When I want to write memoir, the first places I go for research (other than my memory) are my journals. They are my memory-keepers, containing more details of events and my responses to them than my feeble mind could ever hold. In addition to my perception of the facts (what happened), my journals contain descriptions of my emotions and sensory details, such as what the sun felt like on my skin on that particular day, in that particular garden, the smell of a particular flower or place, and the sounds that were a part of the scene.

When I’m very lucky, I can pull entire sentences or passages directly from my journal and add them to my memoir (for later editing of course). When I’m unlucky, it’s because I’m writing about a time when I either didn’t keep my journals faithfully or, in some errant passion of self-deprecation, threw them away.

Journal writing is not the same as writing a memoir. However, journal writing (yours or others’) can be a wonderful research tool. When you become aware of the value of your journals, you begin to write in them differently, recording more of your life.

How to use your journal for research:

Writing for the future — I wrote a list of Things You’ll Want to Include in your journal in a recent blog post over at WomensMemoirs.com, including a record of daily activities, thoughts and feelings about relationships and family events, local and national news (our lives are lived in the context of our social and political cultures), and internal influences (things that are changing the way you think or behave). Other ideas contributed by readers included TV shows, news about close friends, coincidences, and places they traveled. One person said that she created timelines of events for each month and year, categorized by areas of her life, such as “social,” “work,” and “spiritual,” so that she could track trends and progress. Similarly, I keep my journal on the computer and mark my entries with keywords.

If you review your past journal entries with an eye to writing about your life at that time, you’ll most likely wish that you’d included more information about some of the above items. And though it’s true that your time is limited and you can’t include everything in every entry, some of these things can be jotted in abbreviated form. Just enough to help you when mining your journal for stories later on in life.

Mining past entries — When using past journal entries as resources for memoir writing, look for the following kinds of information:

• Information that informs scene: descriptions of your surroundings, the weather, who was there with you, action, and dialog, and evocative prose.
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• Information that informs reflection: how you felt about the events at the time, questions you may have had, hopes and fears expressed. What you knew then about what happened.
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• Information that informs context: surrounding journal entries (the before and after an event), political and social events, general emotional state.

If you have a response to this post or other ideas about journaling for memoir, I invite you to leave a comment and share your ideas with other readers.

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Image Credit: Starfire Photography
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IN addition to many other reasons for journaling, your journal can function as a kind of personal coach — essentially, someone who helps you identify and achieve goals. Modeled after sports coaching, a personal coach holds you accountable, pushes you a little harder than you might push yourself, and cheers you on. You can think of a personal coach as someone who facilitates the identification of desires, skills, and abilities you have, and the development of major and minor goals to help you achieve more in your life. In some cases, helping you to find your passion and/or new directions.

Certainly, there are things a person can do for you that a journal cannot — bringing in outside resources or pushing you harder than you would work on your own, for instance. But a journal can be used to help you identify core issues, things you really want to have or be in your life, and the steps you’ll need to take to reach those goals. And if you decide you want to work with a professional personal coach at some point, your journal writing work will have laid a strong foundation.

This process is future-oriented. So, rather than writing or reflecting about events in your past, you’ll be writing — for the most part — about the future. How does it work? For the sake of this article, let’s take a simple approach to setting and achieving a single goal.

1. Define your goal. A goal is a general statement about what you want to achieve. For example, I want to be more active in my community.
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2. Figure out what you already know and/or have that relates to your goal. In my example, I need to understand what I know about my community and what kind of resources (skills, time, and money) I have to offer. I figure I can spend about two hours a week or so. I can make a list of skills I have to offer, preferably activities that I enjoy. And I’ll write down what I know, if anything, about different organizations in my community.
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3. Brainstorm a list of objectives related to the goal. Objectives are steps or strategies to attain goals, but the trick to stating objectives is that they must be specific and measurable. One step to becoming more active in my community is making a list of community organizations. Another might be to identify those organizations that most attract me. A third might be to visit and/or interview people at these organizations to find out more about how they work and what volunteer opportunities are available. And so on. Once you’ve brainstormed a list of possible objectives, put them in order. Sometimes, you may need to do some research before you know what you need to do and/or in what order. That, then, becomes your first objective.
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4. Next, give yourself completion dates for each objective. In my example, my first objective will be to make a list of ten community organizations, including contact numbers, by one week from today (date). Be as realistic as possible about the dates, while understanding that you can adjust them in the future, if you need to.
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5. Write your dates on your calendar. If there are sub-steps you need to take for an objective, put these on your calendar as well. For example: 1) On (date), look up county agencies on county website; 2) on (date), go to library and find out how to access list of non-profit organizations in town.
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6. Finally, use your journal and your calendar to hold yourself accountable. Hold weekly “sessions” with yourself to write about how you’re doing towards your goal. If you notice resistance to completing tasks you’ve set yourself, write about it, and devise some strategies to help. Maybe you’re trying to push yourself to do things you don’t really want to do but feel you “should” do. Explore this. Above all, be understanding, compassionate, nonjudgmental, yet firm with yourself. This is, after all, what a personal coach would do.

