Re: The two-sentence journal
While browsing Bear's Discovery feed1, I stumbled across this post:
Prompts for your two-sentence journal
That post itself was interesting to read through and got me poking around Alexander's site - I subscribed to his RSS feed but also found the original post he wrote about the two-sentence journal. I read through that, and the follow-up, and I'm convinced this is something that I will find incredibly useful.
I don't usually have a problem writing journal entries once I start writing, but I do have a problem keeping up with the daily habit. For a year I was diligent about writing daily, every day, even a little bit, but I got off that train...somehow. I'm not sure. You'd think if I was able to do that for a year (and a bit, actually, I didn't just stop writing after a year) I could pick it back up again, but habits are nasty, and can sneakily come in the form of not doing something, and those habits are hardest to break.
On days when picking up my pen and notebook feel like the last thing I want to do, practicing this two-sentence journal concept would be a way to at least write something down on the page. My memory is terrible, so it feels criminal that I don't write things down that I might want to remember some day. But that's not the only application that came to mind.
You could easily apply this method to any other writing project. My first thought went to writing about epilepsy. While I have several pieces written already, sometimes I think there are things I could write about that I haven't been. I went to ChatGPT for some prompts. I gave it the website I found first (the prompts) and told it what I wanted. Of course it assumed the wrong thing first and gave me a list of prompts for things I could write about daily, when what I really wanted was a list of prompts that are more "evergreen" that I could pick and choose from if I feel otherwise uninspired. When I clarified it did a better job of giving me a list of prompts. I had it generate a list in markdown format separated by categories and I saved it in Obsidian. I haven't done anything with it yet, but it's helpful to have.
The other application that came to mind was the writing project I thought about: writing about my movie collection. I still have that idea rolling around in the back of my mind, but haven't started even brainstorming it. But the thought occurred to me that I could write a two-sentence starter on each movie and expand on it later. The trick is finding the "right" things to write about, limited to two sentences.
This is a very interesting concept and I look forward to using it.
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I thought I found the link from someone else, and I wanted to give them credit; turns out it was me!↩