I am a rule-follower. Or maybe, I should use the past tense, as the longer I live with my husband, the more I see that most rules are just guidelines, and the more often I am able to just chill and do what comes naturally, instead of what I think I’m supposed to do. He’s a bad good influence on me because he comes from Tennessee where even the laws are just guidelines!
More than ten years ago, my parents gave me Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. They could tell I was struggling to get back in tune with my art (more with acting, than writing, as I always did that). If you were on TAW bandwagon, as so many people were, then you probably know about morning pages. Julia assigns her devotees (Followers? Students?) a task – hand-write three full page journal pages every morning. She asks you to commit to 12 weeks (it’s a twelve-step program for recovering your art, after all), but encourages you to do them for the rest of your life. So guess what happens if you’re a rule-follower?
Yep. Ten years later you have four huge boxes of journals in your closet and you can’t go anywhere or talk to anyone until you’ve written your three pages every morning.
I want to say straight away that these morning pages changed my life in more positive ways than I can count. They got me through trying times, they recorded my husband and I falling in love, there are travel stories, plot lines worked out, scraps of stories I’ll never write…Every single word written was worth it. However…
Lately, I just don’t feel like writing. At least not every day. It was hard to admit at first…like a Southerner saying, “I don’t want to go to church anymore. I just don’t feel like it. I’ve gotten what I need out of church.” Almost sacrilegious!
What I finally decided, and this literally took me six months to work up to, is to write on the mornings I feel like it, and not on the days I don’t. In the last week, I’ve taken three days off. It was weird at first, but kind of freeing too. I don’t think I’ll ever stop entirely. And to be honest, writing in bed, with a cup of tea and the wood stove blazing on a cold winter morning is a true pleasure. As is sitting outside in the lawn chair on a summer’s morning and watching the deer traipse through the yard while I scritch-scratch out my thoughts. But I’m cutting myself some slack here. After all, I plan to live a good many more years. Where in the heck am I going to put all these journals if I write every day?
Do you keep a journal?
Anne Bingham, I wish I’d had your wisdom about using disappearing ink back when I was 13. My mom found my journal under my bed and I got in big trouble. After that fiasco, I learned to obscure my real thoughts with free verse poetry and mysterious little sketches…
I wonder how important it is to keep the journals as archives, although I remember Natalie Goldberg writing that she does that. I think Julia says somewhere to shred the day’s pages if it’s too personal and you can’t take a chance one someone else finding them, which leads me to suspect it’s the process that counts, not the result. Probably writing in disappearing ink would be just as beneficial.
Joelle, what a great post and what a huge box of journals you’re developing! Your rule about daily journaling infringes upon your desire to live in a house with a small footprint. As for me, I have kept a journal for decades, since I was 13 and first discovered boys.
I don’t keep a daily journal. If you look through most of my journals, you see months–even years–go by without a peep from me. Then I’ll go at it hard-core for a couple of years. I’m so sporadic. Journal-keeping holds a spot on my eternal To Do list, though, along with many other things.
I’ve kept journals for years. It is interesting to see how they’ve evolved since I began. I used to record every detail of my life every day. Lately, it’s less detailed and whenever I feel like it. Honestly, I miss writing every day. It felt binding, yet freeing at the same time, as if I was chained into doing it every day, yet letting loose the deepest parts of my soul…