ESSAY

Writer — Do you journal? If not, why not?

10 Reasons Why Writers Should Keep a Personal Journal

The exemplar journalers of this world are often seen to be heroes of the pen and notebook and universally admired for recording their life events in a meaningful and consistent way.

They have cupboardfulls of notebooks and say things like, “I don’t go anywhere without writing down the occasional quote or writing up something that happened to me today”.

Then there’s the rest of us. The Beginners who start well, then tail off, or the Stop-Starters who begin journaling, leave it for months, then begin again.

Or the ‘I just need to find the right pen and journal’ types who have a cupboard full of uncompleted journals, or worse, never actually begin.

Then the Bullet Journal Babes we see on Instagram, with their sticking glue, washy tape and cut outs, superb handwriting skills and artistic efforts that make them the envy of their crowd.

As a writer, forget all that stuff. A plain and simple journal is the key to writerly transformation. And wouldn’t you secretly love someone to describe you in this way:

She’s an enthusiastic recorder of life — writes in her journal every day prodigiously, loads her camera’s SD cards with thousands of pictures. Her swooping, idiosyncratic half-print, half-cursive style scrawls on month after month, skipping lines between the scraps of the discussion that seem important enough to snatch and capture. Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

Did I just hear one of you say, “I am a time-poor waif. I’ve valiantly tried journaling, year after pitiful year, thought about starting, but failing miserably to continue”.

If you’re one of those who decry journaling, or cry about not journaling, I wonder if you’ve given much thought to the transformational power of journaling to the ‘self’ of the writer?

Have you taken any time to appreciate the power that journaling could have for your writing life? Or read what the journaling writers have gained from this awesome practice?

Here are ten reasons why you, as a writer, might use your valuable time in writing a personal journal.

1. Journaling can help you be a more productive writer

Do you have writing goals? I find it’s not easy, but well worth it, as it saves side-tracking down routes away from my main writing projects.

Journaling can actually help you identify your writing goals. The advantage of having goals means that you’ve set out the path you need to travel, and sticking to the goal stops you from getting bogged down on the way.

Journaling can actually help you identify your writing goals

You review the past to assess the present and then determine what actions are necessary to change your future. You take what you know and apply it to how you want to grow. Thus, the power of journaling. Melissa Steginus, ‘Self Care at Work: How to Reduce Stress, Boost Productivity, and Do More of What Matters’.

Goals don’t need to be big hairy ones. You could start small by, say, attempting to read three pages of a novel or a non-fiction book and writing 25 words a day. It all mounts up!

Goals can be self-imposed or set by someone or something externally, like a writing partner or a publishing date. In my writing as a research professor, my goals were externally set by my university as I had to publish a certain number of academic papers a year.

These days I set my own goals, which this year were to complete a book and publish a poem a day on the Medium publishing site. The book is coming along and I’m getting there with the daily poems.

As a new poet, I’m finding that keeping up my daily practice has deepened my knowledge about traditional poetry forms such haiku and tanka, and having that goal makes me write more poems than I would otherwise have done.

Strangely enough, journaling about my goals has also made me take a deeper dive into the creative process and made me more spiritually aligned than I’ve ever been before.

Talking to paper is talking to the divine. Paper is infinitely patient. Each time you scratch on it, you trace part of yourself, and thus part of the world, and thus part of the grammar of the universe. It is a huge language, but each of us tracks his or her particular understanding of it. Burghild Nina Holzer ‘A Walk Between Heaven and Earth’

If there’s something you dislike doing in the writing process, with a goal in place at least you’ll know that there are other, more enjoyable things to do once you’ve finished that piece of the action.

My journal has many entries where I moan about doing particular parts of my goals. Analyzing these entries down the track has enabled me to reflect on why I don’t like these tasks and what I can do to change this.

2. Journaling helps us to record life experiences we can draw upon in our writing projects

Every journal contains a description of our mundane and memorable experiences. For some, this is in the form of a descriptive diary, for others, a log of events with observations. Such journals can be for personal use, or as a portfolio for learning. To gain value from such a journal, though, we should also read, process and analyse our journal entries.

Journaling is a great way to pay attention to “how it all came to be.” In looking back, you gain insight into (and appreciation for) your challenges, lessons, and perseverance. Melissa Steginus, ‘Self Care at Work: How to Reduce Stress, Boost Productivity, and Do More of What Matters’

3. Journaling helps us escape the daily clamour

Many writers like the writing life because it satisfies our need to be alone. But just because we are alone doesn’t mean we can fully escape the din of our daily clamour from those people and issues we are trying to dodge.

