How my writing journal influenced the recent changes in my Substack newsletter
Documenting my frustrations, my battle with a foggy head and feeling terrified that my writing career was over.
Since September/October of 2024 I have been frustrated with my writing, terrified my writing career was over and I was suffering from a foggy head with no ideas, no sense of direction or purpose and just properly fed up.
I know this because, despite not being able to remember people’s names when having a conversation, I have remembered to write in my writing journal. And I’ve recorded what I’ve been going through over the last six months and how it has led me to creating an exciting change with my newsletter.
My writing journals are crucial in my writing. They help me by:
Giving me direction and purpose with my writing, my creativity and my writing career.
Giving me ideas and subjects to write about.
Helping me with mindset blocks.
Helping me free up my mind and allow other ideas to grow.
I never know this is happening whilst they’re happening. I am simply recording all the stuff that is going on in my head. I don’t know where it’ll lead to, sometimes I know I’m being whiny or unreasonable (and worry about someone reading my words and thinking what a terrible person I am!) - but it doesn’t matter because recording all these seemingly random thoughts, ideas (and whines) is GOLD when it comes to my writing.
It is only by extracting these strands within your head - even though you maybe don’t understand them at the time - that you can identify what is happening once you’re further down the road.
PLUS - and this is an important thing for me to point out - by writing them down you get them out of your head to allow other ideas to grow and breathe. Unbeknownst to you a series of unrelated thoughts are turning into something bigger, something more cohesive. Something more powerful.
Sometimes you’ll discover this by re-reading your writing journal and at other times an idea comes to you seemingly out of nowhere - but it’s only when you look back through your journal you can see all the thoughts that led to this bigger idea.
And that’s exactly what happened to me very recently with the change in my Substack newsletter name. It was born from a series of passages in my writing journal. I was fed up, I was burned out, I had no ideas - and I made notes of all these frustrations.
I didn’t know what was happening at the time. But the magic was happening even when I was frustrated. So I thought I’d share some of my pages below, which I can see are conducive to the changes that were to come with my newsletter.