24 Aug, 2025

Introduction

Many, many more people took an interest in my two-sentence journal method than I ever would have expected. Thank you to everyone who shared the original blog, posted about it, or wrote to me about how much you've enjoyed it! I'm glad that my little experiment has proven useful to you.

In the interim, enough readers have asked me about the logistics of journal-writing that I figured I'd do a follow-up blog to cover them. Here I'll go over the different approaches I use when composing my own two-sentence journal entries, reviewing the how and why for each one. I'll also say a few words about how I format my journal (in both its analog and digital variants). Don't think of these as hard-and-fast rules, however! They're simply the methods that have worked best for me, and I share them in case you might find them helpful, too.

My composition methods

Although all of my journal entries end up in a handwritten notebook, few of them actually start there. Truth be told, I more often write outside of my journal first, and transfer my entry to the notebook once I've perfected the day's composition. But I do write directly in the journal sometimes, and am happy to do so if the circumstances call for it.

There are three primary ways my journal entries come into being. Here I've sketched the strategies and mindsets involved, in case you're looking for approaches to adopt or adapt for your own purposes.

Scratching at scrap paper

I'm a technical writer by day (a great career path if you want to pursue it), which means that work days are often spent tethered to my desk while I scrutinize documents on a computer monitor. When my eyes need a break from the screen – or my brain needs a respite from whatever task I'm completing – I spend a minute or two on my journal.

I rarely have my trusty Moleskine to hand while I'm working, so my writings need to go somewhere else. What I'll usually do is have a piece of scrap paper (or a sheet of loose leaf or printer paper) on my desk at all times. When I take my mental breaks, I'll scribble my usual sentence or two. And I stress scribble – I throw down my sentences quickly and without much forethought. As the day wears on, I polish and rewrite the sentences on each following break, crossing out the original and writing an improved version below it. I'll discard sentences and start anew if a better topic comes along at any point during the day. This continues until I've hit upon an entry I can't improve, or until the work day ends, or until I run out of room on my sheet of paper. Whatever the case, the final version on my paper makes a great start- or endpoint for an entry when I sit down to do my journal writing in earnest.

This method, I'm told, is rather like how the great French author Gustave Flaubert put together his careful, painstaking prose. (If you've never read Flaubert, please correct this immediately. His Madame Bovary is, for my money, among the world's top five novels.) Back in grad school, a professor of mine alleged that Flaubert would write an entire handwritten page over the course of a day – but that page would consist of the same sentence, tweaked and retooled over and over again, until he devised a satisfactory formulation. I haven't been able to verify the accuracy of this story, but I can attest that I've found Flaubert's alleged approach sound!

Revising a Google Keep note

I've been a huge fan of Google Keep for as long as I've had a smartphone. At its heart, it's a note-taking app with a bunch of other features. For me, the main draw is that it's like having an infinite-capacity notebook in my pocket at all times. Since I almost always have my phone on me, I can pull it out and write a quick note in Keep whenever something worth recording crosses my mind – be it an idea, an observation, a premise for a story/article, a full-fledged haiku, the opening words of a larger composition, or what have you. (I've even written entire short stories on bus rides using Keep.)

I often take advantage of Keep's portability and convenience for my daily two-sentence journal entry. On days when I'll be up and about (i.e., weekends), I create a note whose title is the date, day of week, and location where I'll be (like in this footnote). I label the note with the tag #two-sentence journal so I don't lose track of it, and pin it to the top of the note list so that it's the first thing I see when opening the Keep app. Then I go about my business. If anything interesting or noteworthy occurs, I record a quick sentence about it in the daily note. I'll revisit and revise the sentences I collect throughout the day. At night, I make the final tweaks, deciding on what will go into the day's journal entry and how it should be written. Then, once the final version is in hand, I copy it into my physical and digital journals.

It's less work than it sounds! Think of it as replacing some of the time you'd spend loitering on social media with an ongoing creative endeavor. For instance, when I'm about to absentmindedly scroll Bluesky or Reddit or whatever, I give my daily journal note a once-over first.

Writing directly in my journal

On particularly busy or eventful days, where I haven't had the opportunity to take a breather and do some idle writing, I end up jotting a quick entry in my two-sentence journal before I go to sleep. It involves a different thought process than the other two methods, but it's also a different kind of fun.

I'm a bit more crunched for time when I resort to these last-minute entries – my day is over, and I need to sleep! As a result, I find that I tend to follow one of two paths:

1. I spring for writing down the first topic that comes to mind. I figure that, because it's at the forefront of my recollections, whatever I write about is a fair indicator of how the day went and what I took from it. It's like stepping up to the plate at a baseball game: There's no time to (over)think, so I must take my swing.
2. I take a minute to slow myself down, enter a restful state of mind, and mentally review what happened during my day. Whichever remembrance I latch on to – because it was the most enjoyable to recall, for example, or because it seems to symbolize the day I had, or because it would be a shame not to record, etc. – becomes the topic of my entry.

Both paths have yielded good results. I therefore don't hold myself to one or the other, and simply do what feels best (or most feasible) in the moment.

My journal's format

I have two copies of my journal:

Here I'll go over how I set up and organize each of them.