You might consider a special journal or notebook to hold your goals and self-coaching sessions. Or you might decide to keep it in the context of your regular journaling (mine are mixed together). Whatever feels most comfortable and works with your organizational style is fine.

What do you think about journaling for self-coaching?

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Image Credit: Angie Torres
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ASK three people who witnessed the same event to describe it and you’ll get three different descriptions. This is because we all have different levels of awareness. For example, some people notice details about other people and their surroundings; they notice who had their hair dyed or cut, the shapes and colors of the trees on the hills, and the smells in the air. Others others don’t seem to notice very much at all; you could sport a new haircut in their presence all day long and they wouldn’t see the difference. Still others might be more aurally perceptive — aware of changes in sound. Our perceptions are unique to us as individuals in many ways.

Currently, I would place myself as about a 7 along the spectrum of general perceptual acuity, where 1 equals “notices next to nothing” and 10 equals “notices everything.” By nature, I would be about a 4 or 5 — one of those people who don’t notice that you shaved off your mustache — and believe that I can attribute my increased perceptual powers to my journal writing practice. Why?

Journaling helps me to:

• Think about physical descriptions — how things look, feel, taste, and sound.
• Be more aware of my emotional responses as they occur.
• Think about things in new ways (looking at things from different perspectives).
• Be more curious and interested in what is going on around me.
• Listen to the tone and nature of conversations.
• Think about relationship dynamics in my personal life and notice more about others’ relationships.
• Use my imagination creatively and more often.
• Manage my feelings by paying attention to my thoughts and attitudes.
• Increase my connection with intuition.

If you need a reason to journal every day, knowing that it may enhance your powers of perception can give you some additional motivation. Use your journal writing to notice more about your surroundings.

And if you already practice journaling (or any kind of writing) on a regular basis, I invite you to think and to write about the different ways that journaling has helped improve your powers of perception.

If you’re so inclined, share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment.

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Inside each of us is a deep well of creative energy, and writing is one way to pump this creativity to the surface. For example, we can use writing prompts to give our imagination a workout, for fun, or as exercises to warm up to our intended writing tasks. Once ideas begin to flow, they will flow in any direction we guide them. All we have to do is sculpt the paths along which they run. And the more we write — in other words, the more we practice writing — the better at creativity and writing we become.

Our minds are wonderfully associative, our thoughts moving from one thing to the next related thing, until they arrive at stopping points that we might recognize as distinct thoughts. But really, our thought processes run something like this:

I notice a red sign over a restaurant, which makes me think about how fast food restaurants use bright colors — orange and red and yellow — to move people in and out quickly, while restaurants that cater to long, luxurious dinners are decorate in muted colors — cool blues and greens and earth tones. I wonder how much of our lives we are unconsciously responding to color, whether it’s moving quickly or stopping to rest; why I almost never wear red, because I don’t like to stand out in the crowd and how I once wore red all the time, knowing that it looked good on me; why I stopped wearing red. My closet holds mostly blacks, whites, browns, creams, and a few golds, greens, blues, and yellows. When did I become so practical, so muted? At the same time, I have become more comfortable with myself, more vocal in other ways. Could it be that as I have become more comfortable with myself, I’ve also become more comfortable with fading into the background? Perhaps I should go buy something red. Or orange. Orange is a good color …

All the while this is going on, I may not even be conscious of my thoughts, only that I have suddenly decided that I need to buy a red blouse or purse and that it has something to do with standing out more.

