The Joy of Journalling

 Since I cleared off my spare desk at the start of the first lockdown I’ve had a dedicated writing space for the first time.  I’ve realised that it’s the best spot in the house, looking out over the neighbours’ gardens.  Currently spring is unfolding, providing me with a line of leafy trees which hide my view of the nearest houses.

I wake early these days, sometimes as early as 5 a.m.  Before I rearranged my working space I tended to waste these early hours messing about on social media.  But I realised I had a chunk of time, sometimes up to three hours, before the proper business of the day, in which to get things done.

So at the start of first lockdown I trained myself to write in that early morning period.  And I’ve found that being totally quiet without any interruptions either inside or outside has allowed my characters and stories to deepen.  I seem to be hearing my characters’ voices better, and as I write some totally unexpected piece of internal dialogue, or a piece of personal history I didn’t know existed, will quietly bubble up.  I used to write in cafes, but I won’t go back to that, even when we’re allowed inside again.My work is deeper and richer for being done at home in solitude,

I started to wonder if the same effect would occur if I started writing Morning Pages again.  Morning Pages are Julia Cameron’s invention, and in her classic book The Artist’s Way she describes them as “three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness”.  She describes them as “brain drain, since that is one of their main functions.”

I’ve started to do Morning Pages before, but I’ve never stuck to the routine.  I think one reasons for that is that I didn’t have a dedicated writing space to go to to get work done.  Now I have I’m sticking to the pages.  I even painted a sunrise forest scene on the front of my notebook to encourage me to do them.

My routine now is to make a mug of Earl Grey tea, sit down at my desk and write my morning pages first, just as Julia urges they be done.  In the quiet of the early morning, with no people or noisy vehicles about, nothing disturbs my thoughts.  I’ve found the pages good for putting down on paper the thoughts that run through my mind when I wake at 3 a.m.  I’ve been able to defuse some of the things that bother me then by writing them down in the cold light of day, then examining them in writing, and asking if what I’m thinking about is really true.  When I’ve got the evidence written down, most of the time I see these fears aren't valid.

I’ve also had ideas for non-fiction books bubble up from this free form writing.  At some stage I will go through those pages and type up those notes.  They include tables of contents for suggested books, titles, and angles for dealing with subjects that are different from what’s already out there.

In those pages I find myself examining whether I’m writing the ‘right thing’ to get published.  And then I tell myself that there is no ‘right thing’, only my thing, authenticity, my individual truth.  Own voices are the things which get work published.

The joy of this kind of journaling is that it helps me to uncover the thoughts which are holding me back, and gives me a place to examine, question, and challenge whether those things are true.  I can’t see me stopping doing Morning Pages this time, they’re simply too valuable.