I have just been reading Writer Magazine’s June 2011 interview of Gail Godwin, regarding her recently released The Making of a Writer, Volume 2: Journals, 1963-1969. Godwin’s purpose in publishing her edited journal entries is to inspire other writers by sharing her journey and growth as a writer, as well as how she mines her journals for story ideas.

Godwin made several statements during the interview that resonate strongly with me, and I’d like to share them with you. She speaks of journal writing as “an ongoing conversation” about the themes that are most important to us, about art, how to live our lives, what it means to be human. And how the themes that run through our journals signal parts of us that need attention, or “working and reworking.”

I have often said we write in our journals, not only to help us process our emotions and thoughts in the current moment, but also for the future, so we can look back and say, “There is where I have been.” Godwin confirms this idea and highlights the importance of recording details we think are mundane because, later, we need those details to remember who we were at the time, exactly what happened, and what was going on in the outside world.

She says, “The longer you keep journals, you realize you have a commitment to the self … So you become more and more responsible about putting in the kinds of things that one forgets–how people talk, how rooms look, just trivial things that make a moment unique.”

This week’s journaling prompts will help you give context to current life events, as well as help you write more complete, complex, and descriptive journal entries — today and tomorrow.

1. Write about the most important issue you’re dealing with in your life right now. What’s at stake? How does this issue or problem affect other areas of your life? What are some possible solutions?
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2. If anyone else is involved, write a passage of dialog (remembered or imagined), discussing this issue with this other person or people. Describe expressions, tone of voice, and setting for the conversation.
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3. What is going on in the outside world — political, social, spiritual — that affects how you think about this issue?
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4. In diary form, write a list of everything that you did or experienced today (or yesterday, if you’re writing in the morning). For example: Got up at 6:30; ate strawberries and eggs for breakfast; wore my favorite red flowered dress to work; beautiful sunny day, wished I was outside instead of inside an air-conditioned office; got angry at my boss … and so on. Repeat this prompt once a week.
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5. Read a previous journal entry — preferably one written at least a year or more ago. What do you wish you knew about that day or that situation that you didn’t include in your entry? How could you have provided more context? Include those kinds of contextual details in all of your journal entries this week. At the end of the week look back and think about what else you could include that might help your future self.
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6. Freewrite for ten minutes about what, for you, is the greatest benefit you receive from journal writing.
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7. In your journal, write a real-life scene from your life today. Don’t think anything is worth recording? Think again … the scene doesn’t need to be dramatic or emotional. It could be a conversation at the kitchen table, a chance encounter with a bird, a moment of reflection looking out a window, an interaction with a child. Include as many details as you can.

Finally, I invite you to share by leaving a comment below: What is the most important thing you learned about yourself or your writing by engaging with these journaling prompts?

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Image Credit: Kevin Dooley
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Journal writing is good for so many things: emotional catharsis, sorting out problems, recording life events, self-reflection, and personal growth. It is also a writer’s tool, in which we write about our characters, explore possibilities, and practice writing dialog. Often, though, we don’t make use of previous entries. We mull over things in writing, and then forget about them.

What would you say if I were to tell you that your previous journal entries are full of treasure, just waiting for you to discover? It’s true, you know: our journals are wonderful places, where the seeds of meaning lie dormant, waiting for us to awaken them. In my recent article, Journal Writing for Memoir: Mining Metaphor, posted at womensmemoirs.com, I discuss how to mine your previous journal entries for images and metaphors you can use in your memoir, as well as offer several journal writing prompts to help you dig more deeply into their meanings (click the above link to read the post and then come back here to read the rest of this one).

Notice what you’ve written in your journal about a past event, particularly a memory from your childhood. Is there a specific, seemingly inconsequential detail that appears in what you’ve written? Something that stays in memory? Perhaps you keep seeing the cat cross the hallway during the time of the event, or the way the sunlight slanted across the living room floor, or the teapot on the table. These remembered images have significance.

This week’s journaling prompts are designed to help you further explore the meanings of images and metaphor extracted from past journal entries.

