Why to Journal - Even (Especially) When You "Suck" at It

Ack! It's too scary!

Yes, this is going to be my case for the importance of journaling. For all of you thinking, "I'm not good at that and this is just going to make me feel guilty so I'm skipping it," let me start right off by saying that I SUCK at keeping a journal. I have never been able to do it consistently. I remember in my graduate Art of Ethnography class, our professor had us keep field notes on just one sense at a time ("This time when you visit your site, only write about what you hear," etc.) So many details zoom through my awareness so quickly anyway that I feel like it would take longer to write them down than it did to experience them. Adding more awareness of sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes only increased that feeling. So believe me, I know all too well what it's like not to journal at all because you're convinced you can't do it well! This is a post for the rest of us.

​ (If you are naturally gifted at journaling, I hope you recognize that it is indeed a gift, and you might ponder where you need encouragement and a little push -- is it revisiting your words to learn from them? Is it doing something with the journals you write?)

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via GIPHY

A couple of weeks ago, I went for a walk in the woods with my friend Carol. Carol has been living a fairly nomadic existence lately so we haven't had much time together, but we have the kind of friendship that picks right back up quickly, and she's someone with whom I can go deep and be real. So we had a pretty intense and insightful walk (including coming upon three different barred owls, including one sticking out of its nest in a tree, one ignoring repeated attacks by a threatened jay, and this one, who was so close to the path that we detoured through the woods to avoid disturbing it)!

A few days later, Carol was on a train west and we didn't get a chance to catch up again until this past weekend. My call found her in the midst of an unexpected overnight; she was enjoying the adventure despite not even having a change of clothes with her. 

As we talked, she said that our walk had really inspired her, and she had two thoughts reflecting on it afterward that she wanted to share with me. "I don't remember what those insights were," she said, "but I wrote them in my journal. Do you want me to go get it?"

I laughed, "So you have your journal with you?" She laughed back, "Yep - I don't have a toothbrush or clean underwear, but I have my journal!"

Many others have written about the importance of journaling to access the creative mind, about how writing by hand does things typing won't -- I certainly know that I never would have finished my master's thesis if I hadn't been writing morning pages as described in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.  And for those of you engaged in documentary work, great advice already exists on why field notes are important and how to write them, including the importance of both descriptive and reflective content. So I'm not going to repeat their advice; just go read them. Instead, I want to argue for my three most passionately felt reasons you should keep a journal or write field notes. And the first is really simple. Because you will not remember this stuff later. 

Because You Won't Remember
Whether it's a reflective insight about your self or your work, a great project realization (the perfect follow-up question, the answer to your plot structure quandary), or rich, juicy details about an experience, they may seem obvious or seared in your memory forever, but trust me. Just like my friend Carol, in two weeks, you will only remember that you had the thought, but not what it was, unless you write it down!

You remember the story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who after he was interrupted in the recording of the dream that would become the poem Kubla Khan, could not remember the rest of the story? Yeah, well, learn from his mistake. When you read a fantastic piece of writing, whether a poem or a documentary essay like this excerpt below, do you ever marvel at how they crafted such rich detail and scene-setting language? Almost always, it was in their notes.

Permanent, blood-like splotches stain my hands, radiant against the green, fruited plains – a tell-tale sign that my summer days are spent in the fields. Though each piece of fruit means a strawberry pie, a strawberry smoothie, a strawberry short cake to someone else, to me each means a penny towards next year’s tuition, this week’s food, my sister’s wedding dress. . . . Down the row, a man lays on his back, eyes covered. His daughter leans against his knees, his son picking next to him. I turn back to my work, and stand up, bucket in hand (how many today?), to get my timecard punched. I wipe my stained hands on my pants. -Laura Valencia, from "America the Beautiful, Revisited."

Because Patterns Take Time to Emerge
In an Oral History course in graduate school, we focused on life review interviewing. It was the first time I had done repeated interviews with one person over a period of time. Every few weeks, I drove up to a older relative's house in the mountains north of Asheville to complete my class assignments. I hadn't noticed in the course of any particular interview, but as I was reviewing my field notes, I noticed that the topic of houses kept coming up. When she was a child her family had had to move because the city used eminent domain to take their house for a development project. The catalyst for her marriage ending was her despair over the house they were building. There were many stories that involved houses in some way throughout the different chapters of her life. I mentioned what I'd noticed to her the next time we met, and the theme of houses ended up being something we explored together at length. (It was also the topic of my final paper for the class.) She also had never noticed this thread through her life story, and I wouldn't have either, if I hadn't been taking notes.

This is true in your reflections about yourself as well. We are trained to think in terms of single big "a-ha" moments, but more often, I think insights come as little "I wonders." Sometimes it takes several repetitions before you recognize that fleeting thought or question as something that might change your life.

Because A Relationship Exists Between Knowing Yourself and Knowing the World
When I was trying to finish my master's thesis, I was well and truly stuck. I had read about Julia Cameron's method of writing morning pages (three pages of hand-written, stream-of-consciousness free writing) and decided, as my grandmother used it say, it couldn't hurt. Many mornings my pages were full of sentences that went something like: "This will never work. Why am I doing this? If I spent this much time actually writing my thesis instead of these pages, I'd be done by now!" 

Eventually, what started coming out is how much my perfectionism (and all its accompanying relationships to shame and fear of failure) was keeping me from making progress. The biggest obstacle to getting my work done wasn't in the work, but in myself. I've found this is true most of the time when my students get stuck as well. If you're thinking, I'm not interested in all that navel-gazing introspection stuff; I just want to:

• Finish this project
• Do better at my job
• Make my first million

you'll be disappointed to learn that you might have to do one to achieve the other. 

Also, your journaling can help you notice unconscious biases, expectations, or needs that may be impacting your work. In documentary work, practitioners who strive for objectivity sometimes see introducing the personal as inappropriate. But ironically, acknowledging your subjective presence and exploring it fully through your field notes and other means can actually increase the objectivity of your documentary piece. Not examining the personal does not make it go away; it just makes you unaware of where and how it is present. This is the reflective part of journaling or field notes, and it is crucial to doing good work.