NOTES ON KEEPING A JOURNAL AND CREATIVE WRITING
Every day we change. We
are a day older. We experience events that affect our thinking, that make us
different people from who we were yesterday. It may be difficult to notice or
realize how we have changed in the past days, weeks, months or even years,
until we think about it. We are too close, too familiar, too comfortable with
ourselves to pay attention to these changes.
The fact remains — we are
changing every day, for good or ill, whether we recognize it or not. The
question is, how much power do we have to effect positive changes in our lives?
Are we going to be sealed, empty bottles that float aimlessly out to sea, to be
carried at the whim of wind, waves and tides, or are we going to be swimmers
who see an island on the horizon, and set out with strong strokes, with a clear
direction and goal that we can accomplish?
Think about how you have
changed. Picture in your mind your first day at school, six years old. How did
you look? How big were you? Were you big for your age, taller and stronger than
your fellow first graders? Or were you small, skinny, picked on, bullied,
pushed around? Did you have confidence in yourself, or were you frightened and
insecure? Were you smart, and caught on quickly what the teacher presented? Or
did you have trouble understanding the lessons? Did you get along with the
other students? Were you popular and well-liked? Did you have a best friend? Or
not? Just the act of reading these questions is likely to trigger memories and
images you may not have thought about for years.
Fast forward a dozen
years, to the age of eighteen. Picture that six year old you as if someone had
taken a series of stop-action photos of you facing the camera as you grew to
seven years old, eight, nine, ten, to your teen years, and your full-grown,
adult self. Watch your growth, development
and changes in your physical self as though you were watching a movie,
from child to adult, and it is easier to understand, to visualize the process.
It is not so easy to
visualize the changes to your inner self, over a period of time, but the inner
changes, your knowledge, education, beliefs, fears, hopes and dreams, are
inevitably developing in no less severe degree than your outer self. In some
instances, the inner changes are even greater than the outer ones.
Are you the same person
you were twenty years ago ? Of course not. What about a year ago, a month, a
week, a day? Each of us is in a state of perpetual change, from our births to
our deaths. Most people aren’t aware of this process until they look at an old
photo of themselves, and then in the mirror and ask, “Is that me?”
This brings me to getting
into the habit of keeping a journal, writing down one’s thoughts every day, or
at least frequently, the process of documenting the changes in ourselves over a
period of time.
In our prison creative
writing class we began slowly, with simple instructions to observe our
surroundings, the events of our days, and write, “DAY ONE, DAY TWO, DAY THREE,”
through “DAY SEVEN,” with at least a paragraph, up to a page, recording what we
saw, what we heard, and what we thought about the daily experiences.
So you want to be a
writer? Writers write. Your journal is not a diary, but it could be. It is not
a listing of your meals — “I had pancakes and oatmeal for breakfast” — a dry
recording of your day, but that could be a part of it. You are the camera, but
in your journal you keep track of more than dry facts. You record your
feelings, how the events and your observations affected you, what memories were
triggered.
Did you remember something
that happened to you as a child, an irrational fear that affected your life,
that you haven’t thought about for years? Write it in your journal. The very
process of writing about the memory may trigger more memories, even an epiphany
that you want to preserve before you forget them. One memory could inspire a
line that begins a poem or a memoir, or even an idea for a short story or a
novel.
Did you have a strange
dream? Write about it in your journal before it evaporates. Robert Louis
Stevenson awoke from a dream, began furiously writing, and when he stopped he
had completed, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
You never know where the
process of writing will take you, but be assured that it will take you
somewhere. Over time, as you keep your journal, filling it with thoughts,
memories, ideas, first drafts and meaningless scribbles, as you go back over
what you wrote weeks, months, even years ago, you will discover that you are
keeping in touch with your former self, the person you used to be. It is an
interesting proposition, one filled with sometimes surprising insights.
In the 1980’s as part of a
time management course I took, I began keeping track of my daily hours and
activities on, at first, sheets of paper, then with a “Pocket Pal,” or small
daily calendar/memo pad that I carried in my shirt pocket, where I would take
it out at any time and write brief entries.
