Ordering your thoughts

Part of my reflective practice is journalling or writing loads of ideas down so they don’t escape me. I am always thinking about new projects when I should be working on existing projects or my thoughts wander into exciting new directions when I really should be going to sleep. I journal in unexpected places too, like in a quiet cathedral, in the woods or on a bench in a museum. My writing in these places might be classed as unexpected too, rather than relating to a specific thing I’m planning or writing for. I might write about quietness or museums as places of care or about my connection with woodlands and trees.

I write about all kinds of things, abstract ideas and thought experiments to ‘work’ writing like course content or blog posts like this (although this one is being written off the cuff and straight into wordpress at my desk). There’s a lot going on with my writing, as with all of my creative ideas. I keep my artwork ideas in project books, separate ones for different projects / themes. I’ve written about my project books concept before. This doesn’t work for writing as I have thoughts going in all kinds of directions and do most of my writing in one ongoing journal. I started going back through my journal when I finished the notebook and devised a system for keeping track of ideas and copying them into useful places. I regularly discover that I’ve had the same thought or idea or project concept before and have totally forgotten it. Another benefit of writing everything down is that I don’t just lose the ideas forever!

My Reflective Writing for Creative Practice is a series of prompts to help you get into the idea of reflecting on your creative work and using writing as a way of exploring ideas. It’s a light-touch course, with an introductory essay, some tips to help you along the way and weekly questions or writing prompts to give you some focus. I also cover my system for going through journals and ordering ideas so you can act on them or find them again and see how your thinking develops over time.

The course starts on 28th June and you will get weekly emails with the prompts, as well as a monthly review reminder and there’s the option of monthly co-writing sessions on Zoom for half an hour on a Tuesday lunchtime. You can join after it’s started too, the prompts will appear weekly from your start date so you don’t have to rush to catch up. I’ve shared much more about the course in this blog post and you might also like to listen to my podcast about reflective practice in general to see if it’s something that might work for you.