outside looking in

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Cynthia G.

JOURNAL THAT

a guide to writing

Cynthia Gregory

Jounaling works if you’re just a baby writer and not sure where it’s going or what you want from it. Journaling works if you’re a seasoned writer and you need something to keep your writing muscles toned when you’re not working on a project. It’s even good when you are working on a project and need an avoidance tactic that can still work to your benefit event while you’re avoiding working on the actual thing you promised to do. What you may not know if you’re new to writing, is that there is nothing like an assignment or writing goal to make you think of all the things you’d rather be doing at that moment than actual writing.

You might think you’re the first to experience the avoidance factor, but no way, Auntie Mae. You can’t believe how sparkly clean my house becomes when I’m on deadline. And it isn’t that you don’t want to write, it’s just that sometime a writer needs to focus on something else for the ideas to become clear. You know how when you try really hard to remember something, like maybe the name of your third grade teacher, you can’t? And then the minute you let it go, it just floats up through your mind like a leaf in a stream: Miss Gerber.

Sometimes taking a break works. Other times, you just need to plant your tush on the seat cushion and write. One day I realized that I became bored with my own voice when I journaled. Granted, I bore easily – but hardly ever where my writing is concerned; good, bad, or mediocre. Nevertheless it began to seem . . .familiar. This of course is what happens when everything starts with me.

It all began to sound the same: I see, I feel, I want. I found that my writing was starting to become labored with too much “I.” This was troubling, especially since writing is almost always fun. I wondered what was up. Then, I developed a method that added some zing to my narrative and my journaling hasn’t been the same since.

You don’t eat the same food every day, and you don’t wear the same clothes, right? It’s important for the human spirit to express itself creatively – otherwise, we would all be dull as rocks. But we’re not. There is an infinite variety all around – from the stars in the sky to the blossoms on a tree. Variety is the pickle juice of life. And the nectar, and the sweet cherry on top. It seems completely logical, requiring no leaps of faith whatsoever, that if you enjoy variety in your non-journaling life, that your journaling process might benefit from mixing it up too.

It’s very true that you need guidelines in general writing and in journal writing too, because if there were no rules and guidelines, there would be complete anarchy and no one would know what anyone else was trying to say. I’m not advocating that you give up structure at all. The same rules apply to journaling that apply to any good writing, and this is as it should be. There are the rules of punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure. A system is necessary, or your journal becomes complete gibberish, and that serves no one, least of all, the journal-ist in you. But it’s possible to add variety to your method, one tweak at a time. So if you suspend one element, everything else stays in place and a sort of balance is achieved and your journal entries still exhibit a sort cohesive read-ability. You may have heard that good writers break rules. But here’s the truth of the matter: they know the rules they’re breaking. They’re not just randomly committing bad writing to the page and calling it creative.

So here’s a very cool way to add variety to your writing, to maintain a certain creative flexibility to your narrative without sending all the rules up in smoke: change your point of view. This doesn’t mean change how you essentially look at life (though that sometimes leads to a creative breakthrough), but it does mean that you get out of your own head. You look at a situation not from your dearest, most precious vantage point; you step aside and consider it from a slightly different angle.

I’m not sure when but at some point in time, I found that I could increase my interest in writing exponentially, when I changed my point of view from first person to second or third person. I began to refer not to “my thoughts” but “her thoughts.” She did this, and she said that. Suddenly, ZOOM! I felt a shift of perspective that allowed me to view my journaling as something not so intensely personal, and therefore allowed me to the freedom to go writing on a tangent if I felt like it. It allowed me the freedom to drift from my life up close, to a view of some one’s life not unlike my own, but because of the distance, it was infinitely more interesting. I became a voyeur in my own life. It sounds like crazy-talk, but it works.

Sometimes feelings are too intense to embrace. This is why people get addicted to a million things: yoga, chocolate, sour apple martinis, you name it. Anything to put a buffer between our hearts and our heads, because otherwise, life is just too real to deal.

