Mary O'Gara

Archive for the ‘Journal’ Category

1. Morning pages or timed writing first thing in the morning.  Let your muse start reminding you about the ideas that have been percolating while you were doing other things.
2. Take a 20-minute walk or do other physical rhythmic work.  A walk with a sketchbook or camera or recorder for notes feeds the muse and starts new creative processes.   But if you’re blocked and just need help starting up again, any rhythmic physical activity–even knitting or needlework–will help.
3. Try reading deprivation for three days to a week.   Or for the first week or two back at work, try fiction deprivation.   If  you don’t provide passive stories, your mind will rush to fill the gap.
4. Set a daily quota for yourself, a word count you can easily achieve.   For the first few days back, that’s all you ask of yourself–but you do that quota no matter how much it seems like wastebasket fodder.   If you haven’t been writing for a few days, your critic’s too strong and shouldn’t be allowed to judge.  (Notice I didn’t suggest starting by reading everything you’ve already written.  The last page is one thing–but if you start from scratch, the critic will destroy good work.)
5. Pick up paper and a fast-moving pen and play with words and free association.  Or make lists of titles, colors, jargon words from a character’s region or work history.  You could cluster or mindmap or write haiku.   It’s the word play that starts the creative juices flowing.
6. Give your muse some music that feels like the mood of the writing you want to do.  If music would disturb other family members, try colors or scented candles or a collage of images.  Use your senses to recover the feeling of the story.
7. And if you do need to read the work you wrote before your break, read it aloud.  Listen for the language and rhythms.  The inner critic is easier to keep at bay when you’re not reading silently.   (Visual artists and performers may have to trick their inner critics in other ways.)

Today is a fine day for a writing dialogue with someone you loved–or might have loved if he or she had returned from a war, any war–or perhaps for writing a heartfelt prayer for the ones who did come back.

In Red Oak, Iowa, my home town, they still fly the funeral flags of our hometown veterans on Memorial Day.   Among them are two men I loved who came back:  My father and my grandmother’s brother, who was my surrogate grandfather:  Charles Arthur Reese and Philo Douglas Clark.

The stories they told me as a child were wildly exaggerated and made war sound like a great adventure.   Today I might dialogue with Uncle Philo about his real memories of World War One.   Dialogues aren’t limited to living people.

You could also dialogue with the condition of living in a world at war, and you might be surprised at what you discover for your own life and your writing.

Or this may be a chance to say good-bye in dialogue–or hello to someone you never got to meet.

Dialoguing is simple:   Sit quietly and breathe slowly and deeply.   Write a name on the journal page and make a short list of up to a dozen milestones in that person’s life, remembering that you are only one of those milestones.   Then close your eyes and imagine that person or something representing the situationn in front of you.

Close your eyes.

Write:  Hello or some other greeting.

Listen and record what you hear or understand.

Write your next sentence.   Continue until the conversation drops.

Ask if there’s anything else.

Sit in silence a little longer, waiting.

And when it’s really done, jot down a summary sentence for yourself or maybe a reminder about what you want to take into the rest of your life from this moment.

If you’re a writer, writing every day is as important to your creative health as brushing your teeth is to your physical health.   I don’t remember whether it was Heifetz or Menuhin or Casals who said that if he didn’t practice scales for a day, he could tell; if he didn’t do scales for a few days, the audience could tell.  Twyla Tharp writes about the importance of exercise and daily practice for dancers.

Daily work is probably the best-kept secret of the top artists in every creative field.   It’s certainly the secret the wanna-bes overlook.  You can work in a journal and keep your notes or work on napkins and toss them.   Personally, of course, I favor journals, but the essential part is working however you can on a particular day.

And here’s the bottom line.   If you don’t love writing so much that you’re willing to do five minutes a day of work on the craft of writing, you don’t love it enough to sustain the ups and downs of a career.

Why are writers the only creative group that actually seems to take pride in not working?

Why do I teach The Artist’s Way workshop (based on Julia Cameron’s book)?  Because it’s easier to coach writers who do their daily work.   Cameron makes it simple:  three pages of flow writing every morning to let the subconscious mind spill its contents, whether those contents are brilliant plots or threadbare whines, plus an hour a week devoted to filling up the creative well and entertaining your muse.   In later books she recommends a weekly exploratory walk.

Natalie Goldberg recommends timed writing, with a topic or starter sentence.  You still just let the words flow and let the subconscious mind pour out its thoughts.

Recently, I’ve been intrigued by the possibilities of sentences, and I’ve been spending my daily time playing with sentence structure.   But soon I’ll return to morning pages.  Maybe I’ll do morning pages and sentence structure, which feels like a musician’s scales.

For you it might be making lists or vocabulary study or some other skill.

However you do it, that daily five minutes keeps the mind focused on stories and looking for material.

Julia Cameron recommends an artist’s date a week–an hour or more when you and your inner artist go out to play and to refill the well of creative raw material.  Cameron also says writers and artists need two play dates a week when they’re writing prolifically.

Supreme self-care is something the corporate world seems to have mastered.   Creative workers–writers, artists, performers, composers–need extreme self-care, too.   And many of us are experts at creating reasons we can’t go play.

Right.  And then we reach brain dead instead.  We drag ourselves to computers and just don’t care.

So we all need first aid kits.   For some it’s music, for others perfumes or special oils.   Massages work for me.

But there are writers who make me feel alive and creative.  One evening off to read a book by Elizabeth Lowell, for example, has my brain believing in the magic of story and racing back to my own writing.   There are other writers whose works I love but whose books don’t have the same impact on me.