1. Does your image have a color, a sound, a smell? What is it, and what emotions do you associate with those sensory details?
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2. What associations does an image like yours have in mythology, fairy tales, or in stories you’ve read? How has it been used in movies? Do any of these uses resonate for you? If so, write about how it was used in the story or movie, and what about that use feels true for you.
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3. If the image involves an activity — gardening, for instance — write about that activity using as much detail as possible. Write about preparing for the activity (putting on gloves, holding the pruning shears in your hand), what it feels and smells like (to dig into the loam, plant seeds, pull weeds). What part of this activity carries the greatest emotional charge, is most fulfilling, dangerous or exciting?
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4. Think of someone in your life you’ve looked up to as a mentor or wise person. It could be a friend, relative, or teacher. Write a letter to yourself from that person, and in that letter have that person tell you what he or she feels the importance of that image to be.
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5. What main concept does that image represent to you? For example, the image of a red skirt might mean defiance. The metaphor then is, defiance is a red skirt. Write five sentences that extend that metaphor. (For example, When worn short and daring, it may reveal more than you intend, or it shouts to be noticed.)
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6. More metaphor extension play, using the _______ is to _________, as _________ is to ________ format. (A red skirt is to defiance as a blue skirt is to conformity.) Play with the second half of that pairing to explore other possible relationships of meaning with your original image.
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7. Is there a person in your memory to whom you assign that image? For example, someone who wore a red skirt or someone who gardened? Make a list of that person’s physical and psychological characteristics. How many of these characteristics relate to that image, and why?

These journaling prompts are a start. I would love to hear from you: how have images from your past infiltrated your journal, and what meaning do you make of them?
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Related Articles:
Why Write? Journaling for Memoir
Blog Talk: Finding Your Writing Voice
How Journaling Can Help You Write Memoir
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Image Credit: Tricia Wang
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THIS week’s journaling prompts help us explore our responses to painful world events, as well as how we could, can, and do help others. The prompts are designed to help us understand, on a deeper level, what triggers our sense of empathy for other human beings. I’d like to continue this theme and talk about the sharing of life’s ups and downs that is the “human condition,” and how we make meaning of life and death.

After all, how do you make sense of natural disasters that cause thousands of deaths and untold suffering in other ways? How do you make sense of war, or of humans’ cruelty to others? To make meaning of something means to create an understanding of it. So what do we do when there are things we simply cannot understand?

When we don’t understand something — whether it’s a natural disaster or the actions of another person –  we can respond in a number of ways.

• We can turn away in denial:  “That didn’t really happen,” “It’s too far away and doesn’t concern me,” “It’s too big to think about,” or “I have my own problems to attend to.”
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• We can judge it (or others):  “They deserve punishment,” “This person (or this organization) is to blame,” “They’re stupid (evil, horrible, etc.).”
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• We can look for reasons: “This happened because …,” “He wouldn’t have acted that way if he had been loved as a child,” “Centuries of war and hatred are impossible to surmount.”
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• We can accept something as inevitable: “There is no way I will ever understand this, and no way to change it.”
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• We can try to change the situation: “I’m supporting [this organization] that is working for change,” “I’m banding together with my neighbors,” “I’m demonstrating or protesting,” “I’m working with the victims.”

Whatever our responses, they are our way of coping and creating meaning out of situations and events.

These are not easy issues to think about or to write about. Nevertheless, I invite you to reflect on and write about your own responses and ways that you attempt to understand and make meaning of the larger issues related to the human condition. Writing about your own responses and the belief systems surrounding those responses will help you to increase in self-knowledge. And when we understand ourselves, we are able to contribute in more meaningful ways to the world around us.

I also invite you to add to the conversation. How does journal writing to understand larger issues help you to understand yourself better?

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Image Credit: nutmeg66

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I have written before about how journal writing helps us make meaning of life’s events. Did you know that it can also help improve your communication with others?

