relatives etc. Choose one of these, write another list or cluster on just that one, and expand it into a paragraph.
3.Write a cluster of all the things that please you; choose one; write another list, and expand it into a paragraph.
4.Take 3 days to think about one of the paragraphs you have written (above). Jot notes on what you think. Rewrite the paragraph using those notes and other ideas that grow out of them. See how an idea grows clearer when you actively think about it over a period of time.
5.Write a Haiku from a part of the clusters you have made.
6.Write a description of your favorite place–your kitchen, rose garden, bridge, porch. Add selective details. Show not tell. Remember the 5 senses.
Journals – Why?
Carve your initials on a tree, imbed your footprint in the fresh cement of a new sidewalk, paint your name on a rock, blaze the trees as you trek through the woods, blog your inner world into the big air or write in a journal.
Journal writing is all about making marks, landmarks, Markings (as Dag Hammerskjold’s journal is titled), in order to give life significance, to survive death or to testify to the passage of a sensitive life in a world so large that whole civilizations can disappear..
You may write in a journal thinking you will want to look back and see where you’ve been so that you don’t keep rotating in circles. Or maybe you are just letting the other bears know you are in the woods.
Henry David Thoreau wrote thousands of diary entries as a consequence of casually being asked by Ralph Waldo Emerson if he [Thoreau] kept a journal.
Surprisingly, the journal as a blog is making a huge revival.
Instead of the old Christmas letter, I had several friends and relatives send me links to their blogs where they had great Christmas letters with pictures of their kids and holidays laid out in surprisingly professional layouts. So much better than chewing your way through the old grocery list of their activities that I have received in the previous years.
Self Knowledge
The private journal presents the possibilities of exploring your inner world and your outer world.
Barbellion wrote in a Jourrnal of a Disappointed Man (1912),
“I can think of no more interesting volume than a detailed intimate, psychological history of my own life.”
Certainly this is the extreme of narcissism which one should avoid, but the exercise is one route along the journey to Knowing Thyself. When we understand ourselves, we start to understand others.
Capturing the Aweness
There can be no foretelling a person’s life. We have no script before we live our lives, no plot, just moments of dramatic conflict, sometimes more, sometimes less action, occasional fun, sorrow, grief and a great deal of just getting along.
Like the writing of a Haiku in Japanese is meant to capture the ‘aweness’ of a moment, the writing of a journal can capture the ‘aweness’ of your life, the sources of your delights and the pitfalls of your mistakes, traveling the journey in full consciousness instead of through a blur of unrelated forgotten incidents like so many dinners last week.
Freedom of Expression
You may not have the freedom to express yourself in your life, but you do have freedom of expression in your personal journal where you are free from the constraints of rules, free from the need to complete the work, and free from the judgment of insensitive critics.
Most of us have our sensitivities so closely entwined with our personal expression, that to have anyone even read our writing or look at our paintings, or taste our brie en croute is nearly unbearable. We desperately want others to think well of what we are trying to create; we want them to appreciate our efforts, to tread tenderly on the exposed expressions we have dared to bare to the scrutiny and possible derision of ungenerous people. (The blog writer has to be prepared for this criticism, however. And many Blog writers love the attention and the criticism.)
But in your private journal, you can satisfy your creative, artistic, confessional urges without the loss of dignity, self-esteem or ego, keeping their pride intact so that you can function proudly in the outer world.
When Edgar Degas, the 19th Century artist, was asked why he didn’t marry, he replied,
“I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, [about one of his paintings] ‘That’s a pretty little thing.’”
A journal ‘should be’ whatever it turns out to be. It can be a diatribe of blasphemy, cursing the devil, god, earth mother and/or your spouse for every rotten thing in your life, or it can be a hymn to the beauty of the flowers that bloom successively throughout the year such as that recorded in the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, with quoted poetry and short personal comments and color sketches of flowers in each season.
You can add sketches to your journal, ticket stubs, news clippings, photos, a sonnet to signal a new season in your life or write the whole book in undated point-form statements like a grocery list.
Harry Rasky, a Canadian film producer, who produced a film on Degas’ art, wrote that Degas was always trying to portray people caught in their own solitude. And this is what a journal does; provides the means for people to come to terms with their own solitude. There have been many journals published by Andy Warhol, George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who spent so many years in Moscow, John Steinbeck, the American novelist, and these journals are so fascinating because we get glimpses of very public people in their solitude, glimpses of the often surprising inner person who is normally masked by the social persona.
This is also the fascination with art. We look at great works of art, and then at the artist who produced them and we are astonished that this rather human mortal, much like ourselves, can have this remarkable talent to reveal so well what he/she sees when we can see the same subject without any of the beauty, insight, intelligence or originality of vision.
The journal writer uses words to try to fulfill the same need for expression that the artist and musician strive for.
Many people have been intimidated by poor teachers that they doubt their ability to write anything. But if you are angry enough at someone in the family, perhaps they have dyed your favorite shirt pink in the wash, you can find the words to express your indignation. We can all find the words. As long as someone isn’t saying, “You have to write this in this order or You must make the subject and verb agree”, you can write exactly what you feel, think, see, like, hate, love, need, and enjoy. That’s the beauty of a journal.
A journal should never be a chore, and it isn’t an arena where you must demonstrate precious literary pretensions or try to outdo Samuel Pepys, that 17th Century tell-all diary writer (and he had lots to tell) or try to be Janier than Jane Austen. You can just relax the grip and let the thoughts flow. Like a trumpet player in his loft releasing
