You don’t need to be a writer to write every day. You don’t need to be able to form complex sentences and place the adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbs and commas in all the right places. You don’t even need to use punctuation. But, you should write every day. You should write down your thoughts, feelings and experiences. You should keep a journal of your life so that you have something to look back on years from now, so that you can remember every part of your life and so that you can share your life with whoever wants to know. Of course, if you aspire to be a writer, in any form, you should write every day. Writing every single day is a form of practice. You will never be in the NBA if you don’t go to basketball practice, you will never win American Idol if you don’t sing your little heart out every day.
Do yourself a favor and buy a notebook. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy and it doesn’t have to cost more than a dollar or two. Set aside time everyday where you can write everything that happened that day, everything you felt. If you want, you can write a story, use your imagination and write some fiction.
But I’m not a writer so why should I care about writing?
Like I said in the beginning, you will have a record of your life and feelings to reflect on and to share with others. It will help you with bottled up stress and emotions. Because the stress and emotions will no longer be bottled up, they will be on a piece of paper in front of you. Writing gives you time to actually think for yourself instead of sitting idly in front of a television screen, believing what everyone else tells you to believe. It allows you to think critically and ask yourself the big questions of life. Even if you can’t find the answers.
The best part is that what you write doesn’t need to make sense. You don’t need to form a perfect sentence.
There’s this thing called free writing, when you free write you set yourself a time, say 15 minutes. For those fifteen minutes you do nothing but write, do not stop, do not erase and do not scratch anything out. Even if you’re writing, “I don’t know what to write about”. You are still writing and you are kick starting your creative juices. Free writing is often used in classroom settings as a prewriting exercise. You can use it as a pre writing exercise for yourself, or you can use it as your daily writing entry.
Journaling can be very cleansing and great form of self-therapy. It’s not just about remembering the things that have happened to you, but about recording and understanding how different things make you feel. It can help you to work through feelings from your past and stay positive. There are so many positive things that can come out of writing every day, but many people feel that journaling or keeping a dairy is for teenagers. Others feel that since they are not writers there is no reason for them to write. But, your writing is for your eyes only, unless you choose to show it to someone else. So, it doesn’t matter if you use correct punctuation or spelling or grammar or anything. It’s for you, it’s for your benefit. Do it for yourself!
