Tag: monday motivation

The Fine Art of Journaling

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I’ve written about the healing power of writing, but haven’t mentioned it in the same sentence with journaling. Any type of writing will help, bullet points, brainstorming, I most often start with freewriting as that is what works best for me.

Freewriting is the act of writing without stopping. Many people begin with a set time, like 5 minutes, and they’ll write whatever comes to mind. If you’re unpracticed in journaling or freewriting, this might work if it seems starting might seem overwhelming.

Some people see journals as a way of recording the day’s events, certain thoughts or feelings, or even keeping track of accomplishments and to-do lists. It can be all or any of these things.

It used to be I’d read Sylvia Plath’s journals or Anais Nin’s diary excerpts and be intimidated – how did they create such lovely and thoughtful prose in their journals when what I scribble appears more like word vomit, thoughts and emotions all over the place in no particular order? and there certainly isn’t much poetry within it!

But then a friend pointed out a few things. First: some people keep a writer’s journal (as opposed to or in addition to a personal journal). This may be what I’ve been exposed to within the realm of famous author’s private thoughts. Second: These published journals have probably been edited, redacted, and only the best parts saw the light of day.

The Diary of Anne Frank, most people are unaware, was edited. Large parts of the original text were blacked out by her father who thought some entries to be inappropriate.

Hey – all the best journals have inappropriate thoughts! That’s why they are there in the secrecy of our journals.

But journals serve a number important purposes: Journal writing relieves us of our anxiety by releasing any thoughts and feelings that have been unexpressed or need to be re-expressed. Writing things down is a way to get them out of us, to say them aloud, and begins a process of working out the challenges we face.

Writing regularly helps with mental well-being, feeling more positive and hopeful. Journaling can help us heal.

Some writers do morning pages. Some people journal nightly. The best time is the time that suits you.

The fine art of journaling lies in putting the pen to the paper and doing what feels best for you without worrying what others will think. It is just for you. And we all need that – to do things for ourselves.

Confessions

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Obviously, my mind has been on memoir.

It’s exciting, invigorating, curative even; however, it’s not – as some people believe – revenge.

Just as forgiveness is more about us than those we forgive, memoir is the same. It’s about the author, the writer stating their peace. While some memoirs may read like revenge, they are more about sharing, maybe even confessing.

While Anne Sexton wrote confessional poetry better than anyone else I can name, confessional memoir comes in different flavors.

When I think of confessional memoir, I used to consider Life on the Edge or Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher. Some people would think of Spare by Prince Harry – but these are celebrity memoirs which carry a very different weight in the market.

Confessional memoirs will offer insight, a new way of looking at life and understanding people. Consider Dirty River by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinna who writes about being a disabled queer woman and survivor of abuse. Not the only example – Lit by Mary Karr, Unspeakable by Meghan Daum will offer more mainstream insights into death, illness, alcoholism, recovery. But we will come away with empathy for the human condition as lived through these authors.

These stories that will hurt your heart instead of shock your eyes.

While I’m working on a few pieces of memoir right now, they may not shock your eyes but some parts may hurt your heart. Certain pieces will speak to some people and not to others. Some readers will wonder, others may doubt. A person or two may become upset – upset with me – but confessional or not – it’s personal, it’s mine. And their upset will be their problem.

Writing memoir is not for the faint of heart. It’s not for the shy or the scared – and maybe it’s not even for the “brave” – it’s for those who need to speak, who need to heal, who might be heard, and for those very souls who need to hear it.

Characteristics of a Successful Memoir

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  1. A Relatable Experience – Many of us go through similar experiences and events; however, if you feel yours is not the run of the mill experience, that shouldn’t stop you from writing it. The emotions you describe can be the connection between the author and the audience.
  2. Drama. Drama. Drama – Keep the experience authentic, but many of us are going to choose a more dramatic event in our lives to share. Use the elements of fiction in your writing to keep the tension building.
  3. Story Arc – Whether it’s a longer memoir or a single experience, the story must have a beginning, middle, and end. A memoir must have a structure which keeps the audience engaged and an ending that offers some sort of resolution.
  4. Character Arc – One of the most important elements: We’re not just sharing an experience, we have learned from or taken something away from this event. Part of the memoir must show that the author has grown in some way from the experience.

In my last short memoir, Days of Remembrance, published by Memory House Magazine, the narrator attends a funeral. A relatable experience – everyone does, at some point, deals with death. It doesn’t start with the death, but the arrival to the service which isn’t quite the inciting incident, but it happens right after the arrival. The tension within the family serves as the drama as well as the rising action; the memoir features remembrances within the memory, a climax, and a resolution. The character has a realization and, in the end, has grown from the experience. These are the basic elements of story – fiction or memoir.

