Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Mining your journal
Drafting and structuring
Drafting, researching, and editing

Spend some time rereading old journal entries. You’ll notice self-growth, recalling where you were and what you were doing a year ago; discover progress you’ve made toward your dreams; and find patterns in your life. Reviewing your journal can also serve as a means of research into past events for scene details, characters, and emotions in a creative writing piece you’re working on.

In addition, you can review your journal entries to look for metaphors you incorporated into your writing. Metaphors are, essentially, the use of concrete, tangible objects and their characteristics to describe intangible, abstract ideas. Another way of explaining metaphor is the use of images to represent concepts. For example, if you say “time is money,” you’re using the image of the tangible, concrete object of money to help others understand the abstract concept of time. When you apply the characteristics of money to time, readers understand that time is something we can spend, waste, save, trade for something else, and so on.

Your journal also is an outstanding tool for examining how your background, upbringing, family, and life experiences influence your world views and, ultimately, our shared and individual metaphors. Your journal entries are one place your unique way of understanding life presents itself in the form of metaphor. You can then pull out this material and use it in other forms of creative writing.

WRITING PROMPT

Read 10 to 20 previous journal entries, highlighting images you used to describe feelings or concepts. It’s important to do this in a nonjudgmental way. Don’t ask yourself whether the metaphor is “good” or not; the merits of your metaphors are not important. Then, once you’ve identified some images, spend time exploring the nature of the images and their meaning(s) to you both then and today.

Here are some additional journaling prompts that could help you utilize the material you’ve written in your journal:

·  Freewrite for 10 minutes about the image(s) in your journal entries and their possible meanings and/or connections to the way you see the world.

·  Choose an image or object and ask yourself what characteristics it has and it applies to the emotion or concept(s) you’re trying to express in the passage.

·  Think about where and/or when you first associated this object with this concept. Let your mind wander into the past. Think about what parents or other family members may have told you, other influential people, books you’ve read, and past experiences.

·  Perform a word association exercise with the image(s).

·  Identify a metaphor and then look for ways can you extend it.

For example, while reading my through my journal pages from several years ago, I found two startling entries that described how I was feeling before I set out to perform the several hundred miles of hiking that would allow me to write my book The Warrior’s Path:

Andrew Sinclair on Jack London: “He was the archetype of the American hero who tried to live what he wrote.”

Ambrose Bierce letter to Nellie Sickler: “[I]t is possible—even probable—that I shall not return. These be ’strange countries,’ in which things happen; that is why I am going.”

These quotes from important American writers illustrate my thinking about my upcoming hike in at least two different ways. The line about Jack London captures my hope for the book—that I could embody the work through my journey. On the other hand, the Bierce lines reflect my reservations about walking great distances along the sides of roads by myself, but also the exhilaration that accompanies such danger “things happen, that is why I am going.”

I have at least two other potential travel books in mind that would require throwing myself out into the world under perilous circumstances. If I undertake them, I surely will return to my journal entries prior to writing The Warrior’s Path to remind myself of both the aspirations and trepidation that accompany the prospect of dangerous lone travel.

WRITING PROMPT

What’s your current writing project? Even if you haven’t been keeping your journal very long, go back through it and look for the images, anecdotes, observations, etc. that might prove useful for your project at hand. Make a list as you go, and order them later.

If the useful materials you discover and explore come from your own journal entries surrounding events you’ve written about, you (like me) might find that you have a direct use for them in whatever it is you are working on. If not, keep them in your writing journal—perhaps marked by sticky notes—and review them from time to time. The material that comes from your journal is highly personal; it resonates with you at a core level and will, most likely, surface again as you continue to write.