Journal writing is a powerful tool for self-expression, personal growth, and healing. So it makes sense to introduce the art of journaling (including art journaling) to young children. In addition to the incredible emotional benefits it offers, journaling is effective in the classroom as a tool to help students learn writing, analysis, and reflective skills.

A recent Education World article talks about the many benefits of daily journaling for students, including polishing writing skills, using freewriting to liberate students from their inner critics, enhancing expression of emotions, and building confidence in emerging writers. Especially for young writers, journaling provides a safe environment for building self-expression and critical thinking skills, because the students can bring forth opinions and ask questions they would not feel comfortable expressing in the classroom.

Going a step beyond journal writing for self-reflection and awareness, Education Quarterly says that, in academic environments, E-Journaling enhances interactivity, while fostering intellectual exchange and successful learning. In this context, specific-use journals, such as a writing journal, can be used to reflect on process. Reading journals provide a place to express reactions and questions to reading, as well as analysis of what is being read. The article discuss the pros and cons of using online journaling vs. the traditional handwritten journal for educational purposes. A good read, if you want to stretch your ideas about the ways journaling can be used.

Here is one teacher’s moving account what happened when she used journaling writing in her classroom: The Power of Journaling.

This homeschooling mom uses “notebooking,” a kind of scrapbook style journal, to help her young students process and hold on to what they are learning. She writes, “It is ideal for covering broad topics or literature units, as information can be disseminated into smaller parcels.  The emphasis is on collecting and organizing information, and documenting student learning.”

In this rather technical ERIC digest on Journal Writing in Experiential Education, the authors provide a comprehensive list of recommendations for teachers who want to use journals in the classroom. Before you introduce journaling to your students or your children, check this out.

Have you introduced journaling to your children or used journaling in the classroom? I invite you to share your stories and thoughts by leaving a comment below.
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Image by Black Vanilla
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I love Sharon Lippincott’s method for mapping the stages of her life: it’s so un-linear. Linearity is something I excel in, and I know I would benefit from the organic, round, mind-mapping quality of her approach. I’ve included a small thumbnail of her sketch here, but go read her blog post, The Tree of Me, to find out about the process.

Stephen Smith’s November 30th post on the In Context Blog, 3 Ways to Increase Personal Awareness Through Journaling, was filed under “Productivity,” and though Stephen’s suggested journaling ideas and methods may certainly help you to be more productive—or at least more aware of ways in which you waste time—I particularly liked his 3rd method, “Close Your Day with Journal Entry Based on Values and Energy,” as a way of becoming away of where you’re spending in your time in relationship to your goals and set priorities. Take a look when you have a chance and let me know what you think. There are so many wonderful ways to use our journals!

Mari McCarthy’s focus is on journal writing for healing, and her post, Grief Journaling Without Words, resonated with me. There are times in our lives when emotions run too deep to be articulated, when words are just not enough. In this post, Mari outlines ways to begin to express your grief—really, any strong emotion—using art.

Finally, have you seen the Writing and Poetry Therapy section of All Things Healing? The site is devoted to … well … all things related to healing and includes sections for spiritual and healing practices, healthy lifestyles, community, and arts (this is where the writing and poetry pages are). Click the link and scroll down the page to find a collection of articles, gathered from all over the web, about journaling and writing for emotional and physical healing.

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Image Credits: Sharon Lippincott & aptmetaphor

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Do you regret wrong decisions you’ve made? What does it really mean to feel regret? And is life better without it?

In the following TED talk, Kathryn Schulz makes a strong case for accepting regret as a positive and reasonable emotional response to bad decisions and mistakes. “We should feel pain when things go wrong,” she says.

Schulz lists the ways we commonly deal with the pain of regret—most of them, negative—including denial, bafflement, self-punishment, and obsession. I encourage you to watch her 16-minute video and then continue on to ideas for journaling about this sensitive topic.