Mem-oir / Re-Mem-ber Me

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I’ve been fascinated with memoir of late. I’ve written and published a number of short pieces and am working on a longer text now.

What separates memoir from autobiography is usually the length, the sharper focus on an event, situation, time period or even a person, and the creative lens through which it is expressed.

A few of my memoirs have featured spirits. It has some readers believing I am haunted; however, living with ghosts is not what any of the stories are about.

Long ago, I heard another writer describe memoir as revenge literature, But that’s not it at all.

Memoir is about remembering, reclaiming, clarifying, and having something to say about an event or situation that carries a universal message so others can identify with it.

Memoir for me – is about remembering me – reclaiming me – and renewing myself. It’s about reconciling and separating myself from the past and moving forward.

When you escape your roots, those roots, the evil, the hardship, the habits, and the others still attached to those roots try to drag you back, bring you down, and won’t let you go.

It has been years since I lived within those roots – since I’ve looked back – but sometimes I can feel those creepers winding their way around my shoulders reaching for my throat – they’re trying to drag me back. They’re angry because they have never even looked for an escape route. They have only ever lived that life and they’re crazy mad because I got out and never looked back.

I don’t give them energy. My energy is laying the past on paper as I see fit and moving forward.

Memoir is healing.

Writing with My Eyes Closed

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Emerging from clouds between theta and delta rises the envisage, the essential nature, our souls. Words and ideas and dreams become stories in the writer’s mind.

Lying there, just a little longer, stories grow and take on life.

Horizontal in a chilled room before the first brushes of daylight: creation.

Before the eyes open, before the needs of the day press on, before the lists and media and people of the world take away the single small moments where stories spark –

I wish so much to remain there, just a little longer, in the moments just before wakefulness, eyes still closed, brain sparking connections, tiny fissures of light like small static flares against the blankets, feeling the contented pressure under my spine, the warmth of the down in the darkness, life all around is comforted and quiet.

I occasionally envy those who don’t need sleep, the man who gets only 15 minutes, the man who never rests, but that is some strange day-time illusion of getting more done, being more, having more, more more more. Their lives are shortened, their victories less sweet somehow, as if this time here in the bed in the darkness of deep night for reflection and creation are robbed from them.

This here, the first creation of life, happens in the dark, just before the light,

And, if I could write with my eyes closed, somehow pick up the pen or click the computer keyboard with my eyes closed, I would.

The vestiges of day – light and sound – are thieves making away with quiet thoughts that would have become life – story.

Just a moment longer here, then I’ll be there, with you.

The Course of Gratitude

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On Thanksgiving, I was invited to dinner an hour or more from my house. There would be family and friends and I was excited about going.

Already stressed from running late, I ticked off my checklist of things as I tossed them into the car, hopped in, turned the key, and …. click.. click…click.

Uhm. No. I must have been hallucinating. I didn’t depress the gas. I didn’t turn the key completely. Confidently, I tried again. Click, click, click my car responded to each and every try. Not one hint of the engine igniting.

I called my daughter who had arrived ahead of me – stress and disappointment overwhelming me. She said it was probably just the battery and she arranged for someone to jump my car.

They arrived, hooked up the cables, and said – turn the key. Click… click… click. Okay, wait a few minutes and try again. But with each and every try the click, click, click even seemed to get weaker.

Not only was I missing the dinner that I was already late for, but my baby – my car – my very dependable, has never let me down was ailing. I assumed since the battery couldn’t be jumped, there was something very wrong with her. I imagined the costs, the time, began to wonder how I would get to work.

Too late for dinner. Too late to make alternative plans. I donned my big sunglasses to hide my tear swollen eyes and took my dogs for a walk. I returned home, ate a bowl of fruit (I hadn’t shopped for heaven’s sake, I was going elsewhere for dinner!) and cleaned out my closet. What else might one have done?

As I thought of the dinner conversation missed, what are you grateful for? I had to consider what I was and am grateful for. Of course, I am blessed.

As with the immediate circumstances, the car with the suddenly dead battery, spending Thanksgiving with my dogs instead of a table filled with food – I was still grateful.

I’m grateful the car didn’t die anywhere else! It died here, in my own driveway, leaving me safe at home and not on the freeway or the supermarket or an hour away from my house on a chilly holiday night.

I’m grateful for the amazing family I have. I may not spend every holiday with them because they have a father, in laws, friends, but I see them all the time. As I walked the dogs around the neighborhood, I saw my neighbors enjoying their family – some of whom only visit on holidays. I am bless to have family who want to hang out with me, want to be here with me, and don’t just come on holidays.

I’m grateful for the beautiful souls I’m fortunate enough to call friends. In the last some years, I’ve attempted to align myself only with those who glow with positivity. They are people who I can count on, people who care about me and I care about. I probably could have even called them on Thanksgiving for a ride, but I didn’t want to disturb their holidays.