Analog version

My physical journal is a bog-standard Moleskine: medium dimensions, hardcover, college-ruled. I much prefer Leuchtturm1917 to Moleskine, for the record, but I only had a Moleskine to hand when I started this project. Even so, it's a convenient enough size, and the built-in ribbon bookmark is helpful, so I'm not complaining.

I treat each entry in the physical journal as a standalone paragraph. That said, I opt not to present them like the paragraphs you'd see in a book (where the first sentence is indented) or on a web page (like this one, where there are no indents, and line breaks separate each paragraph). Instead, I treat them more like MLA-style works cited items or lines from a Shakespeare play. I place a line break between entries, then indent every line in the paragraph after the first. It ends up looking roughly like this:

20 AUGUST 2025 / WEDNESDAY / [LOCATION REDACTED]: While I was cutting our overgrown front lawn,
	a young woman jogged past with two unleashed goats trotting behind her like a pair of
	Springer Spaniels. [WIFE'S NAME REDACTED] tells me their names are Mars and Airhead, and
	they evidently dislike lawnmowers – intimidated by the noise, they halted in the middle of
	the street until I shut the electric motor off and urged them to catch up to their owner.

(In my notebook, I render the date/day/location information in small caps to distinguish them from the entry proper. The full-on caps in the preceding example is the closest approximation achievable in markdown.)

I like this format because it's exceptionally readable – you can tell at a glance how many entries are on the page, what the dates are, and where each entry begins and ends. Also, when you're reading an entry, it's easy to check the date without losing your place in the paragraph.

Digital version

Every day or so, I transcribe my physical journal's latest additions into a lengthy markdown file – the digital version of my journal. The digital copy serves several purposes:

• Preservation: If I ever misplace my Moleskine, or lose it in a house fire, or otherwise damage it beyond repair, I can take comfort in knowing I still have its contents archived on my computer (and backed up in several other places).
• Continuity: I expect to fill my notebook eventually, and will have to start writing in a new one. But that doesn't mean the new notebook represents a separate project. Having all my journals' contents together in one place underscores that they constitute a single work of writing.
• Legibility: My handwriting has always been poor. A digital transcription solves that problem by putting everything I write in readable standardized text.
• Encouragement: I find that I'm less hesitant to ruin use high-quality notebooks when I think of them not as textual destinations in themselves, but as comfortable stopovers on the way to clean final drafts. Knowing that my journal entries are destined to end up in a digital file takes the pressure off of writing in a Moleskine or Leuchtturm. (A blog post for a different day, I suppose.)

I decided to store my journal in a markdown file for a similar bevy of reasons:

• Portability: Markdown (.MD) is not a proprietary file format. You can open and save markdown files using virtually any text editor, and there are plenty of online tools for working with them, too. By keeping my digital journal in markdown, I know I'll never lose access to it, and won't have to worry about it being held hostage behind a product subscription.
• Convenience: Long documents in more complicated formats, like .ODT and .DOCX, can take a little while to open in Word or LibreOffice. That's not a big deal for me in most cases, but since the two-sentence journal is about speed and concision, I don't want to delay! My preferred markdown writing tool, Sublime Text, opens any compatible file in fractions of a second, and consumes almost no resources while it's open, too.
• Organization: Markdown has pretty robust formatting options, including topic headings and internal links to said headings. I can therefore insert convenient year and month dividers in my digital journal (which are lacking in the analog version), and link directly to them using a table of contents in the opening of the document.

With all this in mind, here's how I arrange my entries in the markdown file. I have a first-level heading up top to specify what the file is about. Second-level headings are for the table of contents and years, and third-level headings designate the months. It looks more or less like this:

# Two-Sentence Journal


## Contents

* [2025](#2025)
	* [April](#april-2025)
	* [May](#may-2025)
	* [June](#june-2025)
	* [July](#july-2025)
	* [August](#august-2025)


## 2025


### April 2025

(ENTRIES GO HERE)


### May 2025

(ENTRIES GO HERE)

For each individual entry, I render the date/time/location in bold to differentiate it from the entry proper. To reuse the earlier example, here's how it appears in my digital journal:

**20 AUGUST 2025 / WEDNESDAY / [LOCATION REDACTED]**: While I was cutting our overgrown front lawn, a young woman jogged past with two unleashed goats trotting behind her like a pair of Springer Spaniels. [WIFE'S NAME REDACTED] tells me their names are Mars and Airhead, and they evidently dislike lawnmowers – intimidated by the noise, they halted in the middle of the street until I shut the electric motor off and urged them to catch up to their owner.

You could put each month's entries in a numbered or bulleted list if you really wanted, but I don't bother. I think they look fine as standard paragraphs, and the month/year headings provide enough separation to help me mentally compartmentalize them.

Remember: You do you!

Let me reiterate that everything in this blog post describes merely what has worked for me while keeping my two-sentence journal. The point of sharing them is only to give you a place to start from if you don't know where or how to begin. You should do whatever works for you – whether that entails copying my methods, tailoring them to your liking, or ignoring them entirely!

And in lieu of any further advice, I offer you this benediction: May your days be pleasurable to live through and remember alike.

#autobiography #tutorial #two-sentence journal