If the video isn’t displaying correctly, use this link: Kathryn Schulz Talk

Based on her lecture, explore your unique ways of responding to regret by writing about it:

• What does regret feel like to you? Describe regret using images.
• When you feel regret, in what ways do you cope with it or try to make it go away?
• In what ways do you punish yourself for your perceived mistakes?
• In what ways do you obsess about the mistakes or wrong decisions you’ve made in life?

Schulz leave us with the following words: “The point isn’t to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them. We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them.”

• Do you agree with her? And if so, how might you incorporate her advice into your life?

I invite you to join the conversation—leave a comment.
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Compassionate Criticism
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Sharon Lippincott just posted one of the best lists of constructive feedback rules for writers I’ve seen. It’s similar to the list of guidelines I give all my students, but I think Sharon’s is better articulated. (I think I’ll have to steal it. Okay with you, Sharon?)

I think one of my favorite rules on her list was to “limit comments about needed improvements to the two or thee most compelling ones.” It can be overwhelming, even when you’ve just been given positive feedback for your piece, to then receive ten points of negative criticism. And pairing the comments about things that aren’t working with ideas and suggestions (not prescriptions) for ways to improve the writing is the best way to make the feedback constructive. Check out Sharon’s article, then come back and join the discussion.

What’s the best writing feedback you ever received?

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Avoiding Distraction
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A common complaint of most writers I know is their seeming inability to stop distracting themselves from writing. The usual way of doing this used to be handling all those niggling little chores around the house. Like the laundry, or cleaning the kitchen. Maybe taking the dog for a walk. Now, the problem is the Internet.

Well, that’s easy, you might be thinking. Just close your email program. Close your browser. Refuse to do anything but write for your allotted time. Yes, it’s that simple, but that takes intention and (horrors!) discipline. Not something we all have in great supply.

So I was pleased to read in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Katherine Boehret, Focus! No Willpower Required, that there are some new programs on the market to help us override our natural desire to procrastinate. Among these, is a program called Freedom, which allows you to disable your computer’s networking ability for up to eight hours. And, to keep you from overriding the program before your time is up, you have to reboot your computer — an effective deterrent, if you ask me.

I downloaded the trial, which gives you five free uses. But the full program is only $10. I’ll let you know how how it goes. If you would rather disable only your social networks while you’re trying to write, they have a program called Anti-Social.

Do you use a program to help you manage Internet distraction, or are you among those who have learned to manage it on your own? What’s your method?

Update:

I’ve been using the Freedom app over the last few days, and I love it. Not only does it force me to focus (no quick diversions to check email), it serves as a work timer. For example, let’s say I’ve set it to block the Internet for 1 hour. At the end of the hour a little message pops up telling me I’m reconnected. Once I start writing, I don’t stop until the message tells me I’ve completed my session. Then I reward myself by getting up and stretching, checking my email, or whatever — before starting Freedom again for my next session. Too cool. And what a perfect tool for NaNoWriMo.

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Image Credits:

With all the possibilities journaling offers, from simply writing on lined notebook paper to beautiful and complex art journals, I found Quinn Creative’s recent post, Journaling with Words, humorous and enjoyable. Plus, she offers a great journaling exercise to help you identify and acknowledge the creative aspects of your personality. When I saw the exercise, I thought it would also be an interesting way to select and highlight traits of characters you’re writing about in your journal, memoir, or fiction story.

As the leaves turn color and begin to fall from the trees, we turn inward, to our homes and our thoughts. There is no better time to write, and fast-approaching November is the month to take on the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge. I took part in NaNoWriMo three years ago, and it was one of the best things I ever did for my writing, forcing my inner editor to take a back seat to the flow of words. George Angus’s post, NaNoWriMo: The Right Rite of Passage for Writers is worth reading, if you want to get a better idea of what NaNoWriMo can do for you. And, though the the idea is all about writing fiction novels, I see no reason why you couldn’t apply your NaNoWriMo month to writing your memoir — you know, the one you keep saying you’re going to write. Sure, the first draft will be horrible. But it will be written. That’s the point.