May Sarton, in her book ‘Journal of a Solitude’, writes:

It may be outwardly silent here, but in the back of my mind is a clamor of human voices, too many needs, hopes, fears. I hardly ever sit still without being haunted by the ‘undone’ and the ‘unsent’. I often feel exhausted, but it is not my work that tires (work is a rest); it is the effort of pushing away the lives and needs of others before I can come to the work with any freshness and zest.

Writing down our worries and concerns, or even just a task list of ‘To-Dos’ can help us set aside the daily clamour and get on with what we love to do more….our writing.

4. Journaling helps us declutter our writing life

Decluttering is a word that is used to describe getting rid of the material things in our lives. Too many clothes, too much untidiness. Too many notebooks. Essentially – simplifying our lives.

Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest. Leo Babauta

But there are other ways we can declutter our lives, for example, by telling stories about ourselves and our life journey. Getting rid of the angst and dragging out negativity.

Of course, we could just ring a friend and unload our latest woes upon them. But friends are not just there to listen to us and our whinges and woes. And every friendship has a boundary we must not cross if that relationship is to survive.

As Sara Eckel says in her article, ‘The Power of Boundaries’ in Psychology Today,

Sharing personal information brings people together and helps them like one another more. But in an age of self-disclosure, how do you know when you’ve gone too far — or when someone else has ulterior motives?

But we do have an alternative way of telling our stories, and our journal can help us do this.

In her book, “Clearing Clutter as a Sacred Act”, journaling expert Carolyn Koehnline talks about how clearing clutter through journal writing is a vital aspect for making emotional and physical space for reflective writing.

She presents this special form of decluttering as a transformative, sacred experience, proving that mindfulness techniques during journaling helps us declutter our physical space, calendars, thoughts, and emotions.

We need to do this kind of purge regularly to become the writer we dream of being.

5. Journaling enables us to analyse, identify and heal our emotions through expressive writing

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior. Christina Baldwin

Journaling our angst out can save us from word-wounding ourselves and others.

People refer to the fog of war, and I am sure something similar applies to my situation. If I hadn’t kept a running record of the days, weeks, and years, the fog would have swallowed too much of the story for me to provide a reliable account. Sue Klebold, ‘A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy’.

There are huge health benefits to journaling, including long-term improvements in mood, stress levels and depressive symptoms.

Writing is an unhealthy game, physically and mentally. As well as making it less likely the writer/journaler gets sick, it also increases the chances of fighting specific diseases like asthma and cancer, and it can even make physical wounds heal faster.

Simon Rego, chief of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City advises:

Keeping a daily journal is a great way for people to build awareness of the stuff they’re feeling and the thoughts that are fueling those emotions. [It] can also create a distance and objectivity that allows you to examine thoughts and feelings from different angles.

If you’re not careful, a vicious cycle can form between negative thoughts and negative emotions, and that can quickly cause the emotions to become more intense and the thoughts to become less reality-based.

Rego explains that cognitive framing can interrupt that loop in particular ways. He suggests that, firstly, some self-awareness is required; a person needs to recognize what they’re feeling — anger, fear, worry, uncertainty — and the thoughts that are giving rise to these feelings.

This step may come naturally to some, but not to others, because people don’t always pay attention to what they’re feeling, or the thoughts connected to those feelings.

6. Journaling helps us to re-frame our identities

There are many ways we as individuals are both framing our writer identities and having them framed by others.

Morgan Jenkins, a writer in The New Yorker with a research interest in the place of black women in society, asked her black mother why she journaled. She was surprised at her mother’s answer:

I thought my mother kept her journals to remember relatives’ telephone numbers, mailing addresses, and birthdays. It never occurred to me that she, too, was building and protecting a sense of self…”It was a way to get my feelings out,” she told me, “without feeling vulnerable to someone else”. Diary writing for her was “like having a conversation,” she said, but with herself. Morgan Jenkins, ‘Black women writers and secret space of diaries’

Morgan says:

the black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has argued that black women resist dehumanization from the dominant culture by learning to define themselves in the face of mental frameworks that would classify them as “the other.” This makes them, in many contexts, “outsiders within,” Collins writes.

Not all of us are writers, but many of us can use journaling to access the release that a writer can gain through her writing projects.