1985 was a tough year for
me. I was serving the seventh year of a life prison sentence. My father was
dying, and I was experiencing a number of personal trials. Making daily entries
in that mini-journal gave my life focus and structure, and helped me make sense
of what was happening in my life.
Over twenty years later,
in the midst of another transfer from one repressive prison to another, going
through personal papers I’d been toting from place to place forever, it seemed,
I discovered that little pocket journal. I began reading the entries I’d made
so long before, and I was immediately transported back to that painful time. I
felt those same emotions as I relived those events. I had even made entries of
our Jaycees greeting card project sales figures, and I smiled at the
recollections of how long-forgotten prisoners carped and schemed, of the things
that had been happening outside my inner turmoil that no one knew about as they
went about daily prison life.
I was no longer the same
person I had been over twenty years before, reading those words. I realized
that my old self was sending messages to my present self, messages that said, “I didn’t understand what all this meant
while it was happening. You’ve had a couple decades to think about it and make
sense of it, so do that.”
And I did. Using those
notes, I wrote a memoir, I Wore Chains To
My Father’s Funeral, which won a literary award and was widely published,
then I wrote a second memoir taking place directly before the time period of
the first one, As My Father Lay Dying,
then a third, In The Shadow of the Valley
— A Christian’s Journey Through Life In Prison.
Perhaps I could have
written those memoirs without the journal entries from 1985, but they wouldn’t
have had the emotional connections or included the details and context that
brought that brief period alive in my mind. It became a major revelation, the
importance of recording my thoughts, feelings, and events of my life. I had
been doing it for years, writing in journals, without realizing its future
significance.
In 2008, a literary
mentor, Professor William “Chip” Brantley, in Massachusetts
(now at the University
of Alabama), encouraged
me to expand my writing’s audience. He set up an Internet blog for that
purpose, http://charlienorman.blogspot.com/.
Almost six years, close to two hundred essays, poems, and journal entries
later, several thousand people in seventy five countries have read my blog
posts. Receiving messages, comments and feedback from readers all over the
world encourages me to keep writing, to continue documenting my life,
expressing my thoughts and feelings, and to keep in touch with my former self.
When a twenty five year
old single mother in South Africa tells me she’s been reading my essays for
several years, that they have been a source of comfort for her, increasing her
faith, when people in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Moscow, New Dehli and
dozens of other places log on to the blog, that tells me that what I am doing
is worthwhile, and has a greater value.
The old expression, “If I
had known then what I know now…” — have you ever conjectured how
you would have acted or lived your life if you had the benefit of hindsight, if
you’d known how things would turn out?
The “Terminator” movies
and the TV show, “The Sara Connor Chronicles,” addressed this issue in a
science fiction format. John Connor’s father was transported from the future to
the present time, which was his past. He knew what would happen, the destruction
of the world by intelligent machines. He had been sent back into the past to
warn and attempt to change the future to save humanity.
Writing in your daily
journal will not likely save humanity, but it could ultimately hold answers to
questions that have burdened you, and provide you with an opportunity to
re-evaluate the events of your life from a fresh perspective, in the light of
heightened maturity gained through experience. A mental image from childhood
that has affected you for years, once it has been re-examined rationally in the
present day, may not seem so painful or fear-inducing as it did when you were
six.
No one can stop the
process of change in their evolving lives. But when we are aware of the
process, how we are affected by it, we can actively influence the changes in a
positive, not negative manner. Keeping a daily journal can not only make you a
better writer, but also a better, more self-aware person, better equipped to
deal with life’s challenges.
Can you send a message to
your future self, tell him, “Pay
attention! This is important to me. Try to figure it out, make sense of it.”
Who knows? Perhaps your
future self will answer you back.
Charlie
January 4, 2014
January 4, 2014
CHANGE IN PHOTOS
BELOW: Scene from prison 2014