So now I have a new emerency first aid shelf for my inner artist.  It’s a few books by writers who always inspire me.  I don’t know why it took so long for me to think about that.   Oh, yeah, it’s because it’s so hard not to read those books the minute they come into the house.  But I’m strong.  I can do this.  Or–just buy more.

How well are your important relationships working?   Is reciptocity still there?  Are you letting time slip away and erode important connections?  Or are you being stifled by a relationship that has grown too close?

Here’s a simple way to journal about vital relationships and keep them alive and thriving over time with just minutes a day:

On the first page of a notebook or journal (inexpensive spiral notebooks are perfect for this, but so are old journals with blank pages at the end you haven’t used) make a list of the days of the week and write the name of an important person in your life next to each of those days.   My current list, for example, might look like this:

Sunday:  My husband

Monday:  Our daughter

Tuesday:  Our older son

Wednesday:  Our younger son

Thursday, Friday and Saturday:  Our grandchildren

But what about all those other important people?   I could expand the list to 14 (two complete weeks) or 15 (halving the month) or even 31 (if I had a really complex life).   Or I could group the grandchildren and our oldest son on one day as older son’s family, neatly tucking our daughter-in-law into the family group.

You might want to do one list for family and one for co-workers or friends.   Or you might want to monitor one group for awhile, then switch.

However you make your list, on the appointed day of the week (or date in the month), take five minutes to assess how you’re faring with that relationship since the last time you wrote about it.   Look at the quality and not just the quantity of your contacts.  How current are you with each other’s lives?

Are you happy with the relatinship as it is now?   Would you like to be closer?  Or a bit less cozy?

Is it working?  (And notice that we’re sometimes happy with unhealthy relatinships even if they’re not functioning–and we need to recognize that situation when it arises.)

Barring traumas, which get special consideration for a time, is it a two-way relationship or one in which one of you does all the nurturing and the other barely participates.  (In some working relationships, that’s not unhealthy, by the way; it might be your boss’s management style to stand apart when things are flowing well, but it’s a warning sign for personal and emotional relationships.)

One week, even one month, doesn’t make or define a relationship.   But over time, a picture emerges.  If a relatioship is out of balance week after week, the situation needs to be addressed.

There are other journal tools that will help you once you’ve made an assessment.   You might write an unsent letter to get rid of anger or excessive emotions in order to think more clearly about what you do want from the relationship and what you’re willing to do to improve it.

You may want to dialogue with the other person.  Maybe what doesn’t function for you does function for the other person–and you have to make your own choices based on that knowledge.

Or you could work with lists or poems, even drawings.  My journal workshop, Nurturing the Writer Within, is filled with ideas for working on your life, and it’s available as a package from maryo@iowapoet.com for $20 ($25 if you’d like to have a CD mailed to you instead of receiving lessons by email attachment).

American idioms, yes.  Anyone with a Brit or Aussie in the family knows about American idioms.  And I, of course, live and write in New Mexico where the idioms of multiple languages abound.

But the American sentence is a new and intriguing idea.  It’s a Japanese import, Allen Ginsburg’s variation on the Japanese haiku.

As all of you probably know, a haiku is a poetry form with 17 counted syllables, usually arranged 5, 7, 5 (although written in a straight line in Japanese).  So Ginsburg restored the idea of the straight line of 17 syllables, with the syntax needed for a full sentence, and called it the American sentence.

For quick journal entries, try writing an American sentence a day.

Morning pages focus energy, move me toward the new morning’s joy

Sunrise over Sandias, pink and lush as their watermelon  name.

Granddaughters on facebook, spanning miles, sharing high tech and high touch smiles.

Or, perhaps, a way to find the heart of a story.

A way to hear the syllables of language, to make your words fresh in a new way.

Or just another way to play with language, delight in being a writer.

I’d love to see comments on what you do with American sentences.

Okay, it’s not your mother’s prescripton for keeping the doctor away.  So don’t give up the apple–

But have you tried a cinque for gathering your thoughts, griping gently or smiling at your world?

The simplest of poems, a cinque is counted syllables and gets its rhythm from the syllables themselves.

You arrange it like this:

2 syllables

4 syllables

6 syllables

8 syllables

2 syllables

Like the last verse of haiku, the final syllables seem to become a natural summation.  But not always.

In journal workshops, I often close by having people write an AlphaPoem, beginning each line with an alphabet letter.  In writing workshops, I sometimes suggest a poem for each character, rapidly writing lines that begin in seuqnence with each letter of the character’s name.

If you haven’t tried an AlphaPoem, I recommend it.  If you want examples, check out Journal to the Self by Kathleen Adams.

But for fun, give me a limerick or a cinque

A cinque a day for a writer at play.

Artists sketch items over and over in their journals.  Leonardo da Vinci sketched noses and more noses, then ears and more ears.  Whenever he saw a new shape, he sketched it.

Poets do the same thing with turns of phrases or items of speech and new words.

Novelists seem to work more loosely and to collect plot ideas, character development ideas or even word sketches of settings.

Julia Cameron’s morning pages tend the writer.  But the working notebook or journal brings focus and structure to the work at hand.

Morning pages clear our minds and bring ideas to the surface that give us stories and motivate us to write.

Natalie Goldberg suggests timed writings that focus our attention on one object or idea–and of course free us to move from that single idea to whatever is really lurking under the surface.

A working notebook may be even more focused and structured than Goldberg’s timed writings.  It may have lists of possibilities, research notes.  It’s where writers complain about research problems, plot holes, and fatigue.  And it’s where the problems get solved.

Sometimes a blog is a journal form.  I’m blogging as I’m thinking about material for my journaling workshop in September.  A blog is a public journal, and I’m looking for and welcoming comments, ideas, questions.  Sometimes it’s good for a writer not to be alone.