Speaking of up and coming events, don’t miss the National Association of Memoir Writers’ free (yes, FREE!) daylong online writing conference on October 21st. The general topic is Truth or Lie–On the Cusp of Memoir and Fiction. Even if you can’t be there for the live conference, you can sign up and access recordings later.

For those of you like to visualize and play with paper and scissors and glue, creating your own Writer’s Inspiration Collage might be the way to go. Nicole Zimmerman over at paper-pencil-pen shows you how. Hmmm… sounds like fun…I know what I’m going to do this weekend.

If you know about blog posts that readers here would be interested to know about, send me the links via my contact form, and I’ll check ‘em out.

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Image Credit: **tWo pinK pOSsuMs**
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Last week, I viewed a fascinating TED video with Lauren Zlaznick. Through the results of a study conducted of popular television shows over the last five decades, Slaznick demonstrates how media reflects the attitudes, concerns, and beliefs of our culture.  I wondered, as I watched it, if the same was true of books.

Then, lo and behold, only a few days later another TED video was posted (embedded below), by two researchers, Erez Liberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, showing how they used a new search tool to study words and/or phrases available in the 5 million books scanned by Google.

Through this video, I learned about the NGram Viewer — an online tool that allows you to conduct customized searches for words and phrases that interest you. So I decided to conduct and compare with what frequency the words diary, journal, memoir, nonfiction, and autobiography have occurred in literature since the year 1900 (the NGram tool allows you to search back to the year 1800).

Watch the video, then scroll below to find out what I discovered.

The results of my search were somewhat surprising. First, I didn’t expect the word journal to have been so popular through time (it’s the red line at the top of the graph). I suspect that the search result doesn’t include only references to journal writing, but also to scientific and trade journals, so the result is probably skewed upward. That said, you can see that the word takes off in an upward arc beginning in about 1970—when journal writing began to appear in popular culture. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future.

I expected that diary (the next line down) would move out of favor during this same period, but it appears to have also risen. The term nonfiction, as I expected, doesn’t even appear in print until around 1940 (it’s the yellow line at the bottom); it’s a fairly new concept, historically speaking.

Most surprising, at least to me, was to discover that, though we’re always hearing about the “glut of memoir” on the market and how there is more memoir than any previous time, the word itself was used more in 1900 than it is today. In fact, looking at the green line on the graph, we can see that memoir dipped from 1900 to 1960 and then began a steady, slow rise to the year 2000. And it hasn’t yet reached the same level it had attained in 1900. My take? There’s definitely room for more!

Honestly? I don’t know what any of this tells us for sure, but it’s fascinating and food for lots of speculation! I’d be interested to hear about what you discover. Run some NGram searches for yourself and then leave a comment letting us know what you found.

We writers have a tendency to grouse about how difficult it is to stay focused. We distract ourselves with email, FaceBook, Twitter, and phone texts — all in the name of “social networking” — and then we complain about it. Ben Brooks posted a thoughtful article about the importance of taking responsibility for our Digital Interruptions.

But then, Nathan Bransford reminded me that some distractions are necessary, even healthy — the kind that come in the form of real, face-to-face time with friends, walks in the park, time at a museum or bookstore, or just staring at the clouds. These kinds of distractions rejuvenate, rather than deplete our creative energies.

How long has it been since you had a “digital free” day — a day without computers, phones (land or cell), and text messages? How long has it been since you felt your hand twitch toward your phone out of habit, just to check your email? What would happen if you turned everything off for one day? And then, what would happen if you went for a walk or to the beach for the day?

I’ve done it. Not often, because I write on a computer and teach classes over the Internet, and electronic communication is my bread and butter and breath. But I can tell you that it’s an incredibly freeing experience to not be on call for an afternoon or a day, to simply have time to be me in my environment. And I’ve re-discovered these really handy tools called notebooks and pens, which work without batteries! So I can keep writing, even without electricity. Pretty cool.

How about you? When was the last time you were digital free?

