IN PRAISE OF JOURNALS.
Many years ago in a bookshop in Ohio, a book fell out of the shelf onto me. Never one to miss such happenstance I picked it up with interest. It changed my writing life. Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” is the first of her series of writing workshops full of exercises and challenges but the one that changed my writing life was her use of a daily morning journal to use as you please in a free and easy sort of way. It is not a new idea. Think of Virginia Woolf’s writing diaries.
Most of us have been using diaries and note pads and journals for ages but there is a discipline akin to meditation in these morning pages that really works.
Dreams can be recorded, moans and grumps, confessions, ideas for stories, a to do list for the day. There are no rules as to how you work it, just the promise to do about 3 pages every day and not to re read or edit them for months if ever. Somehow it gets rid of the fluff bunnies in your mind, takes them out of the way before you focus on the creative task in hand. Artists, musicians, actors, whatever creative talent is yours can benefit from such a discipline.
I have other notebooks for researching facts, outlines and ideas and I always date these just in case…It was the proof of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca notebooks, dated and written in Cairo that convinced a jury that she had not plagiarised some other authors’s work.
Making lists of wishes and dreams for the future is another private journal to own. Invest in something special to write up your poems, thoughts and ideas. If all else fails when you’re feeling jaded and a bit stuck writing your pages will help stir up the juices again. Of course, don’t forget the humble pocket diary and purse note pad. You never know what gems you’ll overhear on the bus, train or in the doctor’s waiting room. If you don’t write them down there and then, they flit away forgotten. Here’s one I heard at my writer’s group last week: Angela said, “Finishing a novel is like squeezing the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube!”
Hope that helps.
Helene.
