I paint not by sight but by faith. Faith gives you sight.

Amos Ferguson

Doing Research

The appearance of things changes according to the emotions, and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves

Kahlil Gibran

Learn more by researching what you write about. This may provide solutions and ideas to help work out difficulties. It will certainly help to increase your interest and learning in the subject areas you’ve written about.

Your journal entries may serve the additional purpose of being a resource for something you later wish to investigate. Say, you had made some interesting entries on the cycles of the moon during a particular cosmic occurrence. You may wish to use these observations later in a school project on that cosmic event. Of course, this underscores the merit of keeping an accurate journal when recording natural phenomena, including date and time.

Harvest Your Journal

He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened

Lao Tzu

One of the real benefits of journal writing is the gift of perspective you get from the flow of ideas, experiences and learning through your journal’s sustained use over a period of time. The more frequent, detailed and honest your entries have been, the more you will get out of them when you revisit your journal to reflect on what you’ve written. This is why daily journaling can be so rewarding. Through the lens of perspective over time, you may begin to see patterns in your activities, reactions and observations that you weren’t aware of before. It’s like Max Planc said about nature: “science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” When you step out of the stream you were in and look in from outside, you will gain insight through a new perspective. The payoffs can include galvanizing new ideas, arriving at action items that suddenly make sense, and providing material for making new plans.

Make a point of reading your journals. Often. The three steps in harvesting your journal are: 1) read; 2) ponder; and 3) reread. These three steps can be used as many times as you wish. I would add another optional step too: research. During your revisit, you may find a benefit to researching outside your journal for answers or clarification to ideas and concepts and questions that emerge from your review.

Making sense of your journal takes time. Ken Plummer (2001) tells us that this analysis part in the journaling process is the “truly creative part of the work… It entails brooding and reflecting upon mounds of [information] for long periods of time until it makes sense and feels right, and key ideas and themes flow from it. It is also the hardest process to describe.” He suggests that the standard technique is to read and make notes (and research), leave and ponder (and research), reread without notes, make new notes, ponder (and research), reread and so on.  Ideas and glimmers of understanding emerge. You can deepen these through conversation with others and through research (e.g., reading relevant texts, online searches, etc.).

—What is Truth?

Judith Barrington, author of Writing the Memoir, describes factual truth and emotional truth and that they are not necessarily the same thing.

It’s important to acknowledge the emotional truth of events and actions in our lives. How you express and remember an event tells you as much about your state of mind and heart then — and now — as the event itself.  Understanding the importance of personal truth in capturing the essence of the events as they pertain to you and your life journey can empower you and can also be revealing.

—Questions To Ask as You Review Your Journal

Here are some basic questions you can ask yourself as you reread your journal:

• Do any experiences, situations or understandings stand out for you? What is it about them that is catching your attention?
• Does what you have written in your journal still resonate with you? Were you fully honest and do the interpretations you made at the time still make sense? From your present standpoint and understanding, are there items you need to re-interpret?
• Is there anything missing? Was there something revealed that you evaded?
• Can you see any connection with any broader experience, problem or theme you were/are exploring?

You may wish to eventually use your journal(s), whether personal (mixed) or themed, as a research/resource for development of theories or later projects you may embark on — say, a memoir or a project in school or at work that relates to a theme you covered (e.g., on the subject of recycling that you covered in a journal you kept).

—Making a Themed Index

You may wish to keep the first few pages of your paper journal free to make an index later that will identify 1) particular aspects touched upon in your journal, 2) themes that have revealed themselves and 3) important milestones recognized in your life story.

Making an index for your journal will help you organize your thoughts and feelings over the time period covered. It will also help you find relevant entries more easily later on.

There are many ways to index and code your journal. It helps if you number the pages first. If you are indexing themes (say, anything to do with your friend Alison) — which you may have made entries about not chronologically but chaotically throughout the journal — you can code any relevant page to Alison with a sticky note of a certain colour and refer to that colour in your index alongside your reference to “Alison”. This way, when you wish to come back and revisit those references to do with Alison specifically, you can simply go to those pages coded with that colour.

—Using Metaphor & Personification

Because metaphor compares one thing to another, when you use metaphor you are linking events or things to your personal feelings, which can reveal, heal and provide directions for action. Because metaphor relies on individual comparison and interpretation, it will mean different things to different people. Let’s take the example “the darkness embraced her”. When I wrote that line, I was comparing the darkness to a sweetheart. When I shared the metaphor with my writing students, one of them shared that what first came to her mind was an image of a vampire about to devour her. In my mind the darkness was friendly, safe and warmly thrilling; in my student’s mind the darkness was sinister, scary and suffocating. What’s important is what the metaphor means to you. It will help reveal your feelings at the time you wrote.

Exercise: Compare a person you know to the following: a peacock; a sloth; a dung beetle; a rabbit. What physical and emotional connotations do you get?   Take a piece of your own writing and find all the metaphors and similes. Highlight them then interrogate them. What do they say?

Reference: Munteanu, 2009. “The Fiction Writer: Get Published, Write Now!” Pixl Press. 164pp.

 —Become a “Connoisseur”

Journals are all about expression and learning from it. They enable us to examine ourselves and our world, analyze, conclude and develop. Learning relies on an element of artistry: the ability to improvise, devise new ways of looking at things, and then act on them in new ways. According to Donald Schőn (1987) such artistry is an exercise of intelligence — a kind of knowing. Through engaging with our experiences we can develop maxims about, say, working or relating to a group or individual. We learn to appreciate — to be aware and to understand — what we have experienced. “We become connoisseurs.” (Eisner, 1998).

According to Eisner (1998) connoisseurship involves the ability to see, not merely to look. This means developing the ability to name and appreciate the different dimensions of situations and experiences, and the way they relate to one another. It means drawing upon and making sense of a wide array of information. It means placing your experiences and understanding in a wider context. And connecting them with your values and commitments. That’s where writing and keeping journals comes in.

—Become a “Critic”

“If connoisseurism is the art of expression, criticism is the art of disclosure” (Eisner, 1998). According to Eisner, the mandate of criticism is the re-education of perception. The task of the critic is to help us see (not just look). In order to learn from what you honestly express, you must don the critic hat and analyze. Think of criticism as the “midwife of perception.” It helps perception come into being, then later refines it so you can learn from it. 

This article is an excerpt from The Journal Writer: Finding Your Voice (Pixl Press, 2013) by Nina Munteanu.

References:

Barrington, Judith. 2002. Writing the Memoir. The Eighth Mountain Press. Portland, OR. 187pp.

Campbell, Joseph. 1988. The Power of Myth: with Bill Moyers. MJF Books. New York, NY. 293pp.

Eisner, Elliot W. 1998. “The art of educational evaluation: a personal view.” Falmer Press. London.

Munteanu, Nina. 2009. The Fiction Writer: Get Published, Write Now! Starfire World Syndicate. Louisville, KY. 264pp.

Munteanu, Nina. 2013. “The Journal Writer: Finding Your Voice.” Pixl Press, Vancouver. 170pp.

Plummer, Ken. 2001. “Documents of Life 2: an invitation to a critical humanism.” Sage. London.

Schőn, Donald. 1987. “The Reflective Practitioner. How professionals think in action.” Temple Smith. London.

Vogler, Christopher. 1998. “The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.” 2^nd Edition. Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City, California. 326pp.