Unleash Your Creativity: A Guide To Start Your Book Journaling Journey
- Amanda Hayes
- Mar 18, 2024
- 10 min read
It's time to talk about everyone's favorite hobby! Okay, we're not talking about reading, so I guess technically, we're talking about everyone's second favorite hobby: Book Journaling! From the people that I have spoken about journaling with, I've gotten the sense that it's a hit-or-miss activity for people. On the one hand, you have the annotators, who will purchase color-coded sticky notes, pens, highlighters, and anything else they can find to use and mark up their books like their notebooks from high school history. On the other are your photographers, people with a picture-perfect memory who will remember every detail of what they read without any help or need to take notes. Somewhere between the two, you'll find the scrapbookers, who tend to attach a specific visual, color, or emotion to their reading and then use that in their journaling. Regardless of which one you are most like, the important thing is that it feels like you and makes you happy.
Finishing a book is always an accomplishment, and anyone who thinks otherwise—well, you're reading wrong. It's important to remind ourselves that not everyone is passionate about reading, and sometimes, even those who are struggle to finish books. Book journaling is almost an extension of that feeling of accomplishment. You've just finished your book; maybe it's the first or last in a series, and you don't want to part with the world or the characters or how it made you feel; here comes the book journal to the rescue. As you update your book journal with the book details, you'll be reminded of why you picked it up in the first place (title, author, cover, page count, blurb, etc.). Then, you can add your review or notes about how it made you feel or think or any other way the book connected—or didn't—with you. If you're a scrapbooker, you'll probably spend more time here, cutting out reference images and gluing them in.
Book Journals are also a great tool for tracking reading goals and TBR progress, both of which we have discussed in our monthly trends in the last two months. Having the visual tracker is a great way to ensure you are making progress on your goals and keep yourself on track. It's also helpful to keep track of which books were your favorites of the month or year and, for some, even how many pages or chapters you read per day. The best part about book journaling is that you are not required to do it in a specific way. It is an activity that is unique to you and that you can shape to match your desires or habits. You don't even have to design your book journal if you don't want to or don't have the time. There are hundreds of book journals online created by other readers that you can purchase and make your own. Regardless of how you book journal, below, we will look at the three types of book journalers we have encountered and offer some fun tips and tricks for your book journaling journey, especially if you are getting into the world of book journaling.
The Annotator
The first of our book journaling types comes in the form of The Annotator. You may sometimes spot these readers carrying around a pouch or satchel with them or those that read solely where they can have their supplies laid out. They are the ones with a pack of multi-colored highlighters, pens, sticky notes, etc. These readers thrive on taking notes on everything. It's how they interpret and retain what they are reading. While to some, it might seem like it turns reading into a chore, almost like making it a homework assignment, to annotators, that is far from the case. They enjoy highlighting sentences that stand out to them, making little comments on sticky note inserts to look back on how those parts of the story made them feel or connected with them when they read it, and leaving little notes or reminders of their reactions to all sorts of outrageous scenarios author's come up with. It's as much of the reading experience as the actual reading of the book is to them, and they wouldn't have it any other way.
Be Prepared
It's important to know that if you believe you are an annotator, you must be prepared before starting your book. You should ensure your highlighters, pens, and sticky notes are stocked up. There is no greater letdown to an annotater than when they run out of a color or sticky note that they need halfway through a book. It is so detrimental that it can cause them to stop reading until they can restock on the missing color. You also have to be prepared mentally when you go into a book. Annotators do not just read the book; they analyze it. Their attention must always be on the story because it will make them spiral if they miss something and catch a reference they can't place later in the book. So remember that before you turn the page, you must take inventory of your pens, highlighters, and sticky notes.
Have A Plan
The flip side of stocking up on your materials is to have a plan laid out before you go in. Annotators thrive on color-coding their notes. For those comfortable with typical color associations, you'll find that red, whether in a sticky note, highlighter, or pen form, will represent love or romance. Similarly, blue represents sadness or grief, yellow represents happiness or joy, green represents friendship or serenity, and so on. Each color used will take on its own significance, which is how annotators can return to their notes and make sense of their annotations. However, color coding is not as simple as picking a color and giving it meaning. The previous examples will work for those starting out, but as annotators get their hands on more and more books, they will slowly start to find the methods that work for them. For some, a standard color code will always be sufficient; others will come up with their own color codes. Some might associate pink or purple more closely with romance than red or yellow more closely to sadness than blue. Colors take on a different meaning to each of us, making annotators' color codes unique. Others will still base their color code on the color scheme of the book cover. This is one more for those annotators who are all about the aesthetic of it. But regardless of how annotators develop their color code, the fact remains that it must be firmly determined before going in.
The Photographer
The Photographer is the next most common type of book journaling you will see. Photographers are those readers who cannot be bothered to stop what they are reading for anything. They will read a book from start to finish in one sitting if they can, and the most mindblowing part is that they will be able to recall every detail of what they just read afterward as if they had written it themselves. These readers do not need anything to start their next book other than the book itself and time. The most important thing for these readers will be to find a comfortable place, maybe grab a snack or drink, and most importantly, quiet. Distractions are the enemy of these readers as they take time and attention away from what they are reading and interrupt their process.
