On Journaling
I’ve never been a very good journal keeper, as much as I want to be. I’ve had trouble since kindergarten, when my gifted and talented teacher wanted me to write a full notebook page for a journal entry and I wrote “I lost a tooth,” followed by, like, forty lines of exclamation points. With a pencil, even, so the page got all greasy after a while.
I’ve tried, in fits and starts, to keep journals throughout my life. My past is littered with notebooks and Moleskines and diaries with little locks and little keys, all of them chosen deliberately, with the best of intentions. I write in them, tell secrets, start stories. And after a few days, I just stop. Leave them behind, or keep them out to remind me of what I’m avoiding, as accusatory as inanimate objects can be.
The longest I ever kept a journal was when I tried to make my way through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way. She advises one to get up first thing in the morning and write three handwritten pages before doing anything else. Let me make myself clear: I am not precisely a morning person. Before, say, 10a, all I’m good for is driving my husband to the train station and shouting foul invectives at motorists who have the misfortune of pulling out in front of me when they should know damn good and well that we are running late again. I even shock myself with what comes out of my mouth. So when Julia Cameron wanted me to get up early to write junk by hand in a spiral ring notebook, I was, in a word, skeptical, but willing to try.
In the end, it wasn’t the getting up early that broke my nascent habit, but my crippling perfectionism. If I missed a day, it was all ruined! All that work, those two months, down the drain! Missing the point? Yes, I’m good at that. Either way, I abandoned those journals, too.
I’m having to learn how to keep a journal, though. The journal is one of the cornerstones of the Fiction Writing program I attend at Columbia College, and this semester both of my classes are with a teacher who seems to really like them, so I guess it’s all journal time for me for the next few months. As much as I bristle at authority, I am a grade-grubber from way back, so I’m going to do my best. Not forcing myself to get to a certain page count is a start.
And, you know, I get why journaling is important. I’ve just never made room for it in my process.
Do you think journaling is important to your process, or are you more like me? Any tips?
(originally posted at elizawrites.com)