On Journaling

When I was a closing in on my last days before graduating from college, I had a conversation with one of my English processors about whether or not I should stay on for another semester or another year in order to add an English major to my degree and make me a better writer.

It was then that I first heard, though it was surely not the first time it had been said to me, a piece of advice that has become the often-covered but never undermined bedrock of my efforts at becoming a writer. It was that taking more courses and trying to get a degree in the study of literature was no going to make me a better writer.  There was only thing I could do to make myself write better.

To be the best writer you can be, you need to read and you need to write, and you need to do both every day.

The plan I formed, partially as a result of that conversation, and partly from the large sum of other reasons and purposes at work in my life at that time, was to leave school on time, take my degree, and to to work somewhere that would leave me time to read and write every day until I became good at it.

Happily reading every day has never been a problem for me, or so I thought

 When I was very little my parents would read to me every night, or almost every night, and as soon as I could shake words for myself I was an over-enthusiastic patron of the libraries at my disposal. The long and short of it is I became, as a kid, teenager, and young adult, the kind of person who carries a book at all times, reads on the bus, reads in be waiting room, reads between classes, and is unable to fall asleep at night without wearing out my eyes on the printed page.

This was before the advent of the smart phone and its destructive subtle distractions in my life, but that's another story.

Writing every day, however, was something which, being at heart an insanely lazy person, I have struggled with ever since.

There is a book in my mind that I've been working on for about a decade now, and have been within one or two years of finishing a draft on since before my above conversation at the threshold of leaving school. I'm still at work on it, in a wholehearted but distracted way, but have recognized it for the over-ambitious project it is, and am also working on smaller projects while it continues to grow and shrink and grow clearer.

More on that later: I only introduce it now to say that, when I'd gone out and changed my house, my job, and my state of living considerably, and was a regular office worker in the real grown-up world, it was to this project that I turned, seeing it as the first thing I wanted to finish up, as my material for writing every day.

For about a year, I kept up a pace of writing at least a sentence a day on that book. It could be eleven-fifty five, and I would be heading to bed, but as long as I opened that good old document and added a few words so whatever I'd out down the night before, I could consider myself good for the day. As for the consistency or memorability of be material I was producing at this pace, I won't comment now.

In terms of sheer volume, I can't count that year as a loss by any means; I produced a few hundred pages, finishing half of what was then a first draft. A lot of the material I put down then is still useful, if I can ever compel myself to look through it.

But eventually my enthusiasm waned, then my resolve, and finally I started making excuses and falling off. Before I knew it it had been weeks since I'd written anything new, and then months, and then I had to start all over.

Seasons are a strange thing. It's odd to me that over the course of the year our lives are divided between long stretches of time that feel totally different from each other. Other writers have made this point before, that in the deep of winter, the middle of February, when the cold is getting wearying, s ow is no longer pretty, the novelty has worn off, it is almost impossible to imagine e what July or even may just feel like, but we know it will be here one day. The same goes for me now: I can visualize December, and I remember what it's like, but it's hard to believe that the world I see out my window now, when the world is humming and choked with the glare and the close weight of summer,  is that same world of dead and wasted winter.

I mention all this because it's roughly the same way I used to feel when I'd realize either that it had been a long time since I'd gone without writing at least something, and that I had no immediate recollection of what not writing daily felt like, or, more often, then opposite realization that I had stopped for too long and would have to work to get it back.

Working to get it back.

Over time you learn which tricks will work and which ones won't.

Buying a new journal? Fool's errand, you're masking insecurity with buying looser, no matter how small.

Better to find a  blank or half-blank spiral notebook you already have your house, and start on that. If you don't have one, get some scrap paper to start.

Picking right up where you left off, as if you'd never missed a day? It will be onerous to try and get back the feel, and impossible to get back the confidence, of how you felt before you stopped.

Better I've found, if you want to jump right back in line with a project you were working hard on,  to tackle smaller projects or just free write until some of the rust wears away, then go back and re-read at least the last few chapters at least once, to try and jar your memory as to ideas you'd had but not yet put down and explored, what the main emotions you were feeling when you built the last scenes in your mind, and what surprises you can remember  finding  while just working the material. If you're interested in my advice, the last is one of the best things about being a writer.

Reading books about writing itself? It's a mixed bag, like any market; I'll try and make ajar of recommendations one day, but for now I'll just say that if you're really in a funk, unless it's a book of exercises, you'll likely only see and remember the things that agree with what you thought before you read them.

Otherwise you'll do better to just free write until you begin to get comfortable with your own thoughts and expressing and empathizing with the people you're writing about.

