For as long as I can remember, I have been a creative person. –My mom was a poet, so I have been writing since I was six and started my first consistent journaling process when I was 8. –Over the years, I have considered being much more formal about it, but the purpose of keeping a journal has remained the same; to capture ideas that might have otherwise been lost or forgotten. And the gist of keeping my journals has remained the same; I buy, most often, the cheapest composition notebook I can find and I decorate it with words and images that inspire me. I keep it where ever I spend much of my time and when an idea—or the spirit of inspiration strikes—I whip out my pen, pencil—or crayon—and jot it down. This is a very brief journey through a few entries.
The top image is of my favorite journal cover that I’ve ever compiled. I started the journal in 1998 as a way of compiling ideas for our original zine, De’Pressed Int’l (whose tagline was “For Fucked Up Individuals with a lot of Class). The cover graphic is, I think, Sandra Bullock, hanging upside down in a tree. Though, as you can see from the next photo, what I compiled inside was haphazard little bits of creativity, it is still one of my favorites, because it’s like an old friend who knows WAYYYYY too much about it. It still have blank pages, because I am not systematic about filling up one journal before moving on to another. And I skip to where ever the creative muse sends me to begin an entry.
As you can see from the next journal—The Butterfly Journal—that I became a little more organized—at least in the way I write out the ideas.
The next image is a list of the titles that I aggregated from random notes written on slips of papers and in school notebooks that I finally sat down and wrote out. I try to keep a journal in every place that habit now, so that I don’t have to go searching for a good place to jot an idea. That means I have one by the bed, by the television, by my computer, and in whatever travel bag I am carrying. That way no matter when the inspiration strikes, I will be ready to capture it.
Finally, our stairway to our home studio, The Sanctuary, became a more outward expression of all that journal keeping, since I mined years worth of journals to gather quotes and photo idea—along with those curated on Pinterest—to make my laborious wall paper.
What tool do you swear by in your creative process?
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(and the rest of Planet Prejippie).
As always, love, peace, and chicken grease! Until tomorrow….
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