7 Ways Keeping a Book Journal Will Improve Your Writing
If you haven’t been doing this, start now
Writers read a lot. Writers write about everything. So it’s only natural that writers would write about the books they read. Isn’t it?
Book journaling improves your writing. If you’re not keeping a book journal, you should.
The best book journals are more than lists
There’s more to a good book journal than a catalog listing of authors, titles, and dates. It’s a reader-response entry, an honest emotional reaction to the story that might include descriptions of memorable characters, a plot summary, intriguing elements, recurring motifs, and beautiful passages. You make it whatever you want it to be, but the benefit comes NOT from knowing the author and the title, but from understanding the response the book provokes.
Over the years, my format has varied, but now somewhere deep into the sixth volume of double-sided entries, I’ve developed a basic format. (Sadly, my “Book Journal #1” is missing from my set, but I have hopes I’ll come across it someday shoved in a box of notebooks somewhere.) Until then, there are five other book journals to delve into for inspiration., so for this, I pulled “Book Journal #2: 1999–2001.
