Tuesday, May 31, 2016

My journaling experience

My stats show that many people come to this web journal to read the post entitled My journal. Week after week this post is read over and over. I do wonder sometimes if an academic teaching some sort of writing course sends his or her students here. I can't think of another plausible reason why so many people read that particular post. I speculate that he or she wants to show his students the dangers of online writing, or the possibilities. The simple truth is that everything in this world can be used for writing and story fodder. I was told an anecdote by a woman yesterday as to how she knew that her husband was having an affair. I am sorry to say that my mind immediately said, 'Wow, what a great plot point!' It's what writers do, mine everyone and everything.

Since so many people do come to this web journal to read about journal writing, for whatever reason, I thought it might be time that I said something about journals. First of all, I adore them. I have kept them now for several years and it is a wonderful way of 'dropping' thoughts onto the page. It is said that an idea may come to you and if you don't write it down you may never have it again. Of course, anyone who reads here more than once or twice will have picked up on the fact that I am attuned to reasons to be fearful or anxious. You're not exactly a brain surgeon if you figured this out. So, fearful that this was true, I wrote lots of stuff down. I still do. Once or twice a week I brain dump into a closed web journal and one day I'll delete it because I don't want it read, ever.

Having said how much I love journals, I want to say this, that journals of all and any kind can be the writer's trap. When I first heard Colin Toibin say this, I didn't want to believe it. However, over the past few weeks I have come to see that what I was taught in my writer's course probably doesn't hold water. You don't have to keep journals to be a writer at all.

If you wake up with an idea, or go walking and see something that captures your interest, if you can't do anything else almost immediately than write a note, well then, for goodness sake write the note. But, recognize that it's less than a 50:50 chance that you'll ever refer to it again. Chances are high that by the time you go to use the idea, you won't find it anyway. I must have at least a dozen journals from the past few years and to try to find a single idea written some years ago is not likely. If I do read something over I often notice that the idea has changed; has morphed into another idea; changed as I changed. (Note: This is all debateable, of course. Woody Allan keeps scraps of paper in a drawer by his bed and when he is looking for a project he refers to the scraps of paper until he finds one that continues to resonate.)

Toibin believes that if you have to write a note for fear of forgetting the idea that means that you haven't taken it into your being. One way of taking a single idea into your being is to write a paragraph about the idea, perhaps the opening of a short story. Then file it in your Short Story file and return to it as the idea grows. Of course, I'm still not good at this. It's a very new idea for me. But, it has already released me from this awful notion that I will most likely forget my ideas. As you write into your story that's when you can mine what is in your head. If you have thought about it enough as you go about peeling the vegetables or ironing a shirt, the thoughts can be transferred directly from your head onto the page.

Ideas mull about in the head and need to be put down on the page eventually,  probably in the form of a scene or some dialogue or description. The exception might be, and I still do this: My philosophy of life = _____. This helps because it feels to me that at the core of a story is one's version of the meaning of life, in some form or other. So long as you have that embedded in your brain such that you can express it in a few words, you're good to go in creating scenes and characters, even if they are nothing like you.

To get better, I think one needs to write almost every day. It's not as simple as that but not much can be achieved without that starting point. I've been agitated lately at all the calls on my attention and my difficulty at getting to sit down with myself and write, until I remembered something. When I had no choice but to generate material constantly as a student, I put that first. I didn't go into stores except supermarkets hardly at all and I rushed through my household, wifely and motherly tasks so that I could devote my efforts to the blank screen. Of course, that's an unbalanced view and people count. They come first, at least for me. Yet, without some devotion to a craft - writing, painting, editing, acting, getting the tennis ball to the far back corner - how does anyone become proficient?

I offer one major exception to this advice of minimizing the practice of journal writing. There is a journal entitled '365'. Now, here's a quick way to a writerly life. Don't use this to rant but rather to sit with yourself daily and conjure your most compelling emotion. Ask: What am I feeling right now?' Then, do something with it. Give that emotion to a character on your mind. Perhaps a little dialogue, or a description of the character's internal world. There. Endless ideas all in one little journal that will ward off writer's block forever. Good luck with it, whatever your style of transferring ideas into prose of some form. No-one said it was easy.

4 comments:

  1. This is quite interesting... I have always been terrible at keeping a journal. I'm good at it for bit and then I just, um, I don't know what happens, actually, but I end up stopping when life gets in the way. Or at least, that is my excuse. I recently came back my blog which I'd stepped away from for a few years (actually I had to copy it to a new one..) and as I was setting up the new one I was just glancing at old posts here and there and cringing... I consider myself to have a very good memory but apparently I forget the feelings involved with the events... it almost felt like reading someone else's journal... sorry I'm rambling... your post really struck a chord :)

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  2. Mala: Someone else who kept a blog for years said that to me as well, that it was hard to recognize themselves in some of the earlier posts. I'm sure that I'd feel the same way if I re-read earlier posts. Occasionally, I do re-read something via the stats, seeing what people read, and I can have those feelings that I wrote about all over again. Since some of those memories are very happy ones, I take great pleasure in re-reading them.

    A few years ago I went to hear an Australian writer talk about the reading process. He said that we forget almost everything we read in time. So, you might have read a novel a few years ago and struggle now to remember the name of the protagonist or what happened. What you do remember is how the book make you feel. As an example, Hannah Kent's 'Burial Rites' is starting to get a bit sketchy for me, what happened in particular moments, but what I do remember is this incredible sense of her mining right down to the deepest part of my heart. I felt in the reading of that book that she had split my heart open and that I'd never again question what I was doing on this earth. I'm just finishing 'Remarkable Creatures' by Tracy Chevalier and I can't say that the book made me feel much more than relief that I had got through it. It was like looking at characters through a glass window.

    When we write in a blog we offer ourselves up for scrutiny and I think that's a rather brave thing to do in some ways. I was at a little dinner party of 6 girls last night and it was pleasant conversation, but went nowhere close to the 'meaning of my life' stuff that is found in blogs. I feel a little guilty at not offering a Ph.D student in the USA more assistance with his investigation about what blogs say about society at large, but I doubt they say anything about society at large. Blogs, anonymous ones especially, are written by certain people, perhaps on the introverted side, who need to blood let and share their inner lives. People at large probably don't ponder these issues much at all. That's my guess.

    I'd encourage you to keep on writing as the feeling takes you to do so. As time passes the writing will change. This is quite normal. Personally, if I don't write nearly every day I find that I don't do as well in life. It's my time to myself away from the 'real world'. It's another opportunity to be myself. Out there, I have to be confident and outgoing. Here, I am a self-confessed introvert, a lover of words and ideas and images. It's my respite from the constant effort to be more extroverted in a world that expects and reveres extroversion.

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  3. You read a lot more than I do :) I love to read... but I am pulled out of stories by so many things and then I can't go back... I get annoyed with writers too easily... when I find something I love though, I will read it in one or two sittings... rare, that... you're a really great writer, btw :)

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  4. Thank you. It's so wonderful to find a book that you can't put down. I'm really looking forward to 'My Name is Lucy Barton' which I have already bought, but I belong to a book club so I'm often reading other people's choices. There are gems in there but often it can be a chore to get through them.'

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