Journaling: why you MUST do it

My mom kinda laughs at me when she sees me writing in my Journal. Then I tell her Mart Twain, Benjamen Franklin, Lewis and Clark, and the Queen of England herself all keep/kept Journals. As a writer you absolutely MUST have a journal. Writing in a Journal is not writing like you would for your blog or novel. It's writing when you're not worried about sentence structure or verb variation It's you on the page. Don't get me wrong you can certainly use your Journal for working through scenes and character write ups but don't worry about editing what you put in your Journal. Getting into the habit of Journaling is like any other habit. You just have to do it everyday. I use journaling as a sort of warm up to my writing. It lets me keep my everyday emotions separate from my writing emotions. That may not make sense but what ever. Journals are a great place to plant ideas and let them grow as you work with and/or around them. I have a good five pages in my journal full of "Story Ideas" every time I get an Idea it gets scribbled down fast as I can manage so I don't lose it and it's tucked away until I choose to work with it later. Recently I had a journal entry that I developed into a Short story and It worked wonderfully. There's just so much your journal offers for you to pass one up. You're going to make mistakes and that's OK. It's your Journal. Use it everyday no matter if all you did was wake up and troll YouTube videos. You can draw, mind map, create, scribble, doodle, jot, plan, play with styles, work with emotions, and think all in the papers you hold as your journal. Get a Journal. I mean NOW. Make sure you'll write in it. (you all know my obsession with moleskines) Use a pack of stapled together copy paper and a pastel for all I care just get something you can write your thoughts in so you can refer back to it later. You don't want a file of half done word documents brushed into a corner of your computer. Get a pen and a notebook and get Journaling!