When I was a child, I had an ornamental wooden box in which I used to collect trinkets and knick-knacks of all kinds – broken hair clips, bracelet beads, scraps from newspaper and magazines, paper poems, jewel pieces, glitter ribbons and likewise. As I grew up, I started writing poetry and making lists and jotting down diary entries and creating art journals.
We humans have a deep-rooted appetite to recording our thoughts and experiences. Just look at the famous collections of poetry, at the great monuments and at the things and inventions. Everything is someone’s way to record and capture their innermost thoughts and experiences.
Everyone has their own way to capture their thoughts, feelings and experiences. And journaling is a writer’s way to do this.
Many of the famous writers including Anne Frank, Susan Sontag, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ruskin Bond, CS Lewis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Didion and others used to maintain their writer’s journals and diaries. For most of them, their diary entries and journal jottings were converted into books.
Inside the journals of famous writers, you’ll find chronicles of their daily experiences, time capsules of their deepest emotional encounters, portraits of anguish and shame, secret codes, accounts of melancholiness, bedlams of confessions and innermost expressions, dingle-dangles of sensory material, curios of memories and insights and reflections from the point of view of the eye of their life’s storms. There is so much going on inside a writer’s brain.
Carrying forward in this vein, many famous writers suggest the exercise of journaling for aspiring writers. Journaling is a written and visual version of our deepest thoughts, emotions and experiences. And as it turns out, keeping a writer’s journal is one of the best ways to enhance our writing practice. It is the cream on the cake of our writing.
Ideas. Descriptions. Adjectives. Emotions, Conflict, Character, Phrases…Writing is a complex process. To be able to write, one needs to put one’s mind together and then write while standing at a little distance away from it.
The key to a good piece of writing is practice. While the sun may shine not everyday, practice ensures that it will shine atleast someday.
One way to record our writing practice is to capture the creative process we employ for writing. How do we write the descriptions? How do we create characters and spin scene after scene? What styles and voices do we connect with while we read others’ writings?
Fiction writer Stephen King suggests a Noun Verb Fiction Exercise in which you write a noun followed by a verb. Form a sentence and then use it as a writing prompt to journal or write.
Author of Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury, uses a Word Association technique in which he writes a list of words, writing them one after the other as they come to the mind. When a list is complete, he jams the shapeless list into a story.
Similar to Mister Bradbury’s technique, Edward de Bono, in his book How to Have Creative Ideas, provides many Random word lists and uses many processes to use these words as writing prompts.
But even if you don’t wish to follow any particular technique, freewriting is something that every writer should do, must do. Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’’s Way offers the idea of writing Morning Pages, which is stream-of-consciousness writing or freewriting. Write without any filter and without any grammatical boundary, just write it out.
A writer’s brain is an enigmatically strange thing. No one knows what creeps and slithers in there. But there is so much to write out. Unless you churn and dig it, how are you ever going to discover the gold buried in the subconscious?
Write letters to and from anything and everything. Write character sketches and dialogues and scribbles. Pen down a diary entry. Take support with visual cues such as doodles, sketches, collages, wordboards and word clouds just the way Leonard da Vinci used to do in his journal diaries. Open the windows into your soul and gaze at what you see without any filter of thought, opinion, judgement or belief.
Ending with, here are some views of famous writers on writing a daily journal or diary.
“Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts – like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal, I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather – in many cases – offers an alternative to it.” – Susan Sontag
“The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is the good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus must lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. ” – Virginia Woolf
“In diary you find the proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.” – Franz Kafka
“I never travel without my diary.” – Oscar Wilde
“It was while writing a diary I discovered how to capture the living moments…” – Anais Nin
Indeed what
I have learned from reading about these famous writers has only re-enforced my
curiosity and desire to persist in the practice of writing a daily journal or
penning down a diary entry, for I too am waiting to unfold new doorways to self-discovery,
intriguing fictional worlds that reside in my subconscious, and insights that
stem from the serpentine stillness that creeps and crawls within my bloodstream
and cellular trajectory. What about you?
