School Yourself in the Writing Field
Writing in your journal every day may seem arduous. Perhaps you
may think you have nothing to write there. But to write every
day and fish for those ideas is one way to tap your untapped
brain resources and apply them to a writer's page - every single
day.
There was a book called "The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." I thought for sure that book
would be too didactic, too academic and way too "genius level"
for me to be able to read it. But I did, and I'm glad for that.
It turned out to be at only an above average reading level, not
a genius one. And it gave me some ideas about writing.
For one thing, in that book, the anthropologist author, who had
a bent toward psychiatry, claimed that early humans probably
heard voices before they learned how to talk. He thought that
people as recent as the ancient Greeks and Romans still heard
voices as they went about their business of war and
civilization. Now, I'm not claiming you should hear voices, but
it is the sort of claim that shows that all people must have an
imagination of some sort.
You don't have to hear voices in your head - I'm not suggesting
that. The last thing I want you to do is to end up on
psychiatric medications. Those are cripplers. But you can find
your own "inner voice" that will tell you what to write in a
daily journal, if you simply pick up your pen or pencil, take an
empty journal, and begin to write down your thoughts. This
should be the same as your daily exercise and dietary programs.
You can write on the bus on a long commute to your job. You can
write in your car on the same type of long commute. You can set
aside an hour of your time every day to write in your journal,
quietly after dinner to avoid desert and those extra calories.
Your "desert" can instead be you writing in your journal.
In a ten year period of time, I managed to fill up some thirty
or more hardbound empty journaling books, each with about 200
pages, simply by writing about my life in them at odd moments. I
wrote, I wrote, and I wrote some more, about anything and
everything. It was good practice and kept my word knowledge, my
writing capabilities, and my grammatical and syntax abilities
alive and well during "dry" periods of no real writing work in
my life. I've been a freelance writer, copyeditor and ghost
writer since before 1980, and doing this simple practice really
"oiled the machinery" of my writing. Now that I write articles
and website copy on a regular basis, I don't seem to need it
anymore. But I'm thinking of taking up journaling again in the
near future. I live to write.
Go for it. Buy one of those thick, padded books. They have blank
pages. Buy two or three if they're on sale or you have the
money. Date each and every one of your entries - you might want
to refer back to them later as material to write something from.
And make an entry into the journal each and every day of your
life. When you finish off one journal, move on to the next one,
keeping the filled journal in a box or somewhere safe.
I finally had to dump all of my journals, as we were moving and
they were "only taking up room." I severely regret that now, as
I had kept track of my life that way. Fortunately, I have enough
in my head from which to glean and garner my life history,
should I ever happen to get around to writing it. But I had
poured my entire soul out into those journals, even though they
were mostly only a daily log of my activities.
As Kurt Vonnegut, said, however, the writing itself is what
matters, even if you throw it all away. Write into your
journals, and get started on writing that novel. You may feel
disgust, like you never will get published. But I wrote my first
novel, and I got published. It may be a small start for you, but
it will happen. You will have to keep at it. Daily, on a day by
day basis, is best. Write for every single day of your life. You
won't be sorry.