Write Your Self by Stephen Wade

Author:Stephen Wade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: creative writing, self help, personal development, journaling, personal growth
ISBN: 9781787051935
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2018
Published: 2018-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Sharing your workshops

Again, it might seem strange to mention this in the context of journaling, but now is the time to consider working with someone else on a collaborative piece of writing. But that someone may in fact not be present, or indeed, alive! By this I mean, a workshop with a group often includes a stock of stimulus objects. Start to assemble your own, and maybe a productive way to start this is to collect a set or display for your desk based on another person who is, or has been, close to you. For instance:

Stimulus objects

Person: Your father.

Example: Your father’s autograph book.

Development: Add to this central focus object a group of small items - such as a photograph, birth certificate, a screwdriver used by him, a hat, a music cassette and so on.

Key image: Now work out something that would be representative of the man you knew. What one event or aspect of character is illustrated by your display?

Image: Work - his hands. How you recall his hard skin and sores. Dirty nails. All seen when he was working in the shed, making a chair.

Of course, all this can be transferred to your own life and self. But notice how this emerged from notes and observation on an ordinary place: just a room in your house. In the end, your gratitude may be about security (the place) and love (your father - your love for him/his love for his carpentry)

The meaning of the writing, and its partly hidden purposes, will gradually be revealed.

At this point, you should record the fact that writing is often about the uneasy mix of pain and pleasure. The above exercise illustrates this well. Your stimulus was about a positive, feel-good factor such as being thankful. Yet in exploring this you uncovered loss and parting; you faced up to a lack in your life perhaps. The effort of revisiting a person who is no longer alive is painful, but naturally, it is related to the reasons why creativity exists.

Words can reveal what is hidden but felt. Your random reflections may in fact open up memories you had wanted to bury. But if they were born again in your words on the page, then clearly there is a deep reason why. Words can not only open up pain; they can ease it. They can even formulate new ways of relating to that emotional implosion which has lain unseen for a long time, pushed away in the process of everyday living. Your journal notes may even be beginning to shape towards writing for others, in spite of your purely personal need to explore selfhood and the nature of your complexity as a modern human being, existing in the accelerated present of the twentieth century, when the notion of permanence is dying.

Not so with your private writing, however. You are creating a permanent autobiographical account of how you are now, and what you aspire to be.

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