Excavating an Ancient Word Hoard
At the very least, I'd like to stop writing newsletters about how I don't know what to write about.
1.
A blank book holds so much potential. It is the essence of possibility. While all books are great, a blank book is the greatest, because it cannot prove disappoint you.
At least, not until you write in it. Which is probably why I have so many blank books that I've never used.
I'm kidding, a little bit. While I do have stacks on stacks on stacks of blank books, most of them have at least a little written on their once pristine pages.
I can divide my blank book collection into several categories:
Purely decorative tomes: These are generally so gorgeous that the thought of soiling the pages with my scribbled nonsense makes my heart seize. Most of them were gifts from someone else, because I'm too aware of my reluctance to use such a fine book to spend any of my own money on them.
Lined journals: I've always been sporadic when it comes to regular journaling, but I do have a few of these around, usually with very pretty designs. It's fun to flip through them and see my handwriting go from "I'm going to write neatly so as not to spoil this book" to "What, you actually wanted to be able to read this when you were done?" Most of them are only half-full at best.
Dot grid planners: I have been using these for a few years now to plan my days.1 I have also used dot grid books as writing journals/novel planning notebooks (only semi-successfully).
The artistic: Sketchbooks and art journals. Though I don't aspire to be an artist, I go through phases where my creativity needs to express itself visually. Sometimes I sketch, sometimes I paint, and sometimes I glue bits of paper to the page, all depending on the mood (and how much time I want to spend digging out art supplies).
The purely functional: Composition books, moleskins, spiral notebooks, and sometimes legal pads. There's no pressure with these. They're ideal for when I want to write without the temptation to self-edit as I go, or when I think I need the movement of the hand to trigger a deeper writing flow. A lot of pieces start in these kind of books, and each one will have bits and pieces from different projects in no usefully organized way.
I almost never throw away a notebook, even if I haven't used it in decades. The old ones fill storage boxes, desk drawers and bookshelves, shoveled around every so often when I need to make room for new volumes. Rarely, I have torn a few interesting pages from an old notebook, or photographed them to store digitally, and disposed of the rest. Meaningless notes, scribbled ideas, concepts that I can no longer interpret, and maybe a few that embarrass me with their immaturity. In other words, things I've written down, but not things that I've written.
I know I'm not alone in this caching of blank books . It's a common phenomenon amongst my writer friends, and I bet that at least some of you reading right now have your own substantial pile of blank or once-blank books taking up space in your abode — let's call them our "TBW" piles and share photos in the comments! We can fantasize about what me might use any given tome for if we could get up the nerve to break open the cover.
2.
The reason I’m thinking about blank books at all is because at the beginning of the year, I made it my goal to develop a deeper relationship with my writing. Now, with less than three months left in 2023, I have realized how little progress I’ve made towards this goal. This summer, in particular, it has felt harder than ever to fit personal writing into my life on a regular basis.
It's not just a matter of time and energy, but that I feel lost when confronted with what to write about. It seems strange, because I write daily for my day job.2 But those words don’t come from within me. My writing and storytelling skills are tools I use to fulfill external, institutional goals, to convey a message that is not my message. I know how lucky I am to get a regular paycheck for doing something that I love to do, but I have noticed that the better I get at writing for the job, the harder it is to write my own story.
When I get home from work, I want to relax, and it seems contradictory to start doing the same thing I did all day. It’s much easier to just turn on the TV or play a game (or both at once) until it’s time for dinner and bed. When I do have the time and energy for more words, I prioritize working on my current novel-in-progress — which makes a lot of sense, because finishing that novel is my primary goal and ambition.
Purely personal writing — journaling, blog posts, newsletters — has fallen to the bottom of the writing priorities list. And when I do decide I want to write something like that, I find myself floundering about what I want to write, and getting stuck at the very surface level of an idea, unsure of how to delve deeper into it. Unsure of what it is I actually want to say.
And so, I have been delving into some of my old journals, trying to figure out how I used to do it. While diary-like journaling has always been an hit-or-miss habit for me, I do know that a regular, introspective writing practice will help me get to a deep-thinking and deeper-feeling mind space that used to be much easier to find. I’m hoping that some of these old books will suggest a direction to pursue.
At the very least, I'd like to stop writing newsletters about how I don't know what to write about.
3.
From amidst this decades old word hoard, a few previous efforts stand out as potential renewed channels for creative pursuit.
The Imaginaria
This is a fat, fat book filled with graph paper that I found just as I was beginning to explore the idea of being not just a wordy girl, but also a visually creative one. I love the idea of this huge book filled with invented people, places and things. Sure, they might lead to a story, but the main goal was just to practice inventing things (an essential skill for a fantasist).
Some of the random ideas include maps, family trees, and magical artifacts. Sometimes an entry was only text, a bit of history or world building or even dialog that might serve as a jumping off point for a story, but was just as interesting all by itself.
I have kept this book in my nightstand for almost 20 years, with the initial intention of filling a page with a new idea every night. The truth is there are only about 30 entries all together and, aside from a brief period around 2017, I've hardly touched it for most of that time. But I like the idea of it, and keep it there in case I ever feel inspired to resume.
