Journaling for the Writer

If you write, if you read about writing,  or if writing is only a dream not yet realized, you have heard about keeping a journal. Some writers swear by it and other writers swear at it. Just a few months ago I was entrenched in the camp of the naysayers. Keeping a journal demanded my time,  pulled me from my current writing project, and it threatened to take on a life of its own. But, I kept reading excerpts from journals and diaries of writers I like, and I decided to try to understand journaling in terms of value. The apparent deterrents I have already mentioned. 

 The most rewarding Benefit of Journaling

One of the most powerful and compelling reasons to keep a journal is that it allows you to explore your own emotions, mainly how they apply to what you are engaged in doing and thinking. As a very concrete example, I am writing a short story whose main character is a witch who has been caught, tried, and convicted. She is wearing only a jute sack soaked in coal oil, and the smell has invaded not only her body but her hair, and it is all she can feel, smell, and taste. She is tied to a stake, and her feet are on the top of what is obviously a pyre. She is being taunted by her one guard who enjoys telling her death is quickly approaching. I was able to write how I felt waiting to be burned to bone long after the fat melted past the tallow. How I would smell like burnt mutton. Writing and feeling from different points of view hidden from your audience is a benefit both exhilarating and satisfying.

 Two Secondary Benefits of Journaling

1) Journaling allows you to write anything and know that unless you permit, nothing in that journal will ever be read by anyone else. This gives you a blank slate to examine your deepest fears, desires and wants. Before you scoff and accuse me of crossing the bounds into madness, it is ok to write thoughts of madness, twisted things and poisoned lollipops. Everyone nurtures a secret side, and that is how we develop really deep and sometimes even hilarious storylines.
Consider for a moment Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Peter Shaffer’s Equus. Both plays are deeply twisted tales of deviant behavior ringing true in the human comedy. Neither writer could have pulled these ideas from reading Harry Potter. You have to write and feel from something that burns and pains your very soul. If you wish, think of journaling as the poor man's psychoanalysis. Go for it. Plum your depths.

2) Journaling will vanquish writer’s block forever. If you have explored the emotions and the feelings of your plots and your dreams you have a wealth of ideas to pick from. You will never stare at your keyboard cursing your failed muse. You don’t need a muse. You have a journal. Take one of your thoughts, your feelings from your journal, and start writing.