Writing allows us to not only follow and be more aware of these thought processes, but to creatively and playfully steer them where we want them to go. Creativity, after all, is closely related to play (just watch any child playing for a while).

The image at the top of this blog is a good example of playing with new ideas. The original image was a photo of some cacti, monochromatic and boring. It was in my “not sure what to do with this” folder. But, copied into Photoshop and combined playfully with some different effects (it’s like finger painting, only without the mess), I discovered a beauty and symmetry in the cacti that I had previously missed.

Similarly, writing and play work together to bring new ideas and new ways of expressing yourself to the surface. Just keep playing!

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Image by Amber Starfire
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I’VE WRITTEN previously about how journal writing can help you to clarify where you are and where you want to be in the future. Journaling can also give you a clearer perspective about where you’ve been. In this case, writing can be compared to climbing to the top of a hill. When you’re standing at the top of that hill, you can look back down the trail and see from where you’ve come. You’ll notice the boulders you crawled around and better appreciate their size from this viewpoint. You may notice that you consistently took the difficult path up the trail, though there were easier ways to travel. Reviewing what you’ve previously written helps you to understand the emotional and behavioral patterns in your life and to make conscious decisions for personal growth.

For example, I noticed that I complained a lot in my journals about being tired. I’ve always known that I was a night owl, but hadn’t realized the toll lack of sleep was taking on my overall productivity and sense of well being, until I began reviewing my journal entries. I realized that I needed to decide between my physical and mental health and my obsession with getting things done.

Gaining perspective through writing helped me make a decision to get to bed earlier or give myself permission to sleep in a little later without guilt. Writing also allowed me to explore the underlying reasons for pushing myself so hard — the messages I had internalized while growing up about working hard, being productive, and avoiding laziness. These messages had become the “voices” in my head that drove me. Once I understood the nature and origin of this drive, I was better able to control it. Or at least be aware of it and allow room for change necessary for my emotional and physical well being.

Through writing you can explore how your responses to events in the past affect your life in the present. Reflecting on how you have reacted to past experiences and the subsequent results can help you understand what is and is not working in your life. This understanding brings with it the opportunity to take future actions that are healthy rather than harmful.

W.H. Auden said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” We learn about ourselves as we write and, because we are naturally expanding and learning as human beings, the act of writing engages us in ways that allow us to make conscious decisions about who we want to be, as well as track our progress.

I encourage you to make a commitment today — not only to journal on a regular basis, but to use your journal as a tool for personal growth.

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Photo by Amber Starfire

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SOMETIMES life just doesn’t seem to make sense. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to people who don’t seem to deserve them. All our focused and  continuous efforts at one thing may fail, yet something for which we’ve hardly worked for seems to magically fall from the sky and land in our laps. We stand by helplessly while our children suffer from the words and hands of bullies at school, our loved ones get cancer, or our jobs disappear. And we wonder, Why?

I believe that all of life’s events have meaning, even when they seem random and nonsensical, and that creative acts, such as journal writing and art, can help us uncover the personal value of every experience. I say “personal value” because each of us has something different to learn or take away from all that happens in our lives.

Making sense of things is very difficult to do while we are in the middle of a particularly painful experience, and all we can do is write about what we are feeling, thinking, and doing. But — and this is key — if we have, through writing and art, recorded our inner perceptions and honest truths while moving through these events, we will not only emerge more intact and healthy, we will possess treasure chests full of valuable insights and gifts that we may turn around and offer others.

When I was in my late twenties, my family — at that time my husband, my two small children, and myself — sold our home and moved to Europe to be part of an evangelical missionary group. To save the world, as we thought. Instead, we lost everything — our friends, our church, the money from our home, and our sense of unity. My family never fully recovered and eventually broke apart under the stress. At the time, I could not understand what was happening to us, nor why it was happening. As we struggled to recover, I fell into a dark depression (is there any other kind?) that lasted two years. During this period, I continued to write. Perhaps not as regularly as before, but I wrote about the events as they happened, my feelings, my fears, recording all of it as honestly as I could. Although I judged myself as immature and idiotic to spend so much time crying and whining on the pages of my journal, I continued to turn to it as a way of finding meaning.

