Starting to write

Now that we’ve had a look at motivations and methods of journalling, let’s start by trying one very simple but quietly powerful approach: The Got Done List.

Try this practice in the evening, towards the end of your day. Whatever kind of day you’ve had, it will have encompassed an almost uncountable number of actions: ‘productive’ things like work accomplishments or household tasks; acts of care for yourself or family member; but also just simple actions that enrich your life, like taking a walk, having a chat at the bus stop or watching a favourite TV show.

Begin at the top of a new page with the first thing you got done today, and start to list the things you did as the day progressed. Try to look back on your day with the most generous eye that you can, so you’re viewing yourself with real care, noticing the value in all that you did. Remember this isn’t about conventional productivity; your list might include things like ‘made myself a great sandwich’ and ‘took a nap’.

When you have finished, look back over what you’ve written. Notice how you feel, looking at your list. Are you surprised by how much you did? Did writing your actions down shift, even in a subtle way, how you might value or appreciate them?

Moving into drawing...

Drawing where you are

This workshop is called from writing into drawing. So why bring drawing into your journalling practice?

In one sense, drawing can come into a journal quite naturally, perhaps in the form of small sketches, or even just doodles in the margin. Or it might be a more significant part of a journal, as it was for Frida Kahlo in the diaries she kept over the last ten years of her life. For some of us, making drawings might feel quite separate from a passage of writing; for others, like Kahlo, drawing and writing are part of one organic outpouring of self-expression. Your approach can be unique to you, and might vary, of course, from day-to-day.

If you’re fairly new to drawing in a journal, you might like to begin by making a rough sketch of where you are. Focusing on the desk or surface in front of you, draw the outlines of a notebook and pen, your cup of coffee or any other objects close by. Don’t worry about composition or scale or accuracy, just start with one object and go from there. Try to look at the objects you’re drawing almost all of the time, only glancing at your drawing very briefly to check where you are on the page. Concentrate on the particularities of each shape – don’t worry about tone or colour – and enjoy the feeling of the marks you’re making as you follow their contours with your pen. Re-draw each shape as many times as you need to, to get an approximate rendering of what you see.

Alternatively, if you are sitting by a window (at home, on a train or in a cafe) try drawing some elements of your view: scribbled shapes of trees seen in the distance, zig-zags of the roof-scape opposite, or blurry lines of passersby. Don’t worry about capturing a complete scene – just enjoy a quick sketch that sets down something in that complexity, and registers where you are. Again, try to look almost all the time at your view, just stealing quick glances at your drawing when you need to.

Now sit back and look at what you drew, not with a technically criticial eye, but with a sense of curiosity: how did that feel?

How drawing can help

• Drawing your view in one of these ways is a great way of bringing you into the journalling ‘space’, helping you feel mentally and physically present or grounded.

• It can also be helpful when confronted with the blank page and that ‘where to start?’ feeling.

• Having sketches in your journal can make the experience of journalling (and places you’ve been) more memorable

•  Flicking back through the pages, you’ll get snippets of memories at a glance, before you’ve even read anything. It can be encouraging to look back and see visual evidence of yourself being there.

• Drawing really helps you occupy the here and now, not least because the basic difficulty of translating what you see onto the page can fully occupy the mind. Drawing can offer a kind of immersive experience, sometimes known as ‘flow’.

Between writing & drawing

Of course, drawing isn’t just about recording what we see. Drawing is very close to writing, and many artists have explored the practice as a way of using the forms and gestures of writing but going beyond words. This is sometimes known as asemic text, i.e. creating text which can’t be read. The poet, writer and artist Henri Michaux described his motives for working in this way quite beautifully: ‘I wanted to draw the moments that, end to end, make up life, to make visible the interior sentence, the sentence without words’.

So let’s try a drawing exercise now which plays with that idea of drawing the interior sentence.

• Choose one phrase from a passage of your journalling. It might be a phrase from your Got Done List, describing an action you like, or something you’d like to question or affirm, or any phrase that feels interesting or resonant to you.

• Take a clean page, and hold your pencil or pen loosely, nearer to the top than you usually would. Play with the angle and pressure of your grip so that the lines you make are looser and less controlled that they are for writing. It can help to hold the pen at a relatively upright/vertical angle.

• Begin to write your phrase in a loose, flowing script, larger than you usually write, allowing the relative lack of control in your grip to take effect. Continue without taking the pen off the page, so that your writing becomes more about rhythm and flow and less about accurate, distinct or legible words. Write in cursive, joining up each word and repeating the phrase again and again, ignoring breaks in the line, so that you are filling the whole page with an endless stream of more-or-less asemic ‘text’.

• How loose or controlled you allow your writing to be is of course up to you; you may prefer to keep it vaguely legible, or instead allow your pencil to let go of recognisable letters altogether, so that it becomes a texture of writing rather than distinct words.

• You might want to keep a consistent scale and horizontality so that the lines progress evenly, or you might feel like getting a bit looser and wilder as you go. Maybe the sound of the pencil on the paper can be a rhythmic guide that keeps you going.

• When you reach the bottom of the page, pause and consider, does that look interesting and enough, do you want to continue, either overlaying it, or repeating the process in the spaces between the lines?

• When you’re ready to stop, take a step back and look at your asemic text/drawing. What might it ‘say’ about the phrase you began with? Could asemic writing be a way of looking more dispassionately at something you might have observed? Could it offer a way of creating some space, or playful curiosity, between us and our thoughts?