L.A. Garnett – Author

Throughout my life I have practiced writing in a variety of forms. Through school, essays are of course the most common exercise. I got very good at this, if I do say so myself, and after a while the only writing I consistently did was academic. This was true throughout high school and college, which is when I became tired of what I now recognize as the equation that academic writing can become. You have a hypothesis, you find evidence, and then you summarize your findings.

After some time I began to look for something more. I was writing creatively but I felt a bit stuck – none of my writing had the punch I wanted it to, and my first drafts felt very stifled. I needed to loosen up. I was listening to podcasts and watching youtube videos and eventually I was introduced to The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron.

Julia Cameron advocates for something she calls morning notes- each morning, you are to write three pages of stream of consciousness thoughts. That struck me as unique, so I decided one day in grad school to give it a go.

I wrote two to three pages every morning for the next five years. I have a collection of composition notebooks that house all of these thoughts – I had the idea one time that I could digitize them and assess them, looking for patterns and clues about my own mind. I was a psychology major, so it seemed like an interesting exercise.

I never digitized my notebooks, nor do I now write every day, but I still greatly value journaling. It allowed me to be comfortable just writing. Even if the words seem frazzled or gibberish, I can get them down on the page now and I don’t feel like my mind is quite so clutterered.

There’s great value in journaling, but it’s a difficult exercise. Putting aside the time to write about your thoughts and feelings is oddly embarassing, especially when there are witnesses. Overall, though, it’s something I’d recommend to anyone who is trying out writing – be that as a hobby or for a living. You need to be comfortable with your own voice and to do that, you need to write a lot. With journals, you probably aren’t going to end up sharing them with the world. I certainly won’t. But every word you write adds to your confidence and skills as a writer, and that is priceless.