Prioritization Is Key
As photographers read, they must remember that prioritizing what they read is essential for good book journaling. While most books will be chock full of plot and actions that keep the story moving, many also feature some extent of fluff. That is why, as photographers read, they must learn to pick out the information essential to the story and plot and what is there as a filler. At the end of the story, you want to remember that the main characters kissed under an umbrella in the middle of a downpour, but it doesn't matter that the umbrella is blue. Those miscellaneous add-ons, so to say, are there to add depth and detail, and while they undoubtedly make the story better, they are not essential or impactful enough to merit remembering in the long run. So we prioritize the important things.
Be Prepared To Forget
Of course, it is also important to accept that even photographers are not perfect and must be ready to forget. This is especially true for those who skip the first recommendation and allow themselves to focus and hone in on every detail of every story. No matter how minute, the small, insignificant details will start to fade. Hopefully, those will go first and not the important ones. The only readers allowed to skip that first step are those with eidetic memory, estimated to be as low as 2% of the worldwide population and only as high as 10%. That means the rest of us need to learn how to prioritize. If we don't, and sometimes, even if we do, we must also prepare ourselves to forget. Not every story touches us the same way or stays with us long after we have read it. It is not a bad thing to forget stories. That is why we book journals, because often, long after we have forgotten something, even seeing just a quote that we wrote down that stood out to us can bring those memories back to us.
The Scrapbooker
There is a phenomenon in the medical world known as synesthesia. Synesthesia is when one sensory stimulation in the brain causes a second one to activate. In non-scientific speak, it is when one of your senses triggers another. People who experience this phenomenon describe it as hearing a word or name and immediately seeing a color, or they will look at a color and simultaneously taste it. It is a rare occurrence, but it is the closest thing I could find to compare The Scrapbookers to. The Scrapbookers are those readers who, while reading, will attach different emotions or experiences to the subject before them. They will become almost unwittingly empathetic, and it will be as if they are truly experiencing the characters' worlds for themselves. These are also those readers who commonly say that when they read, their minds will form a movie of what they read. Their brains will take the words and turn them into pictures. It is such a unique experience, making this the rarest of book journalers we have encountered.
Drop Your Walls
Nothing is more essential to these types of readers than being able to drop their walls. Someone who is guarded or reserved with their emotions will never understand what scrapbookers experience when they read. Scrapbookers will be those in touch with their feelings and vulnerable with themselves and others. It requires a genuine connection to your emotions to be able to experience being a scrapbooker because it is those emotions and experiences that shape scrapbookers. Imagine if everything you read came to life in your mind. It would be game-changing for many who simply read and interpret the words. But it is not for everyone. You must want to be vulnerable and open for it to work. You must allow your imagination to run free and bring these words to life in your mind in a way that others cannot or will not.
Listen To Your Heart
It is also essential to allow yourself to listen to what your heart is telling you---the metaphorical heart, not the real one. We will all connect to stories in one way or another; no emotion is wrong, whether positive or negative. But you have to be willing to listen to what your emotions are telling you. Is this book making you feel happy or sad or mad or upset? Those emotions will allow you to draw on your imagination and take from pictures or ideas you have seen or had and bring a world to life in your mind. Characters described as having warm brown eyes and dark copper hair might remind you of your high school crush and bring about those memories of feeling first love, and the more you fall into that feeling, the more precise the vision of the character will become in your mind and before you know it they are alive. Because of this, scrapbookers tend to be the type of journalists who have the most fun with their book journaling. They will find and cut out pictures and stickers that match what they have built in their mind and use those to describe how the book made them feel.
Time to Write
Now that you have some guidance in different ways to book journal, depending on what kind of reader you are, you need to get yourself a book journal. This can be any random notebook or pad you have lying around, or you can buy one from a store. It can be any notebook that speaks to you or has a cover you like. Most tend to gravitate towards bullet journals for their ability to be individually formatted. Their grid format makes it easier to create your designs and charts based on your preferences and the type of reader you are. Annotators might have these intricate layouts with charts that track everything from book details to blurbs to character names and profiles. Photographers are likelier to have a few book details and then large sections to write down their reviews, thoughts, and key takeaways. Scrapbookers might have a full-page spread of reference images and quotes that remind them of what they just finished. Every journal will be unique to its readers, and most will find they will mix and match.
Additionally, book journals, whether created or purchased, will have pages to help you track your number of books read, favorite books of the year, books by star ratings, how often you are reading, mood trackers, genre trackers, the list goes on and on. They are unique and fun to make and enhance the reading experience by going beyond the book and allowing us to relive and record the best parts of the story that we will love coming back to. Anyone new to the world of book journaling should know that to start, you must first determine what type of reader you are, whether one of the above or a different type altogether. Once you know that, you will be able to find the way to read that works best for you and transfer that to your book journaling to find a style and layout that is unique to you, and this will serve as a reflection of your reading journey.
DO YOU KNOW YOUR BOOK JOURNALING TYPE?
ARE YOU AN AVID BOOK JOURNALER OR NEW TO THE TREND?
JOIN US IN THE QUEEN'S CORNER TO JOIN THE CONVERSATION ABOUT BOOK JOURNALING!
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