The Blog & the Journal - Writing About You -. Cecilia Jr. Tanner
And later at university we study the environmental hazards to the plant systems: the various insects that attack certain trees, the fertilizer requirements of the different species and so on.
The learning process is one of noticing increasingly the particulars in our environment, the details of greater knowledge. So also does the writer/artist.
Show not Tell
Instead of saying, “I was cranky and miserable”, try pinning down exactly what you did that was cranky.
“I yelled at Gerald not to slam the door when he came in from school. ‘I didn’t slam the door,’ he replied, and then I gave him a tirade about how he had slammed the door. Actually he shuts the door with the same bang every day but today it annoyed me.”
Here we can see the cranky person. This is good. And the crankiness of an older person will be clearly different than the cranky behavior of a child.
Try to observe the specifics. Instead of writing
“I walked the urban street and smelled various food cooking.”
Write
“I walked the Montreal street, following my nose past the walk-up flats and low rent rooming houses, and smelled the cabbage rolls cooking from the flat below the street level, then the beef and onions next door, and the Italian sauce simmering behind another ragged curtained window.”
So to make the writing sparkle, we must show what we observe.
Use specific actions for generalities.
“I didn’t feel safe in the places where I stayed.”
becomes,
“I haven’t had one accommodation with a deadbolt lock so far, so I put all the movable furniture, the little couch that sloped forward, the homemade side table and the two aluminum kitchen chairs against the door at night.”
The key is to make your writing as visual as possible. But don’t overdo it. There can be too many details that don’t add to the writing. Be selective. Art is about selecting only the right details.
Rewriting and Proofreading
Tighten, tighten, tighten those sentences.
Vary the paragraphs from short to shorter.
Nobody really wants to read dense prose.
The more the writing looks like pictures, the more people will read.
Write on an angle maybe, if your program can do this
(InDesign).
Write in different colors.
Change up the fonts and the capital letters.
How often do you look at a magazine or a newspaper and the only thing you read are the captions to the pictures?
Suggested Exercises
1.Name something and write a list about it non-stop for a time period, 8-10 minutes. Some days lots of material will surface, others not so much. If nothing comes, write your name over and over until words come.
dogs
best friends
coffee
social drinking
literature
sore feet, back?
cars
hair styles
Do one of these every day for a week. Notice how your thoughts start to complete themselves in the time frame after the first few days.
2.Write a cluster of words of things that bug you. We all have the words for annoying things like appliances that don’t work as soon as we buy them, or people, relatives etc. Choose one of these, write another list or cluster on just that one, and expand it into a paragraph.
3.Write a cluster of all the things that please you; choose one; write another list, and expand it into a paragraph.
4.Take 3 days to think about one of the paragraphs you have written (above). Jot notes on what you think. Rewrite the paragraph using those notes and other ideas that grow out of them. See how an idea grows clearer when you actively think about it over a period of time.
5.Write a Haiku from a part of the clusters you have made.
6.Write a description of your favorite place–your kitchen, rose garden, bridge, porch. Add selective details. Show not tell. Remember the 5 senses.
Journals – Why?
Carve your initials on a tree, imbed your footprint in the fresh cement of a new sidewalk, paint your name on a rock, blaze the trees as you trek through the woods, blog your inner world into the big air or write in a journal.
Journal writing is all about making marks, landmarks, Markings (as Dag Hammerskjold’s journal is titled), in order to give life significance, to survive death or to testify to the passage of a sensitive life in a world so large that whole civilizations can disappear..
You may write in a journal thinking you will want to look back and see where you’ve been so that you don’t keep rotating in circles. Or maybe you are just letting the other bears know you are in the woods.
Henry David Thoreau wrote thousands of diary entries as a consequence of casually being asked by Ralph Waldo Emerson if he [Thoreau] kept a journal.
Surprisingly, the journal as a blog is making a huge revival.
Instead of the old Christmas letter, I had several friends and relatives send me links to their blogs where they had great Christmas letters with pictures of their kids and holidays laid out in surprisingly professional layouts. So much better than chewing your way through the old grocery list of their activities that I have received in the previous years.
Self Knowledge
The private journal presents the possibilities of exploring your inner world and your outer world.
Barbellion wrote in a Jourrnal of a Disappointed Man (1912),
“I can think of no more interesting volume than a detailed intimate, psychological history of my own life.”
Certainly this is the extreme of narcissism which one should avoid, but the exercise is one route along the journey to Knowing Thyself. When we understand ourselves, we start to understand others.
Capturing the Aweness
There can be no foretelling a person’s life. We have no script before we live our lives, no plot, just moments of dramatic conflict, sometimes more, sometimes less action, occasional fun, sorrow, grief and a great deal of just getting along.
Like the writing of a Haiku in Japanese is meant to capture the ‘aweness’ of a moment, the writing of a journal can capture the ‘aweness’ of your life, the sources of your delights and the pitfalls of your mistakes, traveling the journey in full consciousness instead of through a blur of unrelated forgotten incidents like so many dinners last week.