I was fortunate enough to have my daughters recreate Thanksgiving on Saturday – which, somehow, was better than the original could have been.

Of Importance

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Someone recently allude to the reason they haven’t been writing is they felt their work wasn’t important.

But – is that why we do this? Out of some idea of importance to the world or to ourselves?

Are we not just driven to create because we are creators? Or does it lose meaning when we think our creations are not important?

As a young person, I wrote. I wrote with no thought of audience or publisher or awards. It was a drive within me, for as long as I can remember, to just write. Get it all out. Put it down on paper.

The idea of importance to the world didn’t come until later – college, in fact, when one professor said – but what is the deeper meaning?

And a student answered – maybe it was just for fun?

And she, slitting her eyes, growled, “We don’t do that.”

My writer friend always got stuck on audience. She’d start on a piece, but then she’d become stalled, staring at it for hours and rereading it and attempting to answer the question – Who is the Audience?

All these expectations stifle the creative spirit. Maybe these questions need to be answered, but I believe the answer must come after the creation.

Perhaps that is the true spirit of creation. Create first, ask questions later.

The spirit of commercialism to which we are all pulled, drawn, or lead is in opposition with the authentic need to create. For the product, we must ask the questions and then create something tailor made.

I don’t want to make products. I suck at sales. I just want to write. The writing is important to who I am as a human. Writing makes me a better human. Isn’t that important?

What is Creativity?

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My friend believes creativity is a gift direct from the powers that be.

I believe everyone is creative in different ways.

My friend feels when she is ill, she is unable to write. The body, she says, is recreating itself, creating health from illness.

I think of the great minds in our society – Mozart’s last work, although incomplete was powerful, was written on his deathbed. Einstein was working on his next great theorem as he lay dying. Howard Hughes, burned and bleeding, after a plane crash left him near dead, redesigned the bed he lay in, redesigned the plane in which he crashed.

My friend is not completely wrong. When I’m not well, the last thing I’m thinking about is how my character will move forward.

But maybe that’s exactly what we need when our body is focused on healing, that our mind needs to be occupied with our passion in life. Maybe there is something to the creation – the connection between healing and writing – that makes magic.

We know that, already, don’t we? We heal though creativity. We are fully present when involved in our purpose.

I wrote the first draft of Our Gentle Sins during a stressful time. It came out fast and easy. The flow was beautiful and powerful and made me feel better, more in control, and hopeful.

When I think of the book now, the characters hold a special place in my heart. Jack and Valerina are the epitome of hope

Grief Memoirs

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I handle grief by writing. I handle stress by writing. I handle many things by laying a line on paper and allowing the dark moments to flow out. Image and rhyme and memory and magic blooms and appears sometimes in chaos, other times in patterns however rarely symmetrical.

People all handle grief differently and all the ways are valid. Many people don’t understand those who don’t bawl and post and praise. Other people don’t understand the public display.

After my brother passed last year, my mother followed him in a matter of days. It took me a bit, but I wrote. While I’m working on a longer piece about my mother, I’m proud to say Memory House Magazine out of Chicago accepted the piece about my brother.

“Days of Remembrance” is a mystical memoir of my brother’s passing, more specifically the days following his death. The print version will be out soon. They’ve invited us to read their digital version at https://chicagomemoryhouse.wordpress.com/

I like words…

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I like sentences. Big, beautiful sentences so long and thick you can wrap them around yourself and keep yourself warm in the winter. Yeah, those. But I like words too. They go together, you know, words and sentences. I like to make them move with rhythm, sing and dance in a way that you fall into them as if you’re hypnotized by them and you never want to leave them, you just want to sway back and forth and keep reading until you slip off of your seat.

It takes time to create those. They start small, like these. Then you have to let them sit, like yeasty bread, and let them rise. You leave, come back, lift the towel, pinch and poke at them, and leave them again thinking, “I know it can be better than that.”

Then you have to sit down with them, you have to get to know them, talk to them, talk through them, try them on, and break them then mend them, try this and try that. It’s frustrating too, I know. You fight with them, want to give up on them, want to trash the whole thing and sometimes you might leave in tears with hopelessness tearing at your soul, but then you come back on another day, maybe an overcast day that holds the threat of rain, and you sit down and talk it all out once again. Maybe this time, this time, it works. Someday it will.

Then you’ll move on to the next sentence.

This is writing. It hurts. It cuts giant gashes filled with jagged edges through you. It scars. It gives you nightmares and makes you curl up in a ball and rock not so gently back and forth.

But it’s also the only thing that pushes you forward, fills the empty spaces, gives you purpose. It keeps the dark shadows at bay and protects you from the harsh world.