In 1968, Joan Didion published an essay called "On Keeping a Notebook" that quietly dismantled everything most people believe about journals. She opened with a line she'd scribbled down years earlier in a hotel bar: "That woman Estelle turned out to be one who survey-making told to bake bread." It barely makes sense. Didion admitted as much. She couldn't fully remember what it meant or why she'd written it. But she remembered the bar, the cracked crab, the afternoon light, the woman at the next table whose fake lashes were coming unglued.
Her notebooks were like that. Full of overheard dialogue from strangers, menu items, weather reports, license plate numbers, the way someone's voice sounded at a party. She kept recipes next to fragments of conversation. She recorded what people wore. Almost none of it would qualify as what we'd now call "journaling." There were no gratitude lists, no reflections on personal growth, no letters to her future self. Just pieces of days, collected without explanation.
Susan Sontag's journals, published after her death, were stranger still. Long stretches were just lists. Words she liked the sound of. Names of books she wanted to read. Sentence fragments that contradicted each other from one page to the next. In one entry she'd write about desire with the seriousness of a philosopher. A few pages later, a grocery list. The journals weren't curated or thematic. They were a place where thinking happened before it had a shape.
I bring this up because the question people actually ask, the one I hear more than almost anything else about writing practice, is some version of: what am I supposed to write in a journal? And the honest answer, the one Didion and Sontag demonstrate better than any advice article, is that nobody good at this ever had a system for it. They just wrote what was in front of them. The pressure to write something meaningful is the exact thing that keeps the page empty.
What to write in a journal turns out to be a much simpler question than it feels like when you're sitting there with a blank page. You write what you noticed, what's bugging you, what you can't quite figure out. You write badly and keep going. The rest sorts itself out over weeks and months, not in a single sitting.
Write What You Noticed Today
Natalie Goldberg has a rule in Writing Down the Bones that sounds almost too basic to be useful: be specific. She doesn't mean journaling about your feelings regarding the day. She means writing that the leaves on the maple outside the coffee shop were the color of a copper penny, or that the barista had a scar shaped like a comma on the back of her hand. Detail. Sensory, particular, small detail.
Goldberg spent years teaching writing workshops where she'd ask students to describe their grandmother's kitchen. The ones who wrote "it was warm and smelled good" had nothing. The ones who wrote about the cracked linoleum, the specific brand of dish soap by the sink, the sound the freezer door made when it unstuck, those were the pages that came alive. The interesting thing is, they came alive for the writer too. You start writing about a detail you barely registered, and it opens into a memory, an idea, a question you didn't know you had.
So one answer to what to journal about is simply: what did you see today that someone else might have missed. The bus driver who was singing. The crack in the sidewalk that's been getting wider for months. Your kid's face when they were concentrating on something and didn't know you were watching.
Write About What You're Avoiding
This one's harder, and I think it's where journaling actually earns its keep. There's usually something. Some conversation you don't want to have, some decision you keep pushing to next week, some feeling that sits in the background while you stay busy enough to ignore it.
Sontag's journals are full of this, though she probably wouldn't have described it that way. She'd circle topics for pages, approaching the same idea from different angles, almost arguing with herself, before finally putting down the sentence that mattered. You can watch her avoid things in real time across entries. And then suddenly, mid-paragraph, a line of startling clarity about loneliness or ambition or the cost of the life she'd chosen. Those lines didn't come from sitting down to write something wise. They came from writing around the thing she didn't want to say until she ran out of ways not to say it.
You probably already know what you're avoiding. You don't need a prompt for it. You just need to stay on the page long enough for the deflections to run out.