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Journal Writing

Christina Sexton Wilcox

What Should I Journal About?
(Part 2 in a three-part series on successful journaling)

If journal writing seems like a waste of time, spruce it up with emotion, combat good and evil, or tell your bossy neighbor off. It may be even more productive than you first think. Using practical advice from successful and new writers on how to write dynamic journals, you can turn daily conversations into saleable prose.

Find Conflict & Emotion In Daily Life

If you're still stuck in the this-is-what-I-did-today mode of journal writing, liven it up with some emotion. There's nothing emotional (or interesting) about entries that read, "Today I talked to my mom on the phone and argued about my getting a perm. Then I got the mail."

Since most interesting writing has conflict, start there. Does your mom constantly call you with advice or gossip? Do you screen your calls to avoid her? What is it about the mailman that creeps you out? Does the fact that your husband reads your letters infuriate you so much that you just want to scream? Do you have someone in your life who blows everything out of proportion? As a writer, you can expand upon these people and situations to make your writing more interesting.

For example, write a letter to your mother telling her how you avoid her calls and the ensuing gossiping. List every bit of gossip she has passed on to you. What ended up being true; what was false? What were the consequences? Now stash that letter away and read it a week later. Once you distance yourself from the situation, you'll see that your emotionally charged, conflict-filled letter could be the foundation of a great short story.

I had a college roommate whose logic and view on life was very different from mine. Plus, she readily admitted that the world revolved around her and that she thought she knew everything about everything. Consequently, she was an infuriating person to have a serious conversation with. In my journal from that time period is this venting letter to my boyfriend:

If I have to listen to another one of Carol's life lessons again, I'm going to explode. I can't live here much longer. She told me today that you're going to cheat on me. She guaranteed it for me. All because you've had "numerous" girlfriends before me. How does she even know that? She thinks that David won't cheat on her EVER because he's only had one other girlfriend. But he's older than you are, and I think there's something wrong with that. I tried to reason with her. I even gave her the old "Sow Your Wild Oats" theory, but will she listen? No way. How long am I supposed to keep having one-way conversations with someone who knows nothing yet won't listen to anyone else's point of view? One cigarette after another, she spews out little puffs of smoke between her screwy "words of wisdom." Every sentence starts with either, "Quite frankly...," or "I hate to break it to ya, but ..." Well, I'm at my own breaking point!

Two weeks later, while packing my bags and moving into my own apartment, I pulled it out and laughed when I reread it. With a little time and distance, I realized that Carol is a great character. I decided to make the most of her crazy, mixed-up views. She is the main character (and villain) in my story, "Harriet's Problem," which is about a frustrated young woman who gets sweet revenge on her know-it-all roommate by revealing her boyfriend's whopping secret.

Create A List Of Opposing Emotions

If you have gone completely blank on what to write about, make a list of what you love and what you hate. Interesting things surface when you focus on two opposite and extreme emotions. When you've exhausted love/hate, try a list of what you believe to be good/evil, stressful/calming, and so on. Expand on these lists with anecdotes that answer the question: "Why do I feel this way?" Turn your lists around and write about what kind of person you'd be if your Love list was your Hate list. From these lists come vivid images (and concrete sketches) for settings, characters, and plots.

Holly, a student of UC-Berkeley's Professor Robert Hass, has started journaling as a way of coming up with images for her poetry. She journals in the evenings when she has time to reflect on her busy day. One of her favorite ways to start her journal is, "Dear Tomorrow..." It's her cathartic way of debriefing from university life by visualizing what happened today and letting Tomorrow know what she expects it to provide. She includes descriptions of people, colors, and sounds that move her in either positive or negative ways. For example, in the following entry she writes about the color she loves the most-blue:

Dear Tomorrow, so much is riding on you. Papers are due, expectations are high. Do you ever get blue? Why does blue get such a bad rap and you get top billing? Blue isn't sad; instead it lights my way. Some blues are snappy. Most stir me to smile. Blue's the color of night and day, shiny, bright in the new light, dark in its last light. So white it turns blue, like ice and snow. Crunchy blue footprints by the slushy lake. Blue like the mountains, blue like the moon, blue like the wind.

From this set of disjointed images, she wrote "Sunset Blues" for her poetry workshop's final project:

Out past the last cabin-dimmed light you can walk for hours crunching through yesterday's snow and listen to the night settle in the dry throated breeze swaying in ice-crusted reeds. Occasionally a long slow sigh breathes high inside the trees and the moon in yellow tinged fullness sleeps on cerulean breast.

Take Advantage Of The New People In Your Life

Janice, a writer's group colleague, found a pen pal that she corresponds with daily. He's a friend of a friend from across the country. Although Bruce is a real person, she has never met him face to face. Soon she realized she was telling her stories to someone that didn't know her faults from her best features. She found that she could retell the worn-out stories of her life with a renewed spark. Everything was new (and, therefore, interesting) to him--little bits of her life, her family dynamics, tragically funny high school jobs, and so forth.

In one correspondence, she mentioned that her first car was a 1977 Plymouth Volare, which she drove all through high school and college. He made fun of it and the discourse went like this:

Hey Bruce, how can you dog the American-made Volare! To refresh your memory, you said, "It was rare that a worse car was ever perpetrated on the American car-buying public!" BUT, I must disagree! That car practically ushered me into womanhood! (You see the word "PRACTICALLY"? Well, that's exactly what it means, nothing more.) It was my BABY! I know that it wasn't a BMW or Mercedes, but it was the Mercedes of too-big-yet-very-safe-extra-large sedans! I mean, the thing was a vault!

In fact on my way to my first day of school during junior year, I tested its safety by slamming into a huge gold Buick right in front of the school! The whole front grill fell to the ground in little pieces, but I barely felt a thing. That's just the first of many examples why the 1977 Plymouth Volare two-door, two-tone (white with deep burgundy red) T-topped sedan was one of the finest cars ever to skid over the streets of San Diego, Sacramento, and parts between and otherwise unknown.

If you continue to pursue this argument, I will have to keep you enthralled with more installments of The Volare: T-tops--why they were cool and how much they leaked in the rain; Two-toning With Red-on-White-Chemicals I used on the Volare to get the white white and the red red; How Fast Can the 1977 Volare Really Go?--My first ticket; Is That Sugar in My Gas Tank?; and The Night the Horn Stopped Blowing!

Janice is now working on a coming-of-age book that centers on the adventures of a high school girl and her first car. Having a new audience helped Janice see her own life from a new perspective. It also sparked her memory, tapping into experiences she had long forgotten. Ultimately, it refreshed her writing and gave her the validation she needed to expound on her life experiences. Now, whether or not she intends to e-mail her stories to him, she begins her journal writing with, "Good Morning, Bruce," and off she goes.

In next month's installment of this series, I'll discuss how you can find your "journaling" voice.