I discovered that if I wrote “she came to the conclusion that she had to fire the boyfriend” it pinched a little less, and by the way, made for some slightly juicy “fiction.” We can split hairs about what is “memoir” and what is “made up,” but that is a debate that’s been raging for centuries. Really. And all fiction is at least marginally revisionist memoir at its most basic level. So what if you make your journal slightly fictionalized? Does it really matter? If it helps you get to the heart of what’s bugging you about what your sister said, or the fact that when you opened the door for the plumber expecting a soiled tee shirt and three day stubble but found instead Adonis’s younger and slightly hotter brother, slide that narrative into third-person and start writing.

Shifting point of view allows you to explore themes and ideas from a slightly higher vantage point, and so allows a roominess to enter into your writing that might just allow you to spread your wings and soar.

journal this

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Cynthia G.

Journal THAT

a guide to writing

Cynthia Gregory

Photography is amazing to me, something bordering on magical. Imagine freezing a moment in time on a small square of paper (or on the viewing panel of a telephone), to slide into your pocket and carry with you wherever you go. There is something mythic about a photograph. I like nothing better than to wander through antique fairs and spend long moments flipping through boxes and boxes of photographs. There’s nothing like it. On my first trip to Paris, I found the famous Montmartre flea market and was in ecstasy to find vendors with bins and bins of dusty old photos, studying the faces in those pictures, imagining the lives that were lived beyond, before, after, the images were captured and through magic and alchemy, printed in sepia tones on thick paper. Oh, I understand the chemical process of photography well enough; I still consider it borderline magic.

I once taught a writing workshop and asked participants to bring with them photographs or postcards of sentimental value, something to write from. Everyone seemed excited by this idea – then their excitement faded to dismay and then marginal alarm when I asked them to retrieve and exchange them with their fellow workshoppers.

“I brought this picture of little LuLu and I was going to writer about her birthday.”

“But this is Barney, my dog. No one else knows him like I do; I want to write about him.”

I’m sure my darling protégées thought it a nasty trick to switch them up like that, but I had my reasons. What I was aiming at was to get them to write about the feelings that were evoked from someone else’s photo, not to write from the matched luggage of associations, memories, delights, and dark secrets that led them to choose their specific photos and postcards in the first place. I wanted them to reach back to the archetypes that we’re all hard-wired with. I wanted them to find the promise that backs every fairy tale and myth and operatic legend that we consider imaginary and yet give our lives meaning.

Things are charged with the emotions we attach to them. You might think this is a radical idea, or sounds a little too close to the far edge of woo-woo for your taste, but think about it. Words are charged with emotional impact. For instance, the words beard, tea cup, and mandolin evoke feelings, which give rise to meaning, which stirs up emotions based on memories you associate with these items. We attach words to things so we know what to call them – otherwise we’d say, “pass the tangy little granules of crystalized sea water” instead of “pass the salt.” So the words we attach to things have an emotional charge, too. Especially things that have to do with deep emotion, like family.

I would venture that an old black and white photo of your father as a young bot sitting on a pony wearing chaps and a cowboy hat, peering into the camera, stirs up a whole score of emotions for you. Of course it does. There are stories, lifetimes, imaginings, family legends, tragedies, celebrations attached to everything we own – or that owns us – and this is as it should be.

Journaling from this stew of material is easy. And, I’m sorry to say, somewhat predictable. But if you’re aiming for a family chronicle, go for it! Distribute photographs to everyone in the family, and ask them to write about what a particular photo means to them. While you’re at it, ask them to throw in a family recipe, too. If you cast your net wide enough, you will amass a collected family history, suitable to finding for an epic family album.

But what you get when you write from someone else’s photographs is access to a collective memory, a collective pool of archetypes that belong to our extended family – the human race. After all, we most of us have mothers, fathers, ancestors, siblings, children. We most of us have lived in a series of varied family homes, have traveled some, gone to church, gone to school, fallen in love, borne great tragedy, been moved to tears by a beautiful object, failed at something trivial, thrived at something meaningful, eaten strange food, dipped our feet in a mountain stream, watched a shooting star on a summer’s night, confided in a stranger, given something to someone who needed it more than we did, discovered the searing pain of betrayal, held a child’s hand, believed a lie, broke a rule, floated in absolute joy; in other words, have lived a slice of life. We all have this in common.

