"Keep a journal" is standard writing advice; but I don't think I've ever seen explicitly stated the benefit that I most commonly get from it.
So, you're having an off week/month/year, you can't keep you Butt in the Chair (which is the whole secret to writing well), you can't find anybody to send your work to and/or have stopped believing in that work, daily life/health crap/your latest fandom/ eat up your time and block your way to productivity, everything is stale, flat, and unprofitable. So you dig out the old notebooks, file folders, backup disks, or whatever and go browsing through stuff from better days.
And what do you keep reading? Gripes about how you're having an off week/month/year, you can't keep you Butt in the Chair, you can't find anybody to send your work to and/or have stopped believing in that work, daily life/health crap/your latest fandom/ eat up your time and block your way to productivity, everything is stale, flat, and unprofitable.
My old journals are full up of grumpy wheel-spinning so boring I can't read it without laughing at myself.
And yet - at some point, all that wheel-spinning turned into productive work, by some alchemical process I still don't understand, but have come to trust. No, this part of it's not any fun. But it, too, shall pass away. As long as I keep coming back to the blank page and those summaries of where each complete work is in the mail out/reject/mail out cycle.
I very rarely read my old journals, what few I have...
ReplyDeleteThey're best saved for the "blah" times, I think. And by journal I don't necessarily mean a formal notebook. I wrote a lot of stuff on scrap paper at soul-sucking day jobs and jammed it into a folder. Hey, somebody had to make use of the otherwise perfectly-good paper that was just a little too warped not to jam the printer.
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