Tell us about it …

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Image Credit: Seriykotik
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I recently discovered DailyLit.com. Get this: DailyLit sends books in short installments via e-mail or RSS. They offer both classic and contemporary books for free. You can read each installment (which arrive according to the schedule you set) in under 5 minutes, and you can receive additional installments immediately on demand. They have a lot more features, as well, so check ‘em out!

The HerStories blog has come up with two great posts this week: Surviving the editorial process by Pamela Jane Bell; and what happens when your computer fails? Read about Susan Tweit’s experience in her post “Technology Fails, Opportunity Knocks.” Have you experienced something similar?

HuffPost article by Kieran Fitzgerald on what it means for everyone to be a writer. Fitzgerald says that no matter how many of us are out here writing blogs and articles and books, “We are still consumers of stories other people make.” We pass on stories and articles we like (this Blogtalk post is a case in point), “like,” and make recommendations at a phenomenal rate. Finally, Fitzgerald takes an imaginative look at what the future might hold for stories. A must-read for future-oriented folks.

Join the discussion. What do you think?

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Image Credit: Keith Ramsey
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Today’s Blogtalk brings two very different writing-related blog posts to your attention.

The first post, “A Writer’s Voice Is All About Choice,” is by Mark Nichol with DailyWritingTips.com. My favorite quote from the article is, “Many writers are inspired by an established author who they model their own style after, but the key to success … is to discover your own storytelling style, whether you write fact, fiction, or poetry.” Mark goes on, in the next paragraph to outline some of the things you need to discover your own style. Among these are understanding your personality, your influences, family relationships, and background. Amen, brother! I would add that part of this process gaining a better understanding of your unique perspectives of life and — thus — your unique metaphors and language. I encourage you to read Mark’s post. Then, if you’d like to explore ways to enhance and control your writing voice, take a look at my e-course, Finding Your Writing Voice.

The second article is from The Writer Magazine — “Writing in a Parallel Universe: How to achieve parallel structure in your sentences,” by Bonnie Trenga. Being the grammar-geek that I am, I enjoyed this humorous and well written approach to a topic that most writers would rather not have to deal with. She explains what parallel sentence structure is and then gives you step-by-step instructions for correcting non-parallel sentences. She even includes some practice sentences to play with.

You might be asking, “Why should I care? Won’t my editor take care of all this for me?” Sure … if you ever get that far. Trust me: making the effort to revise and strengthen your writing will pay off in the long run. Even if you never plan to be published, or plan to publish “only” for your family, your readers will have a more enjoyable experience if your sentence structure is sound.

Leave a comment. What’s your pet peeve (in others’ writing, of course)?

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Image Credit: Spencer Finnley
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I’ve written before (over at womensmemoirs.com) about using music to set the mood while writing. Yesterday’s blog post by Sharon Lippincott, “The Power of Song,” is a great example of how music can pull memories from the past into the present. Sharon’s experience resonated deeply with me; listening to “Hey Jude” by The Beatles still — all these years later — puts me right back onto the barstool at the Orange Julius across from my school, where I sat in a particularly teenage girl kind of nostalgic funk. Sharon’s journaling/memoir writing prompt, at the end of her post is a good one. So be sure to check it out.

Speaking of writing and memories (memory an endlessly fascinating topic), Dan Curtis reminds us of the importance of using our senses to unlock childhood memories. And he has some solid sensory prompts to help you bring your buried memories above ground.

If you love to journal and you’re hungry for more than the weekly journaling prompts here at WritingThroughLife.com, Melissa Donovan offers reading-related prompts in her post, “Journal Prompts for Bookworms.”

Ever wonder about other writers’ writing processes? I never tire of reading about them — maybe because they’re all so different, as individual as the writers themselves. Here’s an article by Sara Gruen (author of Water for Elephants) about how she writes.

Do you have a blog about journaling or writing you’d like me to highlight on a future Blogtalk post? Send me a link via my contact form, and I’ll check it out.