Later, I was able to go back to what I had written and see the common threads woven through the patterns of everything that happened. Through the writing and, later, the reading, I became empowered to understand what I had gained through my experiences: increased tolerance and compassion for others, an opened mind to others’ opinions and viewpoints, and a larger perspective of life in general. Ultimately, I grew into an expanded sense of my own spirituality and purpose in life.

What was catastrophe became a meaningful gift. With or without writing, we grow from our life experiences. With writing, we increase our ability to access our own inner wisdom and strength. We give ourselves the gift of understanding.

As always, I invite you to join the conversation by writing your thoughts in the comments field below.

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Image Credit: Amber Lea Starfire

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If you’re like many of us, sometimes getting started with a new challenge can seem like the hardest thing in the world. Human beings don’t mind hard work or long journeys; we’re just terrified of getting started!

We procrastinate, and make excuses, and stick our heads in the sand. We pretend that if we just wait long enough, the need to change will go away. Except it usually doesn’t, and a day, a week, a year down the road you muster up the courage to re-assess and you have to admit you’ve gotten nowhere.

Eventually, you have to work through your issues; you have to face your challenges, if you’re to go on living with yourself. And journaling is how you can do it with relative ease.

The task ahead of you may indeed be tremendous and difficult, but by using your journal to plan, record, reflect, and revise you can gain indispensable objectivity and comfort throughout the process.

Certainly, getting started is the hardest part. So approach it with heaps of reassuring TLC. Don’t try to be productive. Open your journal and write, “Why do I want to _____________?” (naming your challenge, whatever it is). Then keep writing. Before you stop, set a time for when you will return, and make it a firm date.

With a slow and sensitive start, you’ll soon find that journaling comes easily to you. Not only will you look forward to your regular journaling sessions, but you’ll also continue to be prompted by your journaling thoughts between writings.

At this point, your journal has become your own personal therapist, to whom you can turn for feedback, advice, and guidance whenever you wish.

How exactly does it work? Here’s an example.

If you’re a morning journaler:

•    What are you excited about doing today?
•    What do you hope to accomplish?
•    What are potential challenges you might face, and how can you overcome them?
•    How will you feel at the end of the day?
•    Do you have any insights from yesterday?
•    Were your predictions close to the reality of the day?

Or if you prefer to journal in the evenings:

•    What were your victories?
•    What were your roadblocks?
•    How do you feel?
•    What do you hope for tomorrow?

Keep it simple. Don’t try to write well, or be clever. Just observe and record and listen to your Inner Coach.

With faithful journaling, you find yourself bravely facing challenges in actionable ways and achieving success at unprecedented levels. Your journal is a tool to help you get better at this thing called life.

Author Bio
Mari L. McCarthy – Journal / Writing Therapist. Are you looking for more information on journaling and its therapeutic effects?  Visit Mari’s site at http://www.CreateWriteNow.com. Her trademarked program, Journaling for the Health of It! ™, helps her clients live healthier and happier lives. Recent publications include 53 Weekly Writing Retreats: How to Use Your Journal to Get Healthy Now and Mari’s Most Museful Journaling Tips.
You can also join Mari on Facebook and Twitter

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Image credit: Philo Nordland

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EVERY day, or at least every other day, I make sure to take a few minutes to write in my journal. It is precious time, just for me. I have a tendency to get so involved in all my other commitments — work, family, taking care of the house and others — that it’s easy to forget to take time for myself. Isn’t that the way it always is? Don’t we always think that everything and everyone else is more important than we are?

Journaling is something you can do to take care of yourself, like putting lotion on your skin after a bath or cutting your nails or styling your hair. Would you consider taking care of yourself in those basic ways luxurious and selfish? I don’t think so. And I believe it’s as important to take care of your emotional/spiritual self through quiet practices such as meditation and writing. Personally, I need to write just as much as I need to floss my teeth.

Actually, that’s not a bad analogy, because if I don’t write, the emotional plaque builds up until decay forms in the enamel of my wellbeing, causing pain. And just like flossing, practicing what I preach (writing regularly in my personal journal) takes discipline, commitment, and more importantly, a sense that I deserve this time for myself. (That’s where the analogy ends, though, because writing is way more enjoyable than flossing.)

