The Isolation Journals

A weekly prompt from a guest writer built a large audience fast. Suleika Jaouad started The Isolation Journals early in the pandemic. It drew 40,000 subscribers within 24 hours and now has nearly 300,000 readers, with a guest and a prompt every week.

The format grew out of her own journaling habit, which she began as a child and kept up in the hospital while being treated for leukemia at 22.

How I Write▶ 33:32

Prompts break stuck, recursive writing, especially the prompts people resist. When her journal entries went stuck and recursive, Jaouad read the journals of Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde, picked a page at random, and wrote from whatever it sparked. She says this shifted the light like a kaleidoscope.

"The prompts that I resist are often the ones that yield the most interesting things." The poet Marie Howe uses a similar opener when blocked, starting with "I don't want to write about" and writing into it.

How I Write▶ 33:32

A private, unjudged space frees people to write honestly. At 22, Jaouad opened a Word document thinking she had to write something "New York Times"-worthy, and the pressure killed any impulse. In the hospital, with no expectations on her, she wrote in her journal like a child, for the joy of it.

She drafts by hand so the inner editor stays out of the way, and only starts editing when she types the draft up. She also suggests asking readers where the page feels warm, using Melissa Febos' heat mapping, rather than asking what is broken.

How I Write