Keeping Character Journals

I first heard about character journals in Script Magic by Marisa D’Vari.  In that book she sugggested writing a journal entry for each of your main characters daily.  That seemed like a lot of work to me.

However, Lou Willett Stanek in So You Want to Write a Novel offered similiar advice.  She suggests doing writing exercises from your character’s POV.  So that’s two pings for the character journal/exercise route.

We all know three is the charm.  PBW talked about character journals and posted a journaling excerpt.  She also asked people how they get to know their characters and did her customary – comment on the post, enter a drawing thing.  I was too late for the drawing, but I did look through the comments.  Lots of good ideas.

I was probably hasty (read-LAZY) in my initial assessment.  There’s something to this Character Journal/Exercise thing, and I’m jumping into the deep end.  I’ve started a list of websites that have writing exercises and/or journaling prompts that I can use…

• Writer’s Digest has prompts for every day of the year.
• Bella-Online has a page of links to prompts.
• There’s actually a website called Creative Writing Prompts.
• And there’s a site called Journal Writing Prompts.

These are just a few of the hundreds of websites that have prompts.  While I like the idea of prompts, I’m not going to overlook the obvious ideas

• asking what if?
• pulling one, two or three words at random out of a dictionary, thesaurus, textbook, etc.
• using a line from a poem or song
• using a first line, last line or random line of text from a book
• using a quote
• using a headline from a newspaper or magazine
• using a title
• using a question from The Book of Questions

These are just off the top of my head.   I’m sure there are many other sources that I’m not thinking of right now.

Will I post my character’s journals?  No.  I tend to do a lot of free-writing in the early part of my story writing.  I know that no one else is going to see it, so I’m free to go anywhere I want to go in the writing.  I might start sensoring myself if I start posting character journals.  I will DEFINITELY post the prompts I’ve used that day.   Someone else might find them useful.