I try to write each entry with a reporter’s speed and accuracy—type continuously until I reach 1000 words, and wire it off to my laptop’s hard drive,” she writes. “The content is often banal, with an appealing pithiness that, over the course of many entries, begins to form a persona.”
Daily journaling also helps Folk loosen up before she begins her fiction. “Starting writing each day feels painful, even if it went well the day before,” she says. “I need discipline to get past the stiff beginning stage and into the flow state, which a low-stakes exercise like journaling provides. It demystifies writing a bit, turning it into an act so habitual I complete it thoughtlessly, like brushing my teeth.”
Finally, Folk acknowledges that she can use a lot of this material in the future. “My life is too boring to write a traditional memoir about, but I suspect my journals will one day be source material for a project I haven’t yet conceived,” she writes.