So when you look at a photograph of people you do not know, or you study a postcard that was not addressed to you, you have the potential to access a deeper story, sensations and passions buried more deeply than you ever thought possible. This in interesting territory. I am always enchanted by the cryptic messages on the backs of old postcards – were they in St. Louis ever again, after that trip? How was the train ride? Did they ever find love in that lifetime? Stories spin out of my imagination and I envision children and pets and automobiles long since grown or gone.

You obviously can’t write from a literal perspective by this method, but your journaling can become enriched by the subtle meanings telegraphed to your ancestral brain, where memories are stored, where legends are kept, fables are cataloged for future reference. These are jumping off places. Write from photographs – someone else’s, and stir memories you didn’t even know you had.

give me magic

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Cynthia G.

we don’t apologize. we don’t stammer. we blush.

there’s a new sheriff in town

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Cynthia G.

we have created something truly blush-worthy. read it now. read it here.

meet me at the bodega

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Cynthia G.

Journal THAT

a guide to writing

Cynthia Gregory

Journal writing got you down? Does the pen weight fifteen pounds, the paper cut you to ribbons? Does the shifting light hurt your eyes? Are you feeling totally uninspired, pooky? I have good news for you.

This may be the best ever secret weapon nearly guaranteed to make your journaling a pleasurable and inspiring experience. This information is so good it could be considered cheating – except it isn’t. It’s so good it should almost be illegal or sold with a special license. Nevertheless, here it is for you, the solid gold journaling tip of the year: pick up your journal and walk. Directly to the busiest coffee shop you can find. The kind of coffee shop is entirely up to you.

The place itself can be a youthful hipster java cave where a black tee shirt is very nearly the required uniform and where you are soo out of touch with the music, the cultural references, the technology. It can be a very groovy in a retro kind of place where the waitresses wear those polyester pseudo nurse outfits, with crisp white aprons tied in bow in the back and where the donut case is always stocked with powdered sugar sprinkled old fashioneds. Doesn’t matter.

Once you select your target, enter the writing zone with all the necessary tools and secure a table. So much is negotiable about this drill, but this part is not: you must order enough beverage and/or food to ensure a dependable cover. Your passage on this part of the journaler’s journey requires that you honor your host – the one who provides you with the context of all this rich material – with an offering that reflects appreciation for all the trouble he or she has gone to in order for you have a nice, clean, well-lit writing surface, a place to rest your iced tea, a den peopled with characters to sketch, a platform upon which to balance a snack while you go about your journaling duty.

Here is the question: how can you not find something to write about here? My goodness, there is so much material in this fabulous den it’s almost immoral to shrink from the duty to write. Did you know that in the archetypal studies of fiction, the coffee house, the bar, the watering hole is one of the most holy places in which a plots twist, where complications arise, transactions occur? The Mos Eisley Cantina, the bar in Star Wars, the Whistle Stop Café in Fried Green Tomatoes, the Tropicana where Ricky Ricardo occasionally allowed Lucy to perform as an outlet for her outrageous talent? The watering hole is where information is exchanged, a place that urges the hero to fulfill her next mission in the quest. In this context, the watering hole is wherever you choose it to be and the hero is you.

The bodega is like the telegraph office, where lessons are imparted, instructions delivered. By placing yourself squarely in the heart of your local cantina, you are putting yourself smack in the middle of the most strategically magnetic place in which to attract writing material. (I recommend against writing in an actual bar where alcohol is the beverage of choice, for the obvious reason that while it might make good fiction, it makes lousy writing practice).

So here you are in your café; look around. There are so many topics to bounce into and fill all those crisp empty pages. There is food. Check out that menu! There are customers you couldn’t make up on your best, most fecund day. The décor is an encyclopedia of material. The foot traffic going by outside the window is a screenplay waiting to happen. Maybe you’ve got a host of memories stirred up by the smell of grease, fantasies ignited by the sound of a steamer frothing up milk in a pitcher. Did you waitress your way through college and learn how to balance eight plates on your arms? What is your favorite café experience? Your worst? What about that woman you saw that firm morning in Paris when you finally made it there after so many years of promises to yourself, and found that café in the St. Germain de Pres just blocks away from the Pont Neuf? There she was, sitting in that sidewalk café looking like something out of central casting, with her black sleeveless dress, black, wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, perfect blond chignon, sipping a glass of chardonnay at nine o’clock in the morning, sharing a table with a man who was maybe her nephew, her grandson, her lover? You savored your own cappuccino and croissant with a fabulous mysterious cheese and felt as if in that moment, you were somehow bigger than life.

