All right! I’ve got pens and pencils at the ready, and my trusty writing journal/art journal with me. Time to start the prompt! Remember – I’ll be posting my spread from today (April 1) tomorrow in the comments of this post, as well as on instagram. This allows me time in the evenings to work on the journal, because I rarely have time before then. Feel free to post your own whenever you finish! It can be in the comments, or instagram or other social media – whatever works best for you! Be sure to use the #AprilCreativity tag when you do!

April is the beginning of Spring (at least in my mind) and as such, it’s a good time to start new things. I’ve decided that I need to get back into my writing and art in a big way. So I’m trying something new this month – a month of art and writing journal prompts!

Now, I hope that others will join me. I’m going to post every day’s journal on my Instagram, blog, and FB pages with the hashtag #AprilCreativity so you can see what I’m doing (or not – accountability, right?). I hope you’ll join me. Feel free to post in the comments section here, and on twitter or Instagram – but make sure you add the hashtag so we can scroll through each other’s entries easily! Some days will be boring, full of words in the photos. Other days, it might be artistic and full of color. Either way, I hope it will inspire all of us to get back into the creative groove!

Here’s how it’s going to work:

Each day around 9 I’ll post the prompt for the day. They will be everything from photo prompts to music clips. At some point during the day, I’ll (and hopefully you as well) will sit down, use the prompt as the catalyst, and create.

It might be a free write about a photo prompt. The same photo prompt could be sketched, printed and used in a collage, or used as the inspiration for a seemingly unrelated piece of art. The key is that you create something – even if you don’t like it, or it doesn’t have any sort of relation to the prompt. The point is that you’ve stretched your creative muscles, and the more you do that, the easier it is the next time.

Like anything else, it requires practice to be creative. I can’t tell you how much harder it is to sit down and write when I’ve stopped for a while. But if I sit down and pound out 500 words a day – even if they’re crap and I’ll delete them later, the act of sitting down to write really makes it easier. If you look at my calendar and I do this on a regular basis, the amount of words written per day just goes up and up if I stick with it every day. When I do it sporadically, the numbers are low, and it’s easier to find other things to distract me.

In April, I’m making a real effort to create, and to help set a standard for myself that I will do my best to stick with for the rest of the year. I hope you’ll join me, and I hope you create amazing things!