If you’re a fantasy lover, you’ve probably been reading the genre for years. It’s exciting to dive into a world that’s unlike anything you’ve ever read before, and if you’re also keep a reading journal, keeping at least a portion of your journal dedicated to fantasy books is a natural fit.
There are plenty of ways to spice up the experience of reading fantasy novels, and here are some ideas.
What Can You Write in Your Fantasy Reading Journal?
With a reading journal, you can track your reading, thoughts on the book, and what you learn about writing and storytelling along the way. These reading journal ideas can help fantasy readers get started with their a new reading challenge or habit, or just make the reading experience more engaging.
Likewise, a reading journal is a way to track your reading and discover new books, authors, genres, characters and even plots. It’s also a great way to learn more about storytelling by looking at the structure of how stories are written.
A reading journal is a place to write down your thoughts about the books you’ve read, and also a way to keep track of all the books you want to read. With a reading journal, you can record information such as the title, author and what type of book it is, and why you did or didn’t like it.
Fantasy-Related Reading
- Progress on a reading challenge, whether the number of books, books of a certain type, authors of a certain perspective, and more
- Overall book rating
- Overall book review
- Ratings for the book from a certain angle. Rather than give a single overall rating, perhaps there are specific aspects of fantasy books that are important to you to note. For instance, it might be a rating based on the strength and appeal of the romance, world-building, theme or message, representation, or a different category.
- A gallery of monthly, yearly, or ‘all time’ favorite – or least favorite – books, characters, story lines, and more in your fantasy reading overall (ex: top antagonists)
Character Cast
- List the characters in your book, along with a description of each, whether stated in the book or what you imagine based off of what you read
- Observations about their personality, appearance, and other attributes
- Relationships and how do they interact with each other. Similarly, what are their relationships like? How do these relationships change over the course of the story?
Character Profiles
A profile can be used to get to know the characters in your book. For example, if you’re reading a fantasy story and there’s a new character introduced who seems will be important to the storyline, you may want to write a profile about them. As ideas, the profile could include some of the following information:
- Your first impression, versus what you suspect might happen or may be revealed about them
- A description of what the character looks like or who they remind you of, whether in other books or in terms of people in real life, or your personal headcanon
- Information that stands out about them, such as what makes it seem like it’s more to them than meets the eye or what makes them a great love interest
- Backstory on where they came from and how he became an apprentice sorcerer or wizard
Character Development
Character development is one of the most important parts of storytelling, and for many readers, it’s what makes them care about a character and want to keep reading.
If you’re a fantasy reader, tracking how a character grows over the course of the story could be a fascinating reading journal entry. On the other hand, you could track more of what’s revealed about them that makes them feel more and more like a multidimensional character.
Now, if you’re a fantasy writer, there’s more you can add to a character-related fantasy reading journal entry.
Analyzing a certain character that catches your attention can be a great way to improve your craft or inspire yourself for your own storytelling.
As an example, you could note how the author makes their dialogue makes them sound distinct from other characters, or how their scenes feel authentic to their personality, motivations, and backstory.
A similar line of thinking can be applied to the ‘characterization’ of certain people-groups, kingdoms, or the like.
In order to track character development effectively, you could ask yourself questions as you read such as: What does this character want? What motivates them? How do they change throughout the story?
Example of a Reading Journal Entry
Related to the character profile entry, one idea is to also write about your feelings about the characters in the story. This is a great way of finding out what you liked or disliked about a character and why.
You could focus on any aspect of each character: their motivations, actions, appearance, personality traits (or if they lack one), relationships with others, etc.
World-Building
World-building is the process of creating a new world and populating it with all of the unique elements that make up that world. If you’ve ever read a fantasy book, played a video game or seen a movie set in some fictional land, then you’ve been exposed to some great examples of world-building.
A reading journal can be a wonderful place to write about the world of the fantasy book you’re reading. Whether it’s the legends the world has, the culture, social structure, customs, magic system, or something else, anything that grabs your attention about the world can be something to include in an entry related to world-building.
Magic Systems
Magic systems are one of the biggest draws to a fantasy book, especially if it’s unique and refreshing. As such, a reading journal entry about the magic system or systems in your fantasy book could be an interesting one.
While I’ve used the term ‘magic’ system, it’s a misnomer: Any supernatural power-related system could be a great topic. For instance, fantasy books might also include the following:
- Elementals or elementalists
- Warriors with supernatural abilities
- Mages, sorcerers, necromancers, wizards, and the like
- ‘Superpowers’, or powers that come across as similar
- Miraculous powers
- Vampiric powers, werewolf abilities, and the like
- Many, many more
Conclusion
If you’re looking for ways to keep track of your reading and learn from it, a reading journal is an excellent tool. It can be as simple or elaborate as you like, depending on how much time or effort you want to spend on the project. However, we hope that these ideas will help anyone who wants to start reading more often and perhaps those looking to improve their writing skills at the same time!
