I’ve always kept a journal, although I haven’t always been consistent with writing in one. As a teenager, I mainly used it to document my grievances, confess my sins (not religious, but anecdotal), and write my musings about boys who, let’s face it, never deserved my time in the first place.
As an adult, I started keeping a journal for entirely other reasons.
Primarily, I use it to capture my creative thoughts before my caffeine-fueled mind spirals into a chaotic stream of one thought after another. Take this morning, for instance, my husband and I were watching the “Good Hang” podcast (on YouTube). I started mind-spiraling into pottery, which then turned into a conversation about pottery classes, while I simultaneously Googled jewelry making (yes, jewelry making). Neither of which, I’d like to note, was a topic of discussion in the episode.
Journaling is not just my way of snagging thought spirals, like fish in a net, but it also provides me a sense of permission to write freely. Writing in a document on a computer often feels formal, with less room for wiggling around.
Another benefit I’ve found from journaling is that when it comes time to draft work digitally, I’m able to refine it with sharper details, having previously written it by hand. That is to say, my writing is better when I write it first in a journal.
For these reasons, I developed the habit of carrying a journal with me, especially during travel. These journals are reserved for my own creative writing work, with occasional excerpts from novels or poems by authors who have inspired me.
Then, I learned about “commonplace journaling” from a writing-focused YouTuber I enjoy, Christy Anne Jones.
I’m already a novel-reading note taker. It’s rare, when reading, that I don’t find a few passages to jot down or highlight with a pen. But it was her video, “Let’s Start a Commonplace Book!,” that introduced and therefore inspired me to begin my own commonplace journal.
So, at the start of 2025, I began filling the pages of my commonplace journal with passages, quotes, and poems by writers aside from myself. This assortment of work includes that which inspires me or stirs my heart alive. It is writing I would like to revisit again and again.
Here’s a peek at some of the writing I’ve collected so far. Enjoy!
“Nature is art. And I am a creation. And I make things. This is an expansive fact that I could never measure and it calms me.” – Jenny Slate, Little Weirds
“To be impermanent is only one part of life, there will always be a resurrection.”
– Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
Halfway There, Poem by Kate Baer from And Yet
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment.”
– Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
“Nothing is so privileged as to thinking history belongs in the past.”
– John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis
What quotes do you keep in your commonplace journal?
A Note: This post was 100% human-made. At no time did I use A.I to write this article. Images you see on this post were captured by me (or my partner) unless otherwise stated (credited/linked). Thank you for reading! 🙂
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