You see where you can go with this?

So on those days when you know you should be journaling but just can’t find it in you to examine your own life? Get thee to a coffee shop. Let that java jolt seep into your blood and see where it carries you. This may just be the best tip ever. Use it, and then use it again.

coup de grace

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Cynthia G.

we have a new post @ first blush. join us here. or else.

spontaneous creation

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Cynthia G.

Journal THAT

a guide to writing

Cynthia Gregory

There are some conventions in writing that insist that you have a plan. For instance, back in high school when you had to write the dreaded five paragraph essay, there was a formula. Personally, I never understood the formula with its Roman numeral and abbreviated heading titles; it never made sense to me. How could you know what you were going to say before you said it? I quietly complied with the assignment and made an outline. And then I wrote whatever came into my head and aced the drill. Ha.

The idea of planning an essay is like reading a roadmap. Chances are, if you know that you’re going to drive from San Diego, California, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you will consult a map. You will choose one route or another, and more or less follow it. You’ll have a general idea of where you want to go, but will build in the flexibility to stop in Winslow, Arizona to see the Barrington Meteor Crater, or swing by Stanton, Iowa, to marvel over the giant Coffee Pot Water Tower.

I am told that there are some travelers who travel like it’s a race, speeding from the first rays of light until deep night – but I have never been that kind of traveler. I know writers, wonderful novelists in fact, who know every plot twist before they strike the first key on their laptop. There is a special place in heaven for these extremely organized and disciplined writers. The rest of us rely on bat sonar to get us where we want to go.

Journals do not generally have a plan. That is the great beauty of the process. You’re writing it pretty much for the satisfaction of the creative process. But what if you are journaling for a greater purpose? What if you are taking random notes with the hope that you will organize them into something more or less cohesive and useful? Maybe a plan will work for you.

If you need to have an outline, then write one. If you are the type of grocery shopper who carries an itemized list and ticks the products off one by one as they are dropped in the cart, you may need to make an outline. Go nuts. Use Roman numerals, capital letters, everything. If an outline will make you feel safe and satisfied that there is order in the universe, have at it. But if you are more of a right-brainer, someone more randomly creative – or a left-brainer with an appetite for adventure, you can safely forget everything your eight grade English teacher exhorted about the delicious conformity of the outline, the clear mesas of organization, and write without a road map.

I once had a (completely manic) writing teacher who said that creative writing does not need to conform to an outline because the issuer of thoughts and ideas, the subconscious brain, knows exactly what it is doing. It could be that if your subconscious has a plan, you should not mess with it. A journal does not need to proceed in a linear manner. That is, one thought need not link to the next thought and the next and the next after that. That’s the beauty of the journal.

For instance, say your vague, generalized plan for your journal is to write about childhood memories, a true and wonderful goal. You do not need to start with your first memory, move on to the birth of your little brother, then start working on the preschool years, graduate to primary school.

You can skip all over the place if you want. Write about that trip to the county fair. Pick up the trail of that summer vacation where the family hit all the national parks north of Bryce Canyon. Write about the winter you found out about the Tooth Fairy and Santa. Describe piano recitals out of sequence, your first love after the college years. Start at the end, finish in the middle.

Chronology doesn’t matter in your journal because your heart – arbiter of all that is true and good – knows how it all fits together and it is never, ever connected by a straight line. Creative juice likes backtracking. It adores leaps forward, sideways slides. Creative energy is a baby bird learning to fly – it swoops and swings, aims high and lands in the middle branches, totally content to have made it anywhere at all.

Carry your journal with you whenever possible. Pick it up spontaneously when you’re sitting at the gas station filling up your car. Bring it to your doctor’s appointment and write in it instead of reading six-year-old articles in a middling magazine. Keep it with you so that when you have those sweet, random, poetic moments, you can record them exactly the way they played in your head, sound by sound, because if you wait to write them down later, like a dream, you will find that the image have turned to vapor and faded.

