How does Yea Forums approach writing in a journal? What's your strategy?
Lately when I think of something I'd like to write about I jot it down in a few words in a list, then sit down in the evening to write. But by that time I'm often too tired and apathetic and barely get through half of the list, or feel what I did write is incomplete. But writing thoughts as they come is too unwieldy and I get overwhelmed.
>Write what you can, when you can, as completely as you can.
>Don't go back to rehash later on.
>Write in the morning/ shortly after waking up.
My grandfather, Lane, had terrible arthritis. His knees were so worn that when he walked they did not bend. He worked near every day, if not in his plumbing business, then in maintaining his farm. He built two different houses, each of them two stories tall. His pain was constant and great. Still, he devoted himself to his craft. Write and read with the same dedication that he lived.
Good luck user, it can be really hard to keep up when you're run ragged by the world.
Blessed post, thanks user I will try this in the morning
My journals usually include notes from books I'm reading and how a certain quote affects my current state. In fear of people finding out and reading it, I do not use the words "I" rather give fictitious names to my current feelings. Yesterday I was really upset that I embarrassed myself whilst I was drunk and wrote in a entry about how shit I feel, how worthless etc and the problems I have with alcohol and trying to show off. But I didn't use "I", see, I just created a fake character and wrote in a short story that is based in the truth but if someone finds my journal I'll be like "nah nigga those are some short stories I'm working on"
Wrote this down while coming up with a list of funny writers for user. Mostly pseud nonsense.
Comedy usually peaks early in a writer. Evelyn Waugh’s best book is Decline and Fall, Kingsley Amis never wrote a funnier novel then Lucky Jim and Philip Roth got better roughly at the same rate as he became less and less funny. This too is often the case for serious writers: Eliot’s Sweeney Erect is an early work while Shakespeare got more and more dark with age.
These writers hoarded their humor. There are 20+ years of observation and scattered memory's that go into something like Decline and Fall or Portnoy's Complaint. Culture plays a huge part, and not just the general culture of the town or the country but that of the local coffeehouse, university dorm, internet message board or society dinner. This kind humor is often worth engaging with, even with other mediocre writers , for the sheer uniqueness of each particular accretion is reliably funny, even in otherwise humorless individuals.
On the other side of this coin are humor generators, the Marx brothers , the professional comedians, the ones who have written their scripts backwards, engineering a system of setups and reveals as formalized french academic painting.
There is of course an art to them; formalized but unpredictable is difficult to achieve, but still, at it’s best one still can feel the buildup rising while still kept on edge, unsure from which direction the punchline will come.
Perhaps this explains the huge appeal of the unscripted content. The humor, however weak, feels fresh. The prevalence of comedy on the box/ internet also helps explain the survival of comedy as a genre. The raw martial is there.
might be onto something there
so... in other words you're a pussy.
no bully
bump
Do people go back and rework their old entries? Whenever i go back to my old journals i end up trying to tighten them up. Not just grammar but rewring whole paragraphs .
I tighten up grammar and add in missing words but rewriting whole paragraphs seems to alter the original entry too drasticaly.
No don't do that, you're degrading a snapshot of your mental state at the time
>buh-buh I culdnt ecxspres meself
No shit, that's part of the snapshot. You wouldn't photoshopped a picture of you asa kid to give yourself cooler clothing, so don't try to lie about who you were.
I am. I am unironically mentally ill and trying to fight back. Either my journals will be something that brings closure to my family after I kill myself or an interesting read for me in a couple of years
why would it bring closure if you also think you are obscuring what you are really saying
I keep notes of details on a pad of folded a4.
Once every few days I type up a batch of new entries on a Alphasmart Neo 2 which is a great low-distraction writing machine which is pretty cheap.
Then when I get the chance I transcribe this in longhand into my diary. I use regular exercise books and a Wing Sung 698 fine nib with Noodlers black ink.
This whole process might sound laborious but it fits with my routine, typing up entries is quick and flows better than writing longhand, and manual writing in the diary is a pleasant task when I have the time.
are you autistic
I don't journal but keep several copybooks (moleskine journals) on Art, Essays, Short Stories, etc.
Just bleed.
I guess it's technically journaling since it's a lot of record keeping
I write in a diary frequently and have for the last 10 years or more. I always lurk diary threads, so if you've been on one earlier this year, you've probably already seen one of my entries.
I write about things that are important to me, sometimes experiences I had, sometimes just thoughts or problems I have to overcome.
