Keeping a Journal Can Facilitate Good Writing

As a writer, I often use my journal to play around with strategies I pick up from other writers’ work or with strategies I invent to get myself writing.  Playing around with the strategies, in combination with observing the “show don’t tell rule” (use imagery and detail that appeal to the senses rather than general summarizing words), I find my journal writing becomes valuable writing practice.

One of my favorite exercises is to play with sound in my writing. We are a very visual culture and it is easy to neglect sound imagery in writing since visual imagery comes more naturally to most of us.  To force myself to get sound into my writing, I think of a noisy place–like the street I used to live on in Los Angeles on garbage collection day–and then set about describing it in a journal entry with words that describe the sounds.  Here’s an example:

On garbage collection days, the disposal company my husband calls Loud and Early slams and smashes its way into our sleep.  We hear the sounds of garbage cans colliding with the thick rusty truck, then scraping and clattering across the asphalt and cement of street and curb.  When we hear the garbage truck grind the dregs of our existence to a pulp, we slide our feet to the floor.  A police helicopter hurls its hello from overhead, shaking the walls and shattering any memory of our dreams.

When my writing includes sounds from my environment, I find myself more immersed in the experience I am writing about and continue writing longer than I might have without the sound imagery.

Smell is another underused sense in written work. I am fond of playing with similes to help evoke smells. What I evoke leads to memories I will put on the page with vivid detail. To start evoking smells, I think of something I smell in my daily life and compare it to something else I remember smelling:

The smell of clothes fresh from the dyer is like the smell of bread baking at my friend’s house.

The smell of the charcoal grill after the fire has died down is like my girlfriend’s clothes after the fire in her apartment.

Smell of jasmine flowers as I walk by is the smell of my grandmother’s dress as I clung to the folds.

What I like about writing these similes is that I never know what leap of association I’ll make and what story I might launch myself into.  The memory of my grade school friend’s apartment building burning down is vivid to me as it comes back through my sense of smell, and I can continue a piece of writing about that with memories of standing outside watching red flames coming out of all the windows and standing with my friend and her mother feeling the heat that the flames produced as we watched fire fighters dragging heavy hoses and climbing onto the roof.

Just as forcing ourselves to write from our senses of hearing and smell can produce topics and skillfully drawn description, relying on certain sentence structures can help us be clever and entertaining.  I am fond of copying fiction writer Ron Carlson’s sentence structure when I want to add wit to my writing.  He shared his style of journaling years ago as a contributor to my book The Writer’s Journal: 40 Contemporary Writers and Their Journals, and I’ve been playing with his ideas ever since. He writes clever sentences and keeps them around for “thickening the brew” when he fleshes out stories.  Here’s one of his sentences: “They discovered that the elevator in their dilapidated building acted as a bellows for the air conditioning, so they sent the child out an hour every afternoon to ride up and down.”

When I used Ron Carlson’s sentence as a pattern, I wrote this:

Because I discovered that my cats’ scratching altered the upholstery on my couches, I let them do a patch every day and then I came with darning needles and embroidery paraphernalia and wove a beautiful array of colors into the tatters. Now people all over the world order my cat-scratched upholstery.

I have invented the beginning of a story about the way the business changed the “I’s” life. I know I could also keep on using the sentence to write about more discoveries until I evoked an interesting character who just loves to put the world together in her own way.

The beauty of playing with these exercise ideas is that you can use them over and over when you don’t know quite what to say but know you’d like to be saying it more skillfully and surprisingly!  Using the strategies again and again, you’ll find that you begin to automatically incorporate more playful attitudes into your writing and interest yourself more in putting your words on the page. And you’ll find you have spawned many opportunities for more writing.

Learning to Handle Feedback Well

I once wrote to Joni Cole, author of Toxic Feedback, about her informative and compelling book for writers and teachers of writing on a subject we all talk about but usually don’t see broached over the length of a book.

In the book, she proclaims that

The time has come to rid the world of toxic feedback so that writer’s can avail themselves” of the help others give.

But how to make sure we give and receive feedback that is not toxic to the developing material?

By understanding, Joni said in our conversation, that it “takes two to create the toxicity” and that “writers can convert any kind of feedback into nutritious fertilizer for their writing.”

It has always seemed to me that to use feedback well, writers need to be able to listen to response to their work without defending their work.

Joni agreed, saying  she tought that

effectively receiving or giving feedback does require esteem. Particularly as the writer, you need to value and trust your own writerly instincts above all else, especially when the opinions and comments are flying at you like the Romans, arrows at St. Sebastian. Without a strong writing ego, so many of us, when confronted with criticism, panic, or get depressed, or try to fix the story to meet everyone’s demands. But that’s how we get ourselves in trouble, because I don’t think any piece improves when we write by committee, or under that kind of duress.

Acknowledging yourself as the boss of your story, understanding that as author, you are the most qualified one for that job, makes it possible to hear and sort through all the opinions and suggestions you will receive in writers’ groups and classes. As Joni put it,

It frees you up to listen to even blunt constructive criticism with less defensiveness and more appreciation. And it serves as a reminder that it is your job, as the writer, to consciously manage the process, so that you get the kind of feedback that serves you, your particular writing process, and your work best.

I have always found that just listening and taking notes and not deciding right then if I agree or not, helps me a lot. That way, I listen well and then I let the thoughts of others cook around for a bit. I usually find that I do need to fix things in my drafts, but most often not the way the others had recommended. I must fix it my own way based on the fact that there were areas in which others were jarred or confused or felt they were missing something. That way, feedback became something I love to gather.