The Hybrid Journal
When I worked in arts and crafts magazines, I edited a magazine about art journaling. I learned a lot about the process, and found the practice of creating with paint and paper and ink and glue very satisfying and inspiring. Art journaling accesses your thoughts in a symbolic way, not organized into sentences and paragraphs and chapters, and eventually I wanted to replicate some of that process in a way that 1) was more portable; and 2) was intended for fewer images, more words.
The “creative journal” I came up with was a Moleskin journal and a set of colored pens. The idea was that by breaking up the page with color and shapes and divisions, writing upside down or in circles — sometimes just changing pen colors to change direction in thought — I could tap into a deeper level of thought and emotion without getting “trapped” by the words.
(I am not sure I have ever thought of it in exactly those terms before, but it gets to the core of my problem. The more I get paid to be a professional writer the more I feel responsible for every word I put down on the page. It seems crazy that I would extend that to personal journaling, but I can’t deny that it happened, and I’m still trying to dig my way out of that mindset.)
My hybrid journal was one of the most incredibly creative practices I have ever enjoyed, and I feel like I was freer on these pages than at any other point in my life. Sometimes I wrote about what I was working on, sometimes I wrote about deep emotional questions, sometimes I wrote stupid poems about how gray the sky was. None of it was polished, but that was irrelevant to the exercise. I carried this on this practice between 2009 and 2011 or so; I don’t know exactly because I decided that dating the entries was another constraint I didn’t want to be burdened with.
The Commonplace (?) Book
This is my current creative journal. It’s a nice dot matrix book (I think B5) with heavy weight, gold-edged pages from Notebook Therapy. When I opened this book last year, I stuck some photos of the hybrid journal on the front page, because my intention was to capture the same energy and creativity of that practice, but so far it hasn’t quite worked out that way.
While I am using some of the techniques of the earlier journal on these pages, with the addition of washi tape and stickers and printed photos, I haven’t quite gotten the writing part of practice into play. It's been more of a scrapbook, a project planner, doodling pages, and most recently a commonplace book where I’ve been recording favorite passages from books I’ve read. I don’t mind the multi-purpose function of the volume — I kind of like having these separate dimensions of my experience woven together, feeding my creativity — but I would like to do more deep writing in it.
But that means I have to make a better effort to engage with this book with time and mental clarity, and that continues to be an obstacle. It doesn’t really matter how excited I am about any of these journaling practices if I can’t get myself to sit down with a pen in my hand, instead of a remote control or smartphone.
Morning Pages
Someone will inevitably suggest "Morning Pages" as a low-bar entry point back into regular journaling, and I hear and respect that suggestion. I’ve done morning pages in the past, though, without any revelatory results. However, I’m willing to give anything a chance at this point, and last month I went and bought a new notebook for that purpose.3 It hasn’t been working really well, though — I tried to work an extra 20 minutes into my morning routine to accomplish it, but without setting my alarm 20 minutes earlier, I haven’t been able to figure out the schedule yet.
I will, though. The current plan is to morph morning pages into evening pages, a chance to transition from the institutional mechanisms of the day job into the more introspective writing that is more personally relevant, while avoiding the habitual TV watching habit. A few writer dates with myself are probably in order, too. I used to do a lot of my best journaling in cafes; it should help to break away from the usual scenery from time to time.
And I promise, despite another issue of what is essentially throat clearing, I really don't intend for this Substack to be only about me and my writing processes and blocks. There are many things I want to think about and write about that aren't about me at all. I just have to figure out how to do that sort of writing again.
Thanks for sticking with me in the meantime! I really appreciate everyone who has joined me so far — every subscription is a word of encouragement to keep going. And if you haven’t subscribed yet…. It’s only going to get better from here! Push the button so you don’t miss out.
I hesitate to say I bullet journal, but that's where my planning method started.
Or nearly daily. A lot of my tasks lately are more writing adjacent.
I even bought a gold-colored pen and pen clip to match, to avoid the "can't find something to write with" excuse.
So good to know that I'm not the only one who struggles with what to journal about. But I think I may have found something that might work - for me anyway, your milage may vary. I've been journaling about my WIPs. Two in particular. My mystery "Body In The Bush", which is a little Scarpetta mixed with a dash of Three Pines, with a pinch of Northern Exposure, has been a lot of fun to write. Now that it is in the editing stage, it seems to have stalled while my mind is taken over with a fantasy tale of intrigue and rebellion, and dragons returning from legend. I can't settle on a title. Everything I think is good has already been used a hundred times. Anyway, I journal about my WIP (works-in-progress) my characters, their motivations and backstories and so on. It helps me to understand them better, and why they make the decisions they do.
I might start sharing those journal entries in my Enchanted Life newsletter. What do you think?
I hope you find something that moves you to fill some of your empty ones.
I have a collection of journals and notebooks that I haven’t used much - it took me years to figure out that the lines/ ruled pages triggered some old perfectionism. I switched to dot grid journals and sketch books, and I made some progress but not much. Now I journal only on Notes on the phone, and use a notebook planner to plan my writing for the week.