But I never force it. I write when I feel I need to write. There have been times when I've not written for over a month.
This is my latest diary entry:
3/2/2020
I feel very down today, like there's the black depression lurking just under the surface---kept back by the drug surely. Ever since I watched that episode last night I've felt it, a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, almost like anxiety for an upcoming presentation but without a cause. I think the reason for this depression is the same as it's always been: I watch a show or read a manga that heavily focuses on human relationships, and then I become depressed because I don't have any human relationships. I'm an uninvolved bystander to my own life, I have been for years, and I don't know what to do about it or how much I even want to change.
I'm past the point of talking to my parents about these things. That's my brother's domain. They have enough to fret over with him without my injecting my own problems into the mix. Besides, my mother's response is always the same: "Increase your medication dosage." As if drugs are the solution to everything. That's the easy suggestion. If you're in pain take a painkiller. If you're in chronic pain take painkillers when you wake up each morning. Don't try to get to the root of /why/ you're in pain. Depression, like pain, is a symptom of a problem, and it's much easier to treat the symptom than to address the problem head-on. My brother is almost 31 years old, her only has a low-paying part-time job, he still lives with his parents, he spends all his free time consuming digital content, and you're telling him to increase his SSRI dosage because he feels depressed?
I'm ever worse off than he is. I've been at my job for 3 years, and I'm not on speaking terms with anyone. I went to college for 4 years, and I don't have one friend to show for it. I'm in college again now, and the one person I tried to talk to moved away from me. I don't have a clue what I want from life. I'm almost 28 years old, but how much of that have I actually lived? What does it mean to live life to the fullest? When I had a group of "friends" in high school who would come over after school every day to play video games, even then I felt an emptiness inside. We were together in the same room, but we weren't really connecting. We weren't interacting on a human to human level; we were fighting proxies of each other in a game world. And the one person from that group who I actually /did/ connect with, I ended up selfishly devaluing him as a person and a friend, and eventually chased him away.
[1/2]
I felt at the time, and I feel now, that the happiest moments of my life were when my friends and I would hang out in E----'s backyard, away from video games and the internet. We'd bond on a human level. And I haven't had another experience like that in close to 10 years.
Clearly something needs to change, but I've felt this way before and nothing has. For now there's nothing more I can say. It's just sad.
[2/2]
consider seeing a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist, user
copybook? like for copying out passages you've read?
>copybook? like for copying out passages you've read?
Copying, resummarizing and reordering yeah. Lots of Plays summarized by Act, Painter's palettes and working methods, Writing advice, Historical perspectives, cultural analysis and sociology, quotations, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, Greek methods of devising literature through diction, figures of description, tropes, etc.
The Essays book has a lot of different ways of developing an idea for writing through page counts and persuasive modes.
ive gone back and forth between digital and analog journals. evernote is probably the most superior way of journaling. however, its hard to do away with the tactile sensation of physically writing an entry or note
I started journaling after breaking up with my ex last summer. In the beginning I was just writing because I couldn't stand existing without expressing my panic in words, but as time went on I started to write whenever I had a thought that I wanted to explore. It went from only being about her to being about my relationship with myself, and now, 8 months later, I'm confident that my journaling has helped me like myself more than I ever have before. For me it's like having a conversation with myself and only after spending some time with my thoughts in print I'm realizing that I'm a pretty interesting, warm and genuine guy.
I usually just have the word document open on my laptop at all times, so anytime I think of something I just write it down. Sometimes 4-5 days pass without me writing anything, sometimes I write 2-3 pages in a single day. It mostly depends on my mental state and how introspective I'm feeling. I write a lot more when I'm stuck in thoughts
I have the same exact problem. Very tough to pick between the two.
ive dabbeled with handwriting entries, and then scanning them into evernote. it's cool, and you can add addendums to entries without messing up the original. but its more effort
I do the same. Just can't use moleskine notebooks anymore since they changed to lesser quality paper. I use leuchtturm1917.
>I do the same. Just can't use moleskine notebooks anymore since they changed to lesser quality paper. I use leuchtturm1917.
Ah, thanks for the tip. I can't stand ink bleedthrough in a notebook, but I'm hoping I can find a good one that is larger than A5.
>he doesn't bind his own journals by hand
bump
I tried keeping a journal but my life is so uneventful that I had to stop doing it. It made me too damn self-conscious.
Start again, this sounds like a cliché, but it's true. Self-awareness is the pathway to self-improvement.