Mary O'Gara

Posts Tagged ‘Journal’

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.

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).

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.