How do you get it back when it's gone and you're too rusty to put down a word without feeling silly?

So far my trick has been to just feel silly anyway, and keep writing until it feels good again, and not awkward.

When can you tell when it's back? Everyone's experience and writing voice are different, but for me it's when i can hear what should be written next with clarity and a little urgency. It's certainly this feeling that goes missing and has to be reclaimed when I've gone too long without doing it every day.

After a couple of years of starting and stopping, beginning lesser projects and working on short stories here and there, I noticed that the plan of producing content every day wasn’t working out.  I started to try and understand why it was I kept faltering and falling off, and having to start all over again.  Instead of working all the time on being a writer, I was spending most of my effort on rediscovering, in the middle of a blank season of no production, why I was interested in writing in the first place, and working back to that point.

Basically the problem, for me, came down to the pressure of having to deliver content every day.  Not every day was I able to make time.  Not every day did I feel like what I was turning out was getting it right, especially if I was tired, or stressed, or if other things than writing had been on my mind all day.  There was too much between me and the page for me to see clearly enough to keep moving, especially if I’d had too many days like that in a row, days where “just a sentence before bed” had sufficed to keep things moving.  If I was going to write every day, it would have to be less stressful, and I would have to find a way to keep the stuff getting between me and the page out of the way, in order to see more clearly what I wanted to say.

Without really realizing what I was doing, I managed to solve both these problems with journaling.

I didn’t start journaling with anything in mind other than that I’d read that it was something other writers did, and I wanted to see how it would work for me.  So I bought a new composition notebook and cracked its spine and promised me I’d write two pages in it every night before sleep.

For a few weeks, I kept this pace up pretty well.  I still have the notebooks somewhere.  My approach was simple: mostly free writing, but I wanted, each day, to find some image or some anecdote that would make sense to me, the way some short story writers would.  I figured that if I could do that every day, it would make me better at drawing my ideas for stories from my experience, which I must learn to do sometime, and I could accomplish two things at once.

Once again, this strategy failed, for what might be becoming obvious reasons, but which were not so obvious to me at the time.

I’m sure there are people who are able to fill many of the days of their journals, if not every day, with some condensation of meaningful images and sentiment that will summarize the day somehow and make it into a little story.  There have been many, many days in my own journals, since I’ve managed to keep at it every day, which hasn’t been long mind you, that have more or less complied with this standard, and which I look forward to finding and turning over some day, if I ever decide to re-read any of it.  I am so far notoriously poor at re-reading my own work.

But journaling, I realized finally, is not something you do for reading later, like a record or a captain’s log.  It’s just a way to write every day, so that you don’t have to work your way back to being a writer in your mind.

Thus after a long time I arrived at my present practice:

When journaling, do not force yourself to write anything.  Just set aside time for writing to happen, and let whatever you have to write come out.

For the last two years, or year and a half rather, I keep a daily planner, one with a new page for every day in the year, and every night before bed I spend ten minutes filling a page.  Then I read and go to sleep.

That’s about all the rules I stick to.  But it has to be every night, and it has to be a full page.  If I miss a night, I fill it in the next morning.

There are gaps, and blank pages, especially in the first third or so of the first year I kept it up, but these have diminished over time, and I haven’t missed an entry for a while now.

I don’t put constraints on what to put down, it’s all free writing.  It’s generally thoughts on the day, and if anything important or memorable happened I try to work out how to render the feel and parts of the experience that would be worth telling in a story, but again, it’s all just to keep thinking like I think when I’m writing.

I would skip a night if I felt tired or like I wasn’t feeling like writing, and then have two to fill in the next night, when I wouldn’t feel any more like it than I had the first night, because by then I’d already fallen that far off the wagon. 

Whenever I got rusty, and had to work my way back to writing again, it always felt disjointed and like bad writing; I would feel silly and self-conscious, like talking to myself in an elevator.

This was mainly because I had lost the habit of thinking clearly, and writing down exactly what I think.

The self-consciousness wears off, if you keep at it, and you start to get to know the kinds of things you tend to say and how you say them.

As for it being good or bad writing, I won’t comment, except that for me, journaling has to be a place free of evaluation.  I will never go back and say “boy that entry was poorly written,” because I no longer write the entries to be good or bad.  I just write them to write.

Journaling, at least for me, is not an end in itself, but a means.  It’s just a tool to keep your mind wired into writing mode every day.

I recommend journaling!  Don’t sweat over how you start, just start.  And then keep doing it until you find out what works for you, and what feels right and keeps you sharp as a writer.

Then you can start worrying about writing the other stuff.