Yesterday, Literary Mama, an online magazine for the maternally inclined, published my guest post, “What in the world is a  sprint journal?” The post appeared as part of LM’s After Page One blog series.

After Page One posts are intended to motivate, encourage and inspire writers on their journeys as mothers who are also write. In addition to its articles and stories on motherhood, Literary Mama offers numerous craft pieces that would aid any writer.

My piece revealed how I–a person who never could keep a diary–learned to adapt a journal to meet my very specific writing needs. In this case, I needed to focus precisely on what to write during my daily one-hour writing sprint.

This, for the visually inclined, is what a page from my sprint journal looks like:

My sprint journal is neat, orderly, spare and precise.

Check out the contrast to this, which is my book bible. Check back to this blog in a few weeks, when I will post about book bibles:

A step forward on the messier scale would be my short story draft journal. My writing process for short work is to write a quick first draft in longhand. As you can see, neatness is not important to me at this stage:

For someone who never kept a diary and could not embrace journaling, I do seem to use a number of journal-like tools in my writing, don’t I? I am not alone. I asked a couple of writers friends to share what their journals looked like.

Edith Maxwell’s writing journal (pictured both closed and opened) is below. Edith is the author of the Local Foods Mysteries (Kensington Publishing), the Lauren Rousseau mysteries (as Tace Baker, from Barking Rain Press), and award-winning short crime fiction. Edith also blogs every week at Wicked Cozy Authors, a group blog featuring cozies with a New England accent.

This lovely cover…

…opens to reveal this:

 Another journal is from my Pittsburgh friend, Martha Reed, who writes the Nantucket Mystery series. Martha also she serves on the Board of Sisters in Crime National. She is Chapter Liaison and a very useful person to know. This is what Martha’s writing journal looks like:

Clearly, there is no one way to keep a writing journal.

Do you keep a writing journal? Is it neat or messy? A collection of organized thoughts kept in orderly lists, or a jumble of arrows and highlighted sentences? Somewhere in between?