Instead of sitting on the sofa watching TV at night, write in your journal. After you fold the laundry, write in your journal. Write at dusk. Write when Venus sits like a diamond on the tip of the setting moon. Instead of sitting at your desk at lunch, working, take a break and write in your journal. When you wake up in the morning and the house is still quiet and you haven’t so much as mumbled your first word of the day, write in your journal. Fill the quiet place in your mind between dream-time and day-time with filaments of creation so pure, so honest, you can almost taste the honey sweetness.

So many parts of our modern lives require control. We control our money, our electric bills, our newspaper subscriptions. We control how much access our children have to the Internet, how many ways they have of communicating with their friends. We manage what we eat, how much we exercise, and what kind of shampoo to use. We are dizzy with the need to control the million details of our modest lives.

So give up control in one area of your life. Give up control of your journal. Just give in to the spontaneous nature of your innate creative genius. That’s right: genius likes to be spontaneous. And play. And have fun. Just like you. Genius.

write here, write now

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Cynthia G.

Journal THAT

A Guide to Writing

cynthia gregory

Once upon a time I belonged to an amazing clutch of writers who met every week to explore writing through timed exercises. It was one of the best writing experiences I ever had, and it did more to develop my skills as a writer than almost anything I’ve done since. Twenty years later, I still miss meeting with that group of women. We shared a very important time, you might even say a sacred time, two hours each week, supporting one another and learning to develop our writing voices. Few things were allowed to interfere with our commitment to meet. We gathered faithfully each Friday at an outdoor table at the Bear Street Café in Orange County, California. We parked our individual cares at the door in order to be fully present and nakedly honest during our journaling session. We wrote furiously, read aloud with quaking voices, listened respectfully, and grew as writers.

Now that I live in another state, I maintain virtual relationships with several of these fabulous women, and we see each other when our travels coincide. But the thing that remains one of the greatest gifts of my life is that even though what we mainly have in common is our passion for writing – no matter what, we support each other. We celebrate each other’s success, and provide insightful comments to help make each other’s work the best it can be. Writing groups are an excellent way to develop as a writer. You can find or form a group by taking classes, getting to know other writers, and then meeting outside of the classroom setting to give yourself more honest writing time.

Back in the day when we met at Bear Street, we maintained a strict routine that goes like this: write nouns or phrases on a slip of paper, and drop them in a cup. One by one, the words are extracted from the cup, and the group collectively writes a timed exercise based on the prompt. After the time is up, we go around the table and read our work. At first, it isn’t easy. But in the right group you soon learn that it is a safe place to expose your heart. Writing is like a slice of your soul, a trickle of blood. You put it out there and your bravery is rewarded a million times over. One unbreakable rule is that no one is allowed to comment on anything anyone reads. Ever. This is not about opinions or feedback; it is about expression. But I will tell you one thing: our writing got stronger and better and more deeply creative by just listening to each other.

I think we secretly tried to out-compose each other, but the result was that we pushed each other to spiraling heights of creativity without so much as one critical word. It was amazing and illuminating and a huge lesson in the art of paying attention.

The exercises were sometimes fun; and just as often downright grueling. But the important thing was that it pushed us to write beyond “inspiration.” If you wait to write until you’re inspired, you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter. By pushing yourself to write for a set amount of time about a set subject you learn to write beyond the boundaries of comfort and the results can be profound. Sometimes, as we filled out those slips of paper, one of us would throw in a ringer and add the words “one sentence.” This meant that when we wrote our journal entry, it has to be all one sentence.

This might sound about as hard as a second slice of your favorite chocolate cake, but it’s more challenging than that. To jettison periods flies in the face of every eighth grade grammar drill you ever sweated through. It’s right up there with cutting your own hair – or wearing your painting pants to church. It’s simply not done, my dear. But oh, the freedom! You can’t even know . Have you ever been hiking on a deserted mountain trail and taken off your shirt to expose your skin to all that pure alpine air? The freedom is exhilarating. . .it feels like skinny dipping in a pond of oxygen.

This is what eschewing periods can do for you: it can open a door into your essence that you didn’t know existed.

