Archive for the 'Journal Writing' Category

Journal Writing

Some writers do not understand the power of regularly writing in a personal journal.

Journal writing is an excellent way of honing many writing skills that are essential to the writing process. It doesn’t matter much whether you write fiction, non-fiction, articles or blogs, regular writing practice is essential. If possible, I’d encourage all writers, especially beginner writers, to write every day, even if in the first few months or years journal writing is all you do.

I’ve kept a personal journal since July 1990. That means the 20th anniversary is coming up very soon; I must remember to celebrate it here on this blog. I write about anything that comes to mind about events and people in my life. I filled several hand written volumes at first but in recent years I have tended to use my computer. One day I might get around to printing it all out and binding the pages into booklets.

More recently I have also been keeping a writing journal. In this I have recorded the processes I have gone through in writing my stories, especially my recent novels. The journals include details of my ideas, sources of  inspiration, research findings and the decisions I had to make along the way. In part you can read how I went about ‘Writing a Novel’ here.

When I was a classroom teacher I used Journal Writing as an integral part of encouraging children to write. The skills developed in my programme had some amazing results, not just with writing. I wrote about it in this article: The Power of Journal Writing – a Story of Hope.

This article relates the experience I had with one of my former students. I bring it to your attention now – especially for my many new readers who may have missed it at the time.

Good writing.


Writing a novel – a writer’s journal

I am writing a novel.

I need to clarify that statement: I have been thinking about writing a novel. The time for thinking is over. I urgently need to start some serious planning and writing. The pressure is really on, because I have to present the first chapter – or a part of a chapter – at a seminar next week.

Let me back-track a little. Regular readers of this blog will know that I am half way through my Master of Arts in Creative Writing course. So far I’ve been very successful, completing all the assignments and gaining distinctions (or higher) for every one of them. It was hard work, but the writing has been very satisfying. My skills have developed way beyond what I had hoped for, and I’ve produced many pleasing pieces of writing.

I have one unit of study to complete. It’s called Editing and Publishing for Writers, a very practical course aimed at both editing one’s writing and preparing work for publication. The balance of my studies this year will focus on my thesis paper. This will be a 40,000 word novel.

What should I write about?

This is a question that has plagued writers ever since the first stylus was picked up to scratch on a clay tablet in ancient Sumaria. I wasn’t there at the time, so I’m not sure what they wrote about. In varying degrees of perplexity, many writers have always struggled to come up story ideas.

It makes it so much easier if you know the plot line before you start writing. You know – beginning, middle and ending – that sort of thing. Not to forget twists and turns, problems to overcome, births, deaths, marriages, murders and the inevitable taxes.

It also helps to know your characters. Boy or girl, adults, animals, creatures, monsters or aliens: they’ve all been used before and will presumably be used many times more for many years to come.

Finally, it is essential that you are quite clear in your head where and when the story is set. Will it be in a city or a rural setting? Will it be a place near you or far away, perhaps in another country or even another world? Will the story be set in the present time, the distant past or even the future?

Decisions, decisions, decisions

The writer has to make so many decisions when starting to write a short story or novel. These choices are essential in the planning stages and they need to be reviewed constantly while the work is in progress. That is what I will be doing during the coming months.

I will get by with little help from my readers:

This blog will become a journey through the writing of my novel. I plan to write frequently about the process and the decisions I make. I invite reader’s comments as we go; in fact, you can all help me in the process. I will need all the help I can get.

What I am writing: a writing journal

Over the last few days I have been focusing on expanding a journal I am writing for one of the units in my Master of Arts in Creative Writing Course.

This journal is for the Creative Writing: Prose unit. In this unit we have a set text book called Writing Fiction by Australian writer Garry Disher. Most weeks we have a chapter to read which links to the topic of the lecture. We also have a unit reader consisting of short stories gathered together by our lecturer Rosanne Hawke. We are expected to read one or two of the stories each week. We then discuss the techniques used by the writers of the stories. In our journals we are expected to  respond to the text book and the stories, commenting on how useful we found each one.

Each week we also have writing activities in the workshop part of the lecture time. This is a very valuable exercise because we have to write on a set topic or theme or a set activity and it is under the pressure of time, usually no more than ten minutes. We are then expected to share these short pieces in a workshop situation. The feedback from the lecturer and fellow students is often very valuable. We are expected to include some of these writings in our journal, commenting upon the activity and including any second drafts if done.