7. Journaling can give us the gift to see ourselves as others (may) see us

. ..Most of us walk around completely oblivious to the issues we’re wearing like spinach in the teeth…To contribute in any kind of meaningful way, one has to look at oneself. …So where to begin? For me it started with the realization that no one knows how to be me, except for me.

As Leo Buscaglia sagely reminds us in his book ‘Love’, “You are the best you. You will always be the second best anyone else.”

And the “best you” is a bar only you can set. Imagine? Because I didn’t.

I certainly crowd-sourced and outsourced the particulars of my existence to various friends, boyfriends, strangers over the years, asking for advice or feigning confusion like the answers weren’t already swimming in my gut.

It was an inefficient way to live, but it gave me an out: someone to blame when things didn’t work the way I wanted them to. I’ve tried everything you suggested, see? (Everything except believing I was capable of answering these questions myself.). Stephanie Geogopolous

8. Journaling can help us to develop our own voice and then write our own stories so others can learn from us

As we learn the writer’s craft, we must learn to develop our own authentic voice. This is where journaling can come in:

If you haven’t been journaling through this, now is a good time to start. One day, you and people who love and loved you, and people who will never know you, may want to look back to understand how you survived. Darnell Lamont Walker

When we write about our thoughts, feelings and experiences we use, manipulate, alter, edit, discard, reduce, and recycle other writers’ voices by reading their work. In reading others’ work we engage our memories and celebrate our present. All of this can be recorded in our journals and help us dream dreams about our future selves.

Journal writing gives us insights into who we are, who we were, and who we can become. Sandra Marinella, The Story You Need to Tell: Writing to Heal from Trauma, Illness, or Loss

As we mature as writers, we move from using these other voices as our own to making our own voices through our writing, reflection, crafting, editing and re-writing processes.

In doing this, we explain, connect, theorize, concretize, illustrate, and advocate a particular personal account of our doings.

We need to know that this is the process and also, pay homage to those writers who have served us in our voice-finding endeavours.

Through journal writing, you can find different ways to understand, elicit, and examine the original thoughts that arise from your deep, private voices. And because you have undertaken a deep dive, the voice that emerges will be a voice you can trust.

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently. Puma Chodron

As as we do look at ourselves through our private writing, we can begin to write the stories that must be told in our public writing.

You must remember that your story matters. What you write has the power to save a life. Sometimes that life is your own. Stalina Goodwin, Make It Write!: Put Your Pain To Work Writing Journal

9. Journaling helps us address who we are

And so I just kept writing to myself. Kimberly Novosel, Loved

This pouring thoughts out on paper has relieved me. I feel better and full of confidence and resolution. Diet Eman, Things We Couldn’t Say

I find the act of writing my thoughts out both frightening and healing. I am appalled at what is shackled in the depths of my heart, but I sense a release when it transfers from this inner depth of me to the page beneath my pen. My vision is beginning to clear and shrouded events are coming into alignment with some degree of clarity.

Now I need the courage to disclose my secrets and believe God will take care of me. No matter what the results are of the truth emerging, I want to trust He can use it for good in my life . . . somehow. Jenny Knipfer, Ruby Moon

10. Journaling can help with our creativity

Reviewing our journals is a mega act of creativity. When you read back your entries to yourself you will be amazed at the great writing you did when under pressure, or full of joy, or really annoyed at someone, or when you were so depressed you could hardly drag yourself out of bed.

Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge. Isaac Watts, The Improvement Of The Mind To Which Are Added A Discourse On The Education Of Children

So writing, then reviewing, our journaling can bring us great joy. But it can also make us feel worse than we did when we began.

And you may not want to purge all of your bad feelings onto the page if you are writing an analogue version, as Rosamond Lehmann warns:

Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations. Give yourself all the good and interesting qualities you want and haven’t got. If you should die young, what comfort would it be to your relatives to read the truth and have to say: It is not a pearl we have lost, but a swine? Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

And as Ryder Carroll tells us, each journal becomes another volume in the story of your life. and he has a question for us:

Does it represent the life you want to live? If not, then leverage the lessons you’ve learned to change the narrative in the next volume. Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future

So start your writer’s journal, today. And don’t be intimidated..

It was always intimidating starting a new journal. So much pressure to make everything perfect from the start. It was a relief each time she made her first mistake or two and realized that her journal was more gracious and forgiving toward her than she was toward herself. Alana Terry, ‘What Dreams May Come True’.