On Journals and Journaling, Part 2: Vulnerability

So I'm diving through a bit of grad school trench warfare here, so I need to dive back down into the textual mud soon, but I wanted to complete this post, talking about the "reporting" aspect of journaling.

I became keenly aware of this aspect last week, when for my archival theory and practice class I had to treat some of my own papers as archival materials, and write an aid to guide them about it, and then write about both who might use them and reflect on the experience of having done that.

It's just interesting, viewing what is so often private as potential fodder for others in the future. I now totally empathize with T. S. Eliot's desire to have so many of his papers embargoed for so many years after his death. Makes sense when one thinks about being so vulnerable, or about hurting people in one's life through things said in one's less guarded moments when one was just venting.

All of this reminds me of the vulnerability associated with any kind of writing. I think this is because of the time-delay of response to written text (and the possibility of no response at all). It's often-discussed among writers, but seldom is discussed as the results of text in media studies/media ecology circles.

The thing is that this textual inheritance, I believe, has passed to much of our time-delayed electronic communications as well--without being able to see how our audience (intended, or unintended--as with future researchers) is responding to something like a Facebook status or blog post, we worry what they'll think of us, much like we did with pretty much everyone all the time in junior high. An age-old concern transposed to a new setting.

As electronic readers, I propose, we should keep this vulnerability in mind and respond accordingly, as much as we're able (considering the busyness of our lives, of course). As writers, I think we should chill out a bit, and keep our lives and our writings (of whatever kind) in perspective, and try to have a little faith, while still being aware that yeah, vulnerability is often scary and often has consequences, some of them good, some bad.

On Journals and Journaling, Part 1

"Journal is from Old French jurnal, or 'belonging to a day.' At first, it was a sort of reference book that contained the times of daily prayers. In the 1600s, it acquired the meaning of 'diary' and later became associated with newspaper titles and lent its root to journalism." From Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac

This quotation came through to my inbox the other day, and it struck me as being chock-full of interesting tidbits:

1. That the first journal recorded the times of daily prayers. As a Protestant Christian who, (like Kathleen Norris, whose book The Cloister Walk encouraged me in the practice), loves visiting monasteries, my "monastery geek" side comes out full force for this one. Particularly since my "diary-style" journal entries so often turn into prayers by their ends--I find talking to God so much more interesting than talking to myself.
   
   
2. That the first journals were also reference works. I still find my journals to retain a touch of this character--I try to capture thoughts, observations, emotions, etc., partly so I can refer to them immediately and figure out what's going on in me, but also for reference later on to remember snippets of what my life was like at an earlier time. And my journals specifically used to capture writing inspirations are even more reference works.
   
   
3. The reporting, or journalism, aspect is interesting, particularly as I don't often think of other people reading my journal. However, last week I had to do a finding aid for some of my papers for my archival theory and practice class, acting as though future researchers would be using my papers for research, and this gave me new insights into this journaling aspect (and made me feel quite vulnerable). But more on that in a day or so (hm, there really is an ancient connection between journals and what many blogs have turned into).
   

Writing Tools: Organizing my Brainstorms and Research

Here are some tools for the writing life. I find them helpful for both academic and creative projects:

• Zotero (Mac or PC): Free Mozilla Firefox plugin. When I found this free program, I stopped using both EndNote ($100 USD for students) and SOHO Notes ($39 USD) as note organizational tools. I find this indispensable for my academic work--it will download the citations from the library site or other online services, and build a bibliography in a flash in Word (though you have to be careful about formatting, still, a bit). It, however, will allow you to save and organize book info from Amazon on anything, as well as take snapshots of any page and easily add notes and keywords to any of things I've already mentioned, so I also find it helpful for everything from saving articles relating to my creative projects to saving receipts. And it resides on your computer, so you don't have to be online to get to anything.
  
  
• CopyWrite (Mac only): A relatively low-cost, stripped-down word processing program designed for novelists, though I'm also considering its potential uses for my dissertation. It allows you to keep each chapter as an individual file but search and find and replace across a whole project. It also has a handy "notes drawer" for flipping between notes you want to keep about that individual project and for the project in general, a nifty tracking function for your progress (you put in a goal word count and it tells you how many percent you have as you go). Plus there's a full-screen editing mode to help you focus in and make your words bigger.
  
  
• Good old-fashioned journals (no computer required): I keep a lot of my notes on specific projects in my computer now--in Zotero and CopyWrite's notes drawer, but a set of good old-fashioned journals is also indispensable for collecting my writing brainstorms. A few years ago, I found a system that still works for me--I got a bunch of my favorite kind of spiral-bound sketchbooks (the kind with room for a pen to clip onto them) and I keep different kinds of notes and first drafts in each one, so I'll be able to access them topically or based on genre later on.
  
