Using a Journal to Get Back to Writing
When I graduated from Vermont College of Fine Arts in January 2017, I had it all planned out. I would take the six chapters that made up my creative thesis and finish the rest of that novel. I’d give the chapters to my critique partner, incorporate her wise and helpful feedback, and do a final pass with a checklist of things I wanted to revise throughout. The plan was to finish by the fall, get one or two full-length beta reads, and start querying in January.
Then in September my spousal unit got an offer he couldn’t refuse and we made the decision to move from Chicago to Tennessee. Within six weeks of the initial headhunter contact, he had started his new job in Nashville while I remained in Chicago to coordinate the move. Corporate relocation requirements meant I had 18 meetings in my house over six weeks. Then I had to clean, organize, and otherwise prep the house for sale, by myself. After that, there was the search for a new home in Nashville, and all the preparations for the move, including how and when to transport two cats who hate traveling. Needless to say, my schedule for revising the novel went out the window.
I could have let my broken schedule get me down, but instead I let it go. I had a secret weapon giving me a boost: my daily drafting journal.
The drafting journal was born of desperation during my final semester at VCFA. Each residency we participated in a workshop, submitting 15-20 pages a couple months beforehand. To get the most out of it, our pages needed to be not-too-polished yet meaningful (ie, not something you never intended to work on again). I had already repurposed old pieces in my first three workshops, and had nothing meaningful left for my fourth. That semester I desperately scribbled a 20-page story in five days in between homework packets. No way did I want to do that again, especially since I was eyeballs-deep in my creative thesis and just didn’t have time.
So I thought I’d try something new: what if I spent 15 minutes a day, first thing in the morning, on an idea I’d been kicking around for a while? I started several weeks before the deadline and made it part of my routine. I got up, fed my cats (you can’t write with hungry cats staring at you), made a cup of tea, and wrote by hand in a journal for 15 minutes. I did this almost every day without fail, and before the deadline arrived I had 20 new pages of a new novel. Sure, they were very drafty pages, but bonus! That meant I didn’t have to agonize about their reception in workshop. I knew they weren’t great.
I made it through workshop and graduation and the inevitable post-grad collapse where you don’t want to write anything ever again, at least for a few weeks, and when it was done, I started picking up my daily journal again. I’d discovered it gave me several benefits. First, it’s perfect for a first draft, since you’re forced to just crap it out. You can’t write perfect prose in 15 minutes—and you shouldn’t try! Expecting crap gave me freedom to just write the story. And 15 minutes = one scene, or part of a scene.
Second, since I only had to write for 15 minutes, I didn’t get stuck often, and if I did, I had the rest of the day to let it stew in the back of my mind. If I only wrote one sentence in 15 minutes, it was just 15 minutes “wasted”—and at least I was one sentence further along. Third, 15 minutes was also short enough that I didn’t feel bad for cheating on my novel revision with my new idea. Thus a brief addition to my daily routine gave me a looser first draft, time to let characters and story cook in my head, and permission to play. All in 15 minutes.
This was crucial when all the changes happening because of the move became overwhelming. There were many days I didn’t have time to sit down at the computer, or when I did, I couldn’t focus and ended up visiting real-estate and travel sites instead. But I could still manage that 15 minutes every morning. So when I got to the end of 2017 and still hadn’t finished my novel revision, I could look at my journals—yes, I filled the first and started a second—and feel like I’d still accomplished something.
I did manage to finish my revision and send it to my beta readers at the same time I was watching the movers unload my stuff in Nashville. And once I had started querying it, I was ready to revise my new piece, because I wrote more than 100 pages over the course of a year by spending just 15 minutes a day!
Okay, now I sound like a bad infomercial, but this might be especially helpful in this year of the devil 2020. If you’re someone who keeps saying, “I don’t have time/I can’t get started/My writing is crap,” I say, “UNTRUE.” You can take 15, or even five minutes a day. Get started. Embrace the crap—you can make it better later. Build it sentence by sentence, day by day, make it a habit, and you can get around those roadblocks that life likes to throw in the way of a writer. Because someone out there needs your words.
Diane may have a slight problem when it comes to buying shiny writing journals, but she’ll eventually use them. (PROMISE!) You can find out more about her editing services here.