Would-be journal writers often worry, “Where will I find the time to journal? I already have too much to do.” If you, like them, are concerned about making a time commitment to journal writing, think about the time you spend taking care of your body every day and remember that journal writing can be accomplished in only ten minutes. Don’t you deserve this small gift of time?

Maybe the question we should all be asking of ourselves is, “How can I not find the time to journal?”

WRITING THROUGH TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY clarifies perspective and strengthens decision-making skills.

We all have times of change in our lives, times when we don’t know what’s going to happen next, when the future seems to be engulfed by a vague, gray fog, inaccessible and maddeningly disconcerting. When confusion seems to reign, and you aren’t sure of a direction in which to move or have difficulty choosing between two or more options, writing can help you clarify and organize your thinking. It supports you as you sort through confusion to find clarity and purpose. By exploring the feelings surrounding each possible solution or direction, you gain self knowledge which helps you make difficult decisions and move forward. When you write about your life, you shed light on your reasons for traveling in a particular direction and, when you are in doubt, it helps you suss out the underlying sources of any confusion.

Even more challenging, there are times when we feel out of control of the direction that life is taking, times when there is no choice to be made, when the uncertainty is all there is and we have to wait for what comes next.  When there seems to be nothing to do but sit in middle of all that uncertainty.

I am the kind of person that deals with stress by taking action, and I think that there is almost nothing more difficult than feeling out of control and having to wait for something to happen or an opportunity to present itself. Writing, however, is something I can control. It’s an action I can take each day, no matter what else is happening in my life.

Writing is like making a quilt depicting your life. Each day’s entry in your journal or notebook is a square, a design of your own making, upon which you can put anything you like, using any colors and threads you choose. Over time, looking at the different squares you have created, you begin to see patterns and trends in your life and understand your way of thinking. You begin to form a vision of the overall design you want our quilt to have and, with more clarity and conscious intent, create new designs and stories.

There is no wrong or right, no artistic or non-artistic aspect to your quilt. Every square in your life-writing quilt is perfect and simply a record of your inner and outer world. How is your life-writing quilt shaping up? What (or which) story do you want today’s square to tell?

A HEALTHY PHYSICAL PROCESS means that we take in food and water from our environment, process it for nutrients, then expel the wastes. In the same way, a healthy emotional process means that we take in our life experiences, process them for nutrients, find what we need to grow and survive, and then expel the garbage. But many of us simply hold onto our emotions, storing them away in our bodies, and we become emotionally constipated, unable to let go of that which isn’t helping us in any way. Eventually, when our system gets too backed up, we get sick. We can no longer function as we should. We become sluggish, unresponsive, depressed.

Keeping the flow of our experiences processed helps to keep us emotionally healthy. Writing regularly is one way of accomplishing this. For example, I once wrote a three-page angry diatribe to my ex-husband telling him everything I hated about him. I really told him off! I was able to say everything I needed and wanted to say, no matter how ugly, cruel, or unfair, because I knew it would stay in my journal. I didn’t have to censor myself in any way. Afterwards, I felt calm, relieved, and able to think about him with a more balanced perspective.

Writing about past events works the same way. The process of exploring emotions associated with events and people in our past can be like cleansing and disinfecting a wound that refuses to heal. Yes, it can be a little painful, but afterwards the wound is clean; the clogged emotional state that kept the wound active has been bathed and soothed and has a better chance of healing properly.

It’s important, whenever you’re writing for emotional healing, to write as honestly as possible. Writing honestly and vulnerably connects you to yourself, like looking in a mirror helps you to understand your own facial expressions, or listening to a recording of your voice helps you understand how your vocal inflections might be heard by others. Writing about difficult or hurtful experiences — describing the events, recreating the conversations, the pain, the emotion, and acknowledging the emotion that still exists in you while you’re writing — can help you to heal. Writing about these events, whether they occurred years ago or this morning, allows you to move through, process, keep what you need to grow, and release unhelpful thoughts and feelings.

Something to write about: Think about something that happened in the past that still brings a surge of emotion when you remember it—anger, joy, excitement, fear, whatever. Write about your feelings and what you would do, if anything, to change that event. If you want to, rewrite the event as if it actually happened differently. Now, how do you feel?