Now you are probably afraid that if you drop the period out of your writing it will be pure gibberish, but this simply isn’t true and in fact, I suggest it will open you up to possibilities or maybe an indulgence like a dirty little secret, oh say, like those grapes you sample before you buy them because you want to know if they’re really sweet even though you’re paying for them by the pound but it’s a big grocery store anyway not like that wonderful little farmers market where they hand out samples of pastry and cheese and rich, ripe strawberries, and oh the onions were so beautiful today that I almost bought a pound of them and put them in a vase they were just that purple and shiny with skin so tight you just wanted to lick it and I really really need to plan my grocery shopping a little better so that I can come to the farmers market and listen to the man playing the guitar and think about the million little ways we are connected and what really matters and a meal prepared with love is better than sex and if you don’t believe me just go out and rent Chocolat one more time and imagine what it would have all meant without a little slice of mango and chipotle and bitter, bitter chocolate.

See? Writing is about pushing borders and you will never get to where you want to be as a writer if you don’t do something you have never done before, at least once, the end.

be a tourist in your own life

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Cynthia G.

Journal THAT

A Guide to Writing

cynthia gregory

One way to journal is to forget everything you know about the place where you live. You learn to look at the world as if you just popped through a worm hole from some other verdant, vividly lush and distant planet. Instead of going about your regular routines, I bet you would begin to really see the world you inhabit.

How many times do you go about your business and then suddenly realize that you can’t remember the last ten minutes? That you had been on autopilot, with your body operating the family car, stopping at lights and pausing for pedestrians while your mind had zipped off to distant canyons and gullies of memory and illusion? You’ve arrived safely and no one was hurt, thank goodness, but what would happen if you were fully embodied, fully present, each day of your life? Would you see the world differently? My vote is yes.

It’s a fact that we do not cultivate the practice of notice very well. We are bombarded by television, radio, the Internet, literally thousands of messages a day and so it’s natural that we begin to shut down. In many cases, shutting down is a natural mechanism of survival. The trouble is, once you begin to shut out the ugly of the world, you inevitably begin to shut out the beautiful and remarkable and miraculous, too.

In Eastern traditions people are taught to breathe mindfully. They are taught to sit quietly and focus on their breath for five, ten, fifteen minutes or more. They are taught to let their thoughts go, like confetti in a balloon, to just float away. If minutes pass and you realize that you have got caught up in your thoughts again you simply put those thoughts in a balloon, release them, and return to focusing on your breath. This is a powerful practice, one I heartily advocate not only because it inevitably brings you to a state of poise and charm, but because when you then turn your attention to the world around you again, it looks fresh and clean and lit from within. This is an excellent perspective to bring to your journaling.

So instead of tuning the world out, set the dial on high and tune it in. Begin to notice things like what is the sound of your breath entering and exiting your body? Is it a soft hush or is it a turgid gasp? Listen to your breath for five minutes and then begin to notice the other sounds you’ve been filtering out. Do you hear the sound of warm air blowing through the vents to heat the room? The ticking of the mantle clock in the den? Can you distinguish between the sound of a car going by outside and a truck? Does the lamp you’re writing under emit a faint buzzing noise?

Put yourself on a notice diet: but notice more, not less. Go for a walk and pay attention. How many varieties of garden sculpture do your neighbor’s exhibit? What kinds of flowers are in bloom just now? Have you noticed the faces of the people waiting at the bus stop just as someone who has a story that is probably quite interesting if you had a chance to ask?

Almost no one I’ve ever talked to about it thought their story was interesting. But I’m telling you, their story is remarkable. They just stopped noticing the details. They forgot that their life was miraculous in about a million ways.

So where’s an idea: write about your life like you don’t own it. Write about last Christmas like you’re a staff writer at a big agency and you’re creating a storyboard for a movie that will be seen around the world and sent into space by powerful satellites and viewed by people who have no idea what Santa is about, and why people decorate trees with shiny glass orbs. Explain what your house looks like as if you were describing it to a blind person. Paint a picture with words to describe your dog to a boy who has never seen a dog in his life. Illustrate a journal entry about last night’s dinner with words so smoky and succulent that your nostrils twitch and your stomach yowls. Visit your local grocery store like you’re a tourist from Hungary. Have you ever noticed, really noticed how many different brands of bread there are? How many varieties of potato chips are sold? Go to your local Chamber of Commerce and ask for a directory of its members and marvel that people do the kinds of jobs they do. Lick the inside of your wrist and then sniff it to see what your breath smells like.