While this journal may not appear to be actually writing fiction as the unit title suggests, it is still a very valuable assignment. It has forced me to consider each element of the lecture and the writing activities, and analyse how useful each one has been. One of the interesting things about some of the writing exercises is that I now have a resource of more than a dozen (I haven’t bothered to count them)  short stories which can be developed from 100 – 150 words into longer stories of 2000 words or more. They are great short story starters.  All I need now is the time to do that! With seven essays and assignments due in the next 25 days it will be heads down getting everything finished and submitted.

Good writing.

A lifetime of journal writing

I am beginning to discover that there are a few other strange people out there a bit like me.

Quite a few in fact.

Strange, because they, too, are compulsive journal writers.

It seems that once bitten most people are journal writers for life. I have written in my journal off and on for 16 years. I just checked – seems longer. Originally I wrote in lovely hard cover books. In more recent years I have used my laptop exclusively. One day I might even print it all out.

Some people, it seems, write daily. They must be very disciplined, and have lots of time. I’m still working on both discipline and the use of time. I recently came across an essay written by someone who examines the philosophy behind journal writing.

The essay is called Meditations on 25 Years of Journal Writing written by Kimble James Greenwood. This particular journal writer has the bug quite seriously, writing in a multitude of forms.

As I grew older and the process continued, the journals themselves split off and diversified, specialized—so that my main journal, the “personal journal”, was now accompanied by adjuncts: poetry journals, dream journals, fiction journals, quote journals, journals to list memories in, to list books read, movies seen, vocabulary lists, curious gleanings from newspapers and magazines, etc.

I must admit that my journal was a ‘one size fits all’ type. It was at first a record of events. Soon it developed into reflections on life, experiences, comments on events, poetry, snippets of life, cuttings, quotes from books, poems, sermons, scripture and friends. It was like life itself: unplanned, random and meandering.

The Power of Journal Writing – a Story of Hope

I’d like you to meet Jennifer.

That’s not her real name. I don’t want anyone to be able to identify her.

Jennifer at age seven came into my class as a scared, wide-eyed little girl with a few problems. She was selectively mute. She also had a speech impediment, which could explain why she didn’t speak very much. She chose not to communicate in any vocal way. She had a word that sounded vaguely like “toilet” (bathroom for my American readers) when she needed to leave the room. She had another word “dink” which I translated as her desire to go to her bag to get a drink. That was about it.

She hadn’t learned more than a few letters of the alphabet in two years of schooling. She could barely write her name and as for being able to read… well, she recognised her own name, her sister’s name and few other words. I knew it was going to be a challenge, seeing I had seven other children with great learning needs as well. At least most of them knew how to communicate orally, but their writing and reading skills were so lacking. The other 20 students were your average garden variety children with only one or two of above average achievement.

I began an intensive programme of reading, writing, listening, stories, poems, speaking activities, drama – whatever my 30+ years of teaching experience could draw upon to help Jennifer and the other students. I won’t even go into details about the Mathematics programme! These students had GREAT needs.

Step by step, one lesson at a time, one little piece of progress and many setbacks along the way. There were many discouragements, but they were offset by little victories, small advances, concepts learned and applied. One of the vital cogs in all of this was journal writing. Daily exercises in writing were adhered to, even when the going was really tough.

Gradually I gained Jennifer’s confidence and she began trying to say more words. It took every ounce of patience I had. Her speech never became perfect but it was enough to give her a start. Over the next 20 months (I had most of the struggling students for a second year) Jennifer made amazing progress. At first she could only speak a word or two that she wanted to write in her journal. I would actually have to write the words for her in her book and she would trace over them. Then it became phrases and finally whole sentences. Her reading began to improve, her spelling improved, her speaking improved and her confidence soared.

Jennifer and her family moved to another town towards the end of the second year in my class. Just before she left Jennifer wrote a journal entry about an event in her family. She wrote, without any help, a whole page. That was her Everest – and she scaled it. But wait – there’s more! Not only did she write that unassisted, it was in beautiful handwriting, with only three or four small spelling errors. It was correctly punctuated with sentence structures that would put to shame some blog entries I have read.

Is that all? No – she then asked to read her writing aloud using a microphone at a school assembly! And she did it!

Do think I was proud of her? You’d better believe it!

It still brings a tear to my eyes when I think about it.

Update March 2017: some time ago I found out that she has graduated from high school and has successfully completed a TAFE course. Wow.