Whether we’re writing or speaking, our goal is to communicate our thoughts and feelings. At the most basic level, every time you write, even when you are the only audience for your writing, you bring to the surface what is rumbling around in your heart and mind. When journal writing, you have the freedom to bring up vague ideas and give them definition and form, to surface buried feelings and examine and nurture them into a shape that makes sense.

It takes work to do this. Just getting the thoughts onto the page with words and sentences in the right order is a challenge. At times, it can be frustrating or even frightening. However, when you practice clarifying your feelings and making meaning of your perceptions in your journal, you have done the hardest part.

You can then bring that clarity into writing for and speaking with others. And because you’ve taken the time to understand how to say it to yourself, you will be able to say it to others in ways they understand. Whether your communication is in conversation with family or via email and business correspondence at work, your meaning has a much better chance of being received as you intended.

Here’s a prompt to help you get started:

Think about something in your life that confuses you in some way. Perhaps you’re trying to understand why someone said something hurtful to you. Perhaps you’re trying to understand conflicting feelings you have about an upcoming decision. Perhaps it was something that happened long ago with which you’ve never managed to come to terms. Write about what happened.

• What about the event or conversation is most confusing to you?
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• What feelings do you have about it? Do some of the feelings conflict with each other? Write about all the feelings and which ones, if any, seem stronger than others. Explore the sources and associations with those feelings.
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• Do you judge yourself in some way, either about your actions or feelings? If so, explore what your judgments are and how you came about to have them.
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• What do you think you have gained (or can gain) from this event? Can you learn something that you can apply to the future? Is there some good you can take away from this event? Can you give it a positive spin?
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• If you were to experience this event again, what might you do differently? Or how would you have avoided the situation altogether?
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• Finally, write about what this event means to you, in the context of your life. If any insights have come to you while writing, include those insights here.

Journal writing matters.

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Image by Joan M. Mas
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THIS YEAR I began the habit, at the beginning of each month, of reading my journal entries for the same month of the previous year. It’s so interesting to recall where I was a year ago at this time, to read about my hopes and dreams and fears. I always want to know: Have I made any progress? What was I working on? What was going on for me emotionally? Are there any patterns related to time of year?

So here I am, at the start of October, 2010, reading my journal entries for October of 2009. And I came across a passage I thought I would share with you because it struck me as profound. (Who knew that I could write something profound?) At the time, I was writing about the concept of simplicity — trying to understand why I make my life so complicated and to remember a time when my life was simple. Here is what I wrote:

I can’t think of a simple time in my life, except perhaps when I was a very young child. And that image, the image of me dancing on a hill feeling the wind on my skin, is such a fleeting, long-ago thing. It’s an image I manufactured. I know, because I can see myself from the outside as though in a movie. How can I do that, if it’s truly a memory? Yes, I can remember the feelings, the sensations, the joy. But I can also see myself from the outside. I don’t think one can really do that. That’s not a memory — it’s a story of a memory.

Perhaps that’s what writing is. Memories as examined from the outside, externalized so that they become a fixed part of one’s stories about life, about one’s experience and development. I could have chosen anything as a hallmark of my young childhood. I could have chosen the time my brother Michael spray-painted my favorite teddy bear yellow and threw it in the bushes for me to find months later. I remember it quite clearly; I was heartbroken when I found it. But the poster child of memories, for me, is that dance on the hill. Really a mound in the lawn — not a hill — but to my childish mind, a height I had conquered so that I could feel the sky.

One of my MFA professors says that writing is an attempt to stop time. What do you think? Do we write, in part, to stop time, create stories of our memories in order to externalize them and to make meaning of our experiences?

What kinds of memories do you have, like mine, that have been externalized so that you see yourself from the outside? What kinds of memories do we choose to define who we are? (That dancing child of my memory became the dancing teenager and eventually the ballroom dancer of my adulthood.)

I would love to hear your stories. Share them in the comment section below.