  The most important of these notebooks is the one in which I capture my random creative brainstorms and first lines/first pages of potential projects. I don't have to--in fact I'm not allowed--to finish these projects in there, which means I always know where to go back to when I need a new project to inspire me.
  

Mindgames; or, the Fine Art of Self-Management

The difficult part in being in occupations involving writing is that so often we are required to manage ourselves to get our stuff done. Many times, we don't even have anyone breathing down our necks to finish our novels except ourselves, and even when we are externally motivated, we still have difficulty getting past our internal roadblocks to getting the work done. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly as an at-times-procrastinatory graduate student with an interest in the workings of rhetoric/persuasion.

The art of self-management, I've been reflecting, is a bizarre one, involving a rhetorical situation that pits oneself against oneself, as both rhetor and audience. In order to convince oneself to do something one does not want to do, one has to:

1. Partition the part of oneself that wants to get something done from the part that really does not want to do whatever it is.
   
   
2. From the perspective of the part that wants to persuade the recalcitrant part, study the audience (i.e., the part that really does not want to do whatever it is). This is, perhaps not surprisingly, difficult, as a large part of one's mind will be resisting this process. Free-writing helps--I think this is why morning pages are so helpful.
   
   
3. Consider and try motivational strategies. Figuring out what has worked in the past helps with this. But also be creative in finding solutions. Collect these on paper or in your head for later use. Note: Being hostile to one's audience isn't such a good motivational ploy.
   
   
4. Lather, rinse, repeat. Only do this when needed. The way I look at it, there's no need to do this all the time, as one is not blocked or unmotivated all the time. When you've found a set of formulas that works, no need to muck with them for awhile, until one forgets again. One can get more done when one isn't always fiddling with one's self-motivation processes.
   

It feels weird, this process. Very strange. But a week's worth of morning pages certainly seems to have helped with this, and gotten me back into the game. The thing is, the morning pages get my creative side so jazzed up and productive that I think I should take a bit of a break from them for awhile, while I go and work on the things they've inspired me to do, and work out the finer points of the insights they've given me into the ways I work best.

Anyone else find their process to be similar to or different from this? Anyone have creative ideas for motivating oneself?

Getting Back into It

Considering how energized I was the morning after my 2-day monastery visit, it's perhaps not surprising that I lost all motivation a few hours later. Such is what often happens. The thing is that my monastery weekend, and in fact all my efforts to get into the writing groove during the last few weekends, were only a beginning. It takes an ongoing effort to really get back into the game.

And so I finally broke down and opened up the big guns again, by picking up my copy of The Artist's Way and reading through the first two chapters again.

Okay, so I know many many people sing its praises, but here's what I don't like about this book and why I dropped out of it 10 years ago when I started it then:

1. It makes you sign a contract at the beginning of the book. Okay, I'm a "dip my toes in the water" and try things out before I dive in sort of girl. I also don't like to overcommit. Which leads me to point 2:
2. It requires you to give 7-10 hours for 12 weeks.That's a lot of time. As much time as taking another course during the semester. I'm already busy this fall, and I'll be going away on vacation the end of next week. So I know that if I signed that contract, it would get broken in about 10 days. Not--simply not--going to happen

All the same, though, the book does have fabulous ideas, and right now, for these 10 days, I have a window in which I can be productive, both creatively and otherwise, if I can clear the cobwebs and clutter out of my head so I can get to work. And this book is a lovely thing, if I adjust it to my life rather than vice versa.

And so I decided that I could manage reading through some of it, and doing one of its primary practices--morning pages--for the next week or so, just to continue the good work I've been doing towards renewal.

And so far it's really working. I've been reclaiming my journaling practices lately, and they've helped, but this is a slightly different kind of journaling--the kind that isn't looking for just the right words, but instead acts as a dump of all your attitudes towards life and writing and creativity and work out on the page so you can hover them to the surface and then beat the bad ones up. It gives an opportunity for a sort of morning pep talk to oneself, and a place to become energized by being reminded that there is work to be done and that I really can get some of it done today.

So yeah, I won't be doing the whole book--well, maybe if I start it earlier, then next summer would be a good time--but I do suggest plowing out those 3 pages of nonsense first thing in the day for plowing through one's procrastination, ennui, and other unpleasant junk in one's head on a regular basis. I'll be trying it for the next 10 days, along with a few of the other exercises in this book and in Vinita's book, so I'll let you know how it goes in keeping me moving in everything I want to do...

Anyone else tried this before, or willing to try it with me for a few days? Let me know.