interlude

journaling for writers

Isaac Levitan

My track record with journaling has been sporadic at best. As with meditation, I appreciate the benefits in theory but have a hard time maintaining a practice. None of the usual reasons people keep a journal appeal to me. I’m not interested in tracking my daily habits or making detailed accounts of my day. What I care about is developing my voice as a writer. Turns out, there’s no better tool for that than journaling by hand, the old-fashioned way.

When I was in the querying trenches, I remember agents and editors would say things like, I love voice-y books or when you find your voice, you’ll know it, as if it’s this exotic bird you have to catch in the wild and not something that lives inside your body. How hard can it be to find your voice?

The answer: very hard.

Frederik Gieschen and David Perrell pointed out a peculiar phenomenon where people—often smart, interesting, well-read people—don’t sound like themselves when they write. They come across as stiff, their sentences dry and lifeless, or as I’ve seen, overblown with purpose prose. Funny enough, the same thing happens in acting. When students are told to perform a scene or a monologue in front of a class, they switch into “acting mode.” They seem like they’re trying really hard to make you believe they feel [insert big emotion]. They sound phony.

The awareness of an audience hijacks our brains, turns us into self-conscious, overthinking performers. In the pages of a journal, we’re set free from the gaze of an audience. This alone makes journaling uniquely suitable for developing your voice. There’s also the physical movement of your hand across the page: a tactile experience that forces you to slow down and reflect, making it easier to access what feels true in your mind and body.

Many people struggle to write when things are going well in their lives. It’s a curse or a blessing, depending on how you look at it. I find I have much more to say when I’m experiencing relationship turmoil. This is pure conjecture, but I think it’s because our brains are doing so much more processing during hard times to keep us sane and functional, and all that processing is bound to turn up a few nuggets of wisdom. Plus, we tend to do more journaling and therapy when we’re going through the wringer, both of which are great for writing because they make the unconscious conscious.

We have a powerful capacity to recognize pieces of ourselves in others—even those who seem nothing like us on the surface, whose worldviews we find abhorrent. This is how actors can play despicable people, how writers can create villains that are fascinating. They find a piece of their own humanity in the character they’re portraying. It requires a tremendous amount of self-work and imagination, plumbing our own buried experiences for kernels of hard, emotional truths.

Survival is its own kind of creative act. I heard this on a podcast some time ago. The instinct to make meaning out of suffering is crucial and life-affirming. But you don’t have to be miserable to write well. We hold entire bodies of data—fragments of thoughts, raw feelings, waiting to be processed. You can’t write anything insightful unless you’ve mined your own experiences. You can’t create a compelling character if you haven’t peeled back the layers of your own emotions.

A journal can be a tool for writing. It’s also a time capsule, preserving who we are at a moment in time. It’s surprising to look back and see what was important to us at a particular stage in our lives. The other day I was flipping through an old journal from high school and came across this passage:

Now I have been very candid writing these journal entries, and this next matter requires me to be even more candid. Deep breath. Here goes: I think I have fallen for… [name redacted]. Yes, [name redacted] who used to like me in fifth grade. It seems this thing between us has come full circle, doesn’t it? Anyway, I don’t even know if my feelings for him are real or not. Am I so desperate for a boyfriend that I’m settling/pining for the last un-repulsive guy who had feelings for me? I’m very confused right now.

I can’t believe how pretentious I sounded back then. But this is gold. This is uncensored, un-self-conscious voice. This is what an actual sixteen-year-old sounds like. This has messy emotions. This feels true.