Stop living on auto-pilot. Cultivate an appreciation for each Now that shows up. Now, I reach for my water bottle and the cool liquid slides down my throat. Now, my fingers pull away the skin of an orange. Now, I call on inspiration and she takes my hand and we walk.

embrace the writing geek

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Cynthia G.

Journal THAT

A Guide to Writing

cynthia gregory

The practice of becoming a writing geek will show huge rewards almost immediately. If you have mastered the rock concert, the dinner in a five star eatery, the transcontinental journey – utterly and completely alone, there will be rewards, there just won’t be as much contrast because you already know what it’s like to push the far edge of discovery, to test your parts.

You can’t write a journal or anything else if you aren’t ready to go out on your own. It’s true that writing is a solitary act, but you must take your act on the road because there just ain’t enough material hidden away in the attic. You must get out, you must. If you need fortitude, and this is so delicious, grab a book. Going out alone is easy, if you carry a book with you. With a book you can go anywhere. A book is a passport. You can go anywhere with any book and you will be assumed a) intelligent, or b) important. Once you begin to carry a journal and a novel around with you as backup for solo social adventures, you become a writing geek. You have earned your membership card, and are almost a candidate for the secret geek decoder ring.

As a writing geek, I am imminently qualified to offer the warning signs that you too, are becoming a writing geek. These traits are not listed in any particular order of importance; your characteristics may have a remarkable quality all their own.

You carry your journal around with you everywhere, and when you don’t have it with you, your brain becomes stuffed to overflowing with provocative ideas.
You have a favorite style of pen you like to use because you like the way it feels moving across the page. You actually write so much that you can tell the difference between different kinds of pens, and you have one kind that you highly favor.
You will not, under any circumstances, let anyone ‘borrow’ your favorite pen. No sirree, no way.
Sometimes your favorite pen leaks and gives a great, huge blotch of blue stain over to your fingers that no amount liquid detergent can erase. These distinguishing marks afford you great satisfaction.
You take your journal everywhere. Did I already mention that? I mean seriously, everywhere.
You take notes like a mental patient. Standing in line at the grocery, waiting for your double deluxe non-fat extra dry, no-foam latte, sitting on a stone bench at the car wash. Everywhere.
You write in the morning, you write at night. You write fast and furiously, lazily and languidly; you write like you’re making your own life up as you record each savory verb, each tangy noun.
You dream of writing and may actually be jealous that your dream writer is a more resolute wordie than you.
You arrive early at the movies and sit in the semi-dark, jotting notes about the way the place smells, the distant sounds that penetrate the think walls between auditoriums, the ordinary quality of light.
You sit in public places writing, and ignore the sideways glances of strangers who imagine that you’re a journalist, traveling through exotic locations to record the behavior of native dwellers in their habitat.
You keep more than one journal at a time, separating journals by subject and/or reference to time, distinguished by a a shade of nuance that only you understand.
You have a voracious appetite for fiction and non-fiction, in no apparent order.
Words dance around your head like the little birds in the animated version of Snow White. They even dance on your fingers when bidden.
You copy entire phrases out of books you love or by poets whose babies you would birth if only you could.
Your journals are filled with your inspired works and the works of those who inspire you because imitation is the highest form of flattery and beside how else will you fake it until you make it, and it’s okay as long as credit is given where credit is due?
You have journals so precious they never leave a particular room in your house, much less the house itself. You have traveling journals – so tattered from wear of the smashed in handbags, book bags, grocery bags, briefcases, that they have grown soft around the edges. But inside, they are clear and crisp as a mountain stream.
You mercilessly shun bad writing of any kind, lest it taint your own art. You eschew bad television, bad movies, even bad music as a bummer influence on your writing vibe.
You elevate your skills by seeking the company of other, equally intense writing geeks.
You are bewitched by punctuation, even the magical, seductive, subtle nuance of the semi-colon.

So get out there you geek, you, and be a secret agent for journaling. Be a reporter, a spy, a great, groovy Kerouac of a rebel, and write publicly, proudly. People may think you’re important. People may think you’re sent by the government to record their covert movements. People may worship you as a pagan goddess sent to illuminate their meager lives. More likely, they will take no notice of you; being too preoccupied with their own epic lives. That’s okay. You’ve become one of the proud and prolific, you are: The Writing Geek.