Acknowledging Change - Journal Prompt

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Good morning readers

We are sitting in a place of seasonal change in the northern hemisphere right now. I am watching the leaves begin to change on a daily basis. I find myself touching the acorns in their cups, the yellowing leaves of the willow, the seed heads and rose hips that line the hedges. I am noticing the way that the light is changing, how the air feels different, thinner. Even the clothes that people are wearing are changing: less shorts, more trousers, more hoodies, less T-shirts. Soon I will be forced to abandon my sandals and wear socks again. A sad day.

I’m noticing, also, how these external changes are affecting me, my mood, my creativity; how I am starting to think about the colours I’ll wear in the autumn, the cosy meals I’ll cook. And also how I am turning towards future plans, a future me. My mind keeps returning to an image of myself wearing long boots and jeans, crunching through woodland with the dog and just the idea of that experience; of stopping and listening to the fall of leaves in a wood, makes me feel more creative. Autumn is my most creative period, it is a period of deeper thinking, still pools of creativity.

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If I think about change in my own life, and there have been several big life changing incidents so far, I imagine my life as a series of events in which there are really two main types of change: change that happens to a person and change that a person instigates. The two go hand in hand sometimes: When my daughter died it changed my whole life, and my identity. But I made the decision to change from the work I was doing and pursue a career in the arts to absorb that change in my life and do something with it. I instigated change on the back of a change that happened to me. I’m sure you have done the same at points in your life. Life is really just a series of physics experiments in which we are acting and reacting to force applied to us.

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I am a writer, I suspect you might be too, and we use the world and ourselves within that world to create. So how do we use these changes, these events to create, or rather, how do we translate those events into creative writing? What are the building blocks of mining your own experiences, of observing the world, how do you get to the creativity?

And how do you then, once you have created something, stop creating it. Where is the place at which you begin editing, or finish a piece of writing?

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A piece of writing is never really finished. It is written at a time when everything in it is important to you, when you have a specific viewpoint on the world based on the things that are happening to you at that one point, or have happened to you up to that point. But you are not the same person you were one day ago, never mind a week, a year, more. Everything that changes around you is impacting you and therefore anything you produce as writing is only produced in that moment. You could go on editing a piece of writing to the end of your life, adjusting it to make sense to the you that you are now, as you change, but then that would defeat the purpose, which is, in many ways, to record that moment, to record that thought, to translate the world in that one moment. Have you ever looked back at your older writing and felt disappointed because it is not ‘as good’ as the writing you now produce, or the themes and styles are not the same? You could edit those again, change them, bring them up to the standard you now hold as the very best of your work. But then what happens in five years time when you look back and feel the same distrust in yourself as a writer, or as the writer you were?

Move on. Let the poems or the prose absorb the moment they were written in. Accept the change.

This all makes it very difficult to invest in your sense of self as a writer. How do you know who you are or what you think if you are always in a state of change? How can you be sure what is relevant and what is not if your perception of yourself and your writing’s worth changes with you.

Woah, there. That’s enough over thinking. And perhaps that’s the trick. To not over think. To not attempt to exert change on yourself or your subject. To be an observer, to be a capturer, not just of your external world, but of your internal world. And to work on making the web of connections between the past and the present, the various viewpoints.

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Katherine May wrote a fantastic piece recently on notebooks and keeping a writer’s notebook.

How to keep a writer’s notebook

I am a lover of journals, diaries, notebooks. I have kept a diary since I was about seven years old and its use has changed over time. At one point it was a place where I drafted poems, ideas, workshops. More recently it became more of a catalogue of my day to day life. I stopped writing in it for a while because I became frustrated with myself for simply recording my day to day, meaningless existence. I wanted to be a writer and to capture the many, many different creative thoughts I had that seemed to pass through my head like clouds. I never quite seemed to do that with my diary. However, what I have realised is that I value the act itself; the morning routine of opening my beautiful notebook and picking up my beautiful fountain pen, and of sitting in peace simply recording my own life. That is the value of the process for me. My frustration came from feeling like that wasn’t enough, that wasn’t what I thought I should be doing as a writer.

Then my dad died, in August last year. And I realised that by capturing the simple day to day existence, for all those years, I had a piece of his life, his authentic, genuine life in my diaries. Not the canonisation of the dead that seems to occur almost immediately after a person’s death, but his actual personality, his complex, beautiful life, in relation to my own complex, beautiful life. It’s very precious to me now, that mundane, daily existence in which a person I loved still exists. Never assume just because your life appears to be mundane, that it has no value.

As an experiment I tried the Katherine May method of notebooks (only writing on one side of the paper, such luxury!) and found it to be incredibly effective and freeing. For one thing, it’s allowing me to mine my own thoughts for blog posts. Why not give it a go? Now I have my peaceful, me moment, the aesthetically pleasing routine of V&A notebook and kweco pen to catalogue my day to day existence, and then I have my Wilko spiral bound notebook and black biro for the nitty gritty of observing and writing.

If you want to be less passive in the way that you create, if you want to dig into yourself for inspiration, journalling as an exercise can be quite effective. Below you’ll find a downloadable journal cover and the first few pages, which you can print out and put in a folder if you like.

Notes Autumn Season

3.19MB ∙ PDF file

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I like to layer my journal exercises, first connecting to the exterior world, then connecting to the interior world, finding the connections between the two. You can repeat this exercise as many times as you want, it might be useful to do it every few weeks to see what is happening and where you are with yourself.

Journal Prompt for September

Here are some questions to ask yourself.

1. What environmental changes are you seeing in your exterior, physical environment. Not just in nature, but in your house, in your work, in whatever external environment you exist in?

2. What physical changes are you aware of in your own body, what are you seeing about yourself that is in a place of change?

3. What emotional change is occurring in you right now?

4. For all of these questions, think about whether the change is happening to you, and what is exerting that change on you, or whether you are exerting the change.

5. Become an observer, try distancing yourself from your own voice, describe yourself and what is happening.

6. Are there any reflections here? Is, for example, the browning of the edges of the early autumn leaves similar to the ageing skin on your own hands?

7. Might some of these reflections and mirrors to self be used as metaphor?

8. What is the emotional reaction to the physical?

9. Try writing a passage or a poem in which you deliberately make some of your observations into metaphors. What links are there between your life now and the life that you have lived up until now, what would the you of twenty years ago think about the you now?

10. What might you say to that younger you?

My advice here is to allow yourself space to play. You aren’t producing something; your journal is a place to write freely, this is your work space, this is your place to write badly, but the key to being a writer, at whatever level, is simply to write in the first place. Not everything will yield a poem or a narrative essay, but some of it will.

Until next time

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