The journal pictured above is from Oberon Design. I really came to like them very much after having found one of their journals at Goodwill for under two bucks and reselling it for just under a hundred.
Journals, diaries, notebooks — writers collect useful things in such. F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks show how a writer should go about collecting things. You should have many different notebooks and classifications of them, viz., Conversations and Things Overheard, Descriptions of Humanity, First Sentences. You should keep a daily journal, a dream journal, a journal for poetry, for musings, for essays, and if you wish to follow Pepys, a journal of bowel movements...
Journal Keeping Exercise
Robert Anton Wilson spoke of using English prime or E-prime — the use of English without any form of is or being. RAW states that E-prime is an acceptable form of expression in modern science, as well as being the type of consciousness Zen Buddhism tries to induce.
Forms of the verb to be do not create vivid images. By using E-prime, you will begin to choose more interesting verbs, and you will become more of an accurate writer. For example, instead of writing "John Lyerly was a scary man," you might write, "At the sight of John Lyerly's brutal shaven face within Julia's boarding house, Eugene's own face filled with a sudden recollective horror".
Make a page long entry in your journal daily. Try to extend the length of your sentences. Avoid "and" to connect the long sentence; try out other conjunctions. Experiment with shifts from third person to first person. Make use of stream of consciousness and internal monologue. Try making an entry containing only nouns of the day.
Example:
Tissue, Toilet, Socks, Coffee, Biscuit, Livermush, Grape Jelly, Computer, eBay, Chess, Bed, Goodwill, Freud, Farid Ud-Din Attar, Clifford D. Simak, Red Light, Woodfin Police, Issued Warning, Salad, Soup, Twizzlers, Red Hots, American Pickers, Universal Waite, Bicycle, Ginger, Valerian Root.
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