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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Tree of Life

MOST PEOPLE carry some form of story around with then. When someone asks who we are, we recite what we do for a living, the roles we play (mother, daughter, husband, father, son, caregiver). And when we tell the stories of our lives, we repeat the things we’ve decided are our truths. Perhaps we were raised in a dysfunctional family, with alcoholic or abusive parents. Or perhaps we grew up in a warm, nurturing home. Either way, what we say about our families of origin are part of our personal stories, part of who we think we are. And we experience life through the framework of this story.

When we journal reflectively — that is, when we write about our past and look at the why’s and how’s of what happened and how it affects us today — we are creating a story and making meaning of our lives. During this process, we usually reinforce the story we always tell ourselves.

Imagine being able to create a new story about your past, who you are, what you can accomplish, and what your future could be like. Reflective Journaling allows us to do just that by reframing our past and our sense of who we are in the world.

For example, as the only girl in a family of six children (that’s right, I had five brothers) I carried a story throughout my life about my brothers beating me up, about having to learn to be tough and to fight for what I wanted. One day, as I was writing about my childhood, I began to question my story. Did my brothers really beat me up? As I searched my memory, I realized that only one of the five ever physically hurt me. Certainly, they were rough with each other, and I was often teased, but for the most part, they left me alone.

And then it hit me that most of my brothers had actually been rather easy on me. With this new perspective, I could no longer see myself as a victim of cruelty, but as the privileged child I was, with high status as the only girl.

When one’s self-image is suddenly transformed from victim to advantaged, the heart opens to new possibilities. This is what happened to me. Suddenly, I could see my life differently; rather than view my past in a negative light, I could appreciate the advantages I had. Not only did this allow me to rewrite my past — and my attitude towards my brothers — it allowed me to rewrite my present.

Today, I invite you to look at some negative aspect of your personal story in a new way.

Take something from your childhood that wounded you and examine everything you think is true. Search your memory as honestly and thoroughly as you can. Is the story that you have carried about accurate? Is there another way to look at what happened? Can you now, as an adult, view the situation through another’s eyes?

If you are able to view a significant event or impression about your past in a new way, ask in what ways that changed perspective might affect how you see yourself today and how you can create a better future.

When we write, we tell stories. And it’s up to us to decide which stories we want to tell. What story — what meaning — are you creating today?

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Image credit: Arte Kjara

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AS I WAS LYING ON MY BACK this morning, groaning through one of my yoga stretches, I was thinking about the journal entry I wrote earlier. I had, in the spirit of my weekly Journaling Through Life E-zine, written an entry using one of this week’s writing prompts. The topic was Time, and the prompt was to create new metaphors for Time by finishing the sentence, “Time is …”

I wrote:
•    Time is a cloud which obscures our view.
•    Time is a road upon which we travel.
•    Time is a strict parent who enforces discipline.
•    Time is a prison within which we must live.
•    Time is an illusion of the human mind.
•    Time is a structure that enhances our creativity.
•    Time is a problem we must solve.
•    Time is a ship in which we travel through space.
•    Time is a guardian of the universe.
•    Time is a school in which we learn.

It never fails to impress me how creating impromptu metaphors reveals so much about our state of mind and how we assign meaning to things. In my case, the fact that so many of my metaphors for Time had a negative feel (a strict parent, a prison, a problem), said a lot about my sense of time as a restriction of some sort.

As I changed positions (still groaning), I wondered if, by reframing my metaphor to something more positive, I might release some of this sense of restriction. And then it came to me: Time is a treasure chest, and each moment is a jewel.

And just like that, the meaning of my yoga session changed from something I disciplined myself to do, to something I had gifted myself. The feel of the carpet under the palm of my hand became a sensory treasure, the breath in my lungs, the gift of presence. Each moment became a jewel, not something forgotten in my rush to move forward and get everything done, but something to be appreciated and treasured.

How we make meaning of life, events, relationships, and even how we view Time, is ultimately a story we tell ourselves.

As you travel through your day, or as you write about it, pick an event you perceive as negative and — just for fun — reframe it with a positive spin. How does that change the event’s meaning for you? How does that change your story? And finally, how do you want to write it into memory?