Junk Journal Prompts for When You're Stuck (50 Cards)

Being stuck in a junk journal is almost never a lack of ideas. It is one of three specific problems, and knowing which one you have tells you which prompt to reach for.

The three ways you get stuck

Blank page. No subject. You want to make something and have nothing to say. Use the Ordinary Life or Memory prompts.

Blank hands. You have a subject but no idea what the page should look like. Use the Structure prompts — they tell you what to build, not what it is about.

Too precious. You have a subject and a plan and cannot start, because you might ruin it. Use the Constraint prompts. Restriction is the cure for preciousness.

Diagnose first. Reaching for a subject prompt when the problem is preciousness does nothing.

Ordinary life (1–10)

1. What was in your bag today
2. The view from where you are sitting right now
3. What you ate yesterday, all of it
4. A receipt from this week and what it was for
5. The last five things you searched for
6. What is on the kitchen counter
7. A conversation you overheard
8. Your commute, mapped
9. What woke you up
10. The song stuck in your head, written out

Memory (11–20)

11. A house you lived in, drawn as a floor plan
12. A meal someone made for you
13. The first thing you remember
14. A day you would like back
15. Someone who is gone, and one specific thing about them
16. What you wanted to be at nine years old
17. A trip, told only in the small parts
18. The last time you were somewhere for the last time
19. A smell that takes you somewhere
20. What you were doing exactly one year ago today

Structure (21–30)

These say nothing about content. They tell your hands what to build.

21. A page that holds something. Pocket, tuck spot, envelope.
22. Three layers and nothing else
23. A page with a flap that lifts
24. A page in one color family
25. A page that is 80 percent empty
26. A page made only of paper you did not buy
27. A page with a fold-out that extends past the book
28. A page with something sewn onto it
29. A spread that works as one image across both pages
30. A page with a hole cut in it, showing the next page through

Constraint (31–40)

For when you cannot start because it might not be good.

31. Ten minutes. Timer on, stop when it goes.
32. Three materials only
33. No scissors — tear everything
34. Your non-dominant hand for all writing
35. One piece of paper, whole, no cutting
36. Make it deliberately ugly
37. Only what is within arm’s reach
38. No writing at all
39. Only writing, no images
40. Use the piece you have been saving for the right page

Collections and lists (41–50)

41. Everything you have lost this year
42. Books you did not finish, and where you stopped
43. Things you are quietly good at
44. Every place you have lived
45. What you would take out of the house
46. Advice you were given and ignored
47. Words you like the sound of
48. Colors of one specific day
49. People whose names you have forgotten but faces you have not
50. What you want to be true in a year

Make the deck in twenty minutes

1. Cut fifty cards at 2 x 3.5 inches from card, an old cereal box, or index cards cut in half.
2. Write one prompt per card. Do not decorate them. A pretty deck takes three hours and gets used the same amount.
3. Mark the back with a category letter — O, M, S, C, L — so you can pull from the right pile when you know what kind of stuck you are.
4. Keep them in a pocket in the back of the journal, held with an elastic. A deck in a drawer in another room is a deck you never use.
5. Add your own. Leave ten blank cards in the deck. The best prompts are the ones that occur to you at a red light.

An envelope glued into the back cover is the ideal home for this — measurements are in the ephemera templates, or a ready-made vellum pocket divider holds a deck this size well.

How to use a prompt without ruining it

Pull one and commit. Do not draw three and choose. Choosing is the same decision you were already stuck on.

Set a timer. Twenty minutes. The prompt removes the subject decision; the timer removes the finishing decision.

Take it literally. "What was in your bag today" means empty the bag out. Interpreting a prompt into something more meaningful is usually avoidance.

Do not save the good ones. The prompts that make you slightly uncomfortable are the pages worth having.

If you are still stuck

Make a page that is not about anything: a color test page, every pen you own swatched with its name written beside it. It is genuinely useful later, it requires no decisions, and it usually breaks the block within ten minutes.

For more shapes to build, 25 junk journal page ideas is organized by what each page is for, and the supplies are in junk journal supplies.

Cut ten cards tonight

Not fifty. Ten, from whatever card is nearest, one prompt each, straight into a pocket in the back of the book.

Pull one this week and set a timer.