Amy is another of my guest bloggers whom I've never really met. But I've followed her blog for quite some time -- again, because she is someone with whom I share a number of interests: writing, scrapbooking, reading, poetry. (But not running. I am not a fan of running. Well, I admire others, such as my oldest daughter, and their ability to run, but I do not run. No.) Amy's writing is amazing -- it's deep and heartfelt and reflective and very real. And it's that quality that I would love to bring to more of my writing, and I think that other scrappers feel the same way. So that's why I invited Amy here today. Enjoy.
One of the last real conversations I had with my dad, who
has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t speak anymore, focused, oddly enough, on
scrapbooking. It isn’t a hobby he has any real connection to, other than the
fact that he remembered one of his daughters did it. Plus, he was the
photographer in our family; he was a reader and a closet writer, and
understood, I think, the power of words and photographs combined. He sat on my
couch for an entire afternoon, reading my scrapbooks; he’d finish one and ask
for another. By that point, reading was a challenge for him, yet he kept at it,
commenting now and then about a detail or something funny.
Until that day, I had occasionally questioned my
scrapbooking approach. My layouts are full of words—full of them. I have layouts
that are only words. I eliminate pictures or embellishments to have more room
for words. Much as I love all the patterned paper and the ribbon and the
rub-ons, the painting and the designing and the making that is involved with a
layout, what continues to draw me towards scrapbooking (and I’ve been doing it
for almost 15 years) is, quite simply, the words. Scrapbooking creates a space
where I can to do something with words—stories and ideas and information and
epiphanies—rather than leaving them, unseen, to linger in journals.
Watching my dad read my scrapbooks eliminated any doubt.
Watching him was nearly like seeing the future, a glimpse of how, perhaps, my
scrapbooks might impact someone reading them after I am gone. Watching him,
seeing what he noticed (not once was it an embellishment), recognizing the
emotional response on his face, my scrapping aesthetic settled firmly into
place. Words + images: This is what matters.
Whenever I share this opinion of mine, I am always met with
some version of the same question: OK, but how? How do you write well? How do
you write something evocative, something that prompts an emotional response? My
first gut response is always this one: you have to be a little bit obsessive
about it. Read books about writing and books about words. Read books about
anything, but pay attention to how the writers use language. Write something
every single day. Practice. Read poetry and essays and comic books and
newspapers, simply for the sheer joy of discovering a well-wrought phrase. Keep
notebooks that you fill with odd snippets of observations. (Today, for example,
I wrote about the patient mother robin sitting in her nest in our sycamore
tree, waiting out the day's ceaseless rain, waiting out the starving of
incubation.)
Of course, you’re also going to want some actual real
advice, some “do this” sort of ideas. Steinbeck said that the way to find the
magic in writing “seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to
convey something he feels important to the reader.” Write what is aching to be
written, rather than what comes next chronologically. What I know about writing
journaling I have learned by writing journaling. While I am, like my dad, a
closet writer who fills up notebooks and backup hard drives with unpublished
poetry and essays and stabs at novels—not yet, in other words, a “real”
writer—these things that I know about writing journaling will help everyone
write better.
1. Be honest. Trying to fake an emotion is a sure way to sap
any feeling from your journaling. Say, for example, your last family holiday
was awful. You had an argument with your husband, the potato salad made
everyone sick, all of the gifts were wrong sizes and had to be returned. Aiming
for a “this was the best Arbor Day ever” feeling in your journaling won’t work
well because your writing is based on the ideal rather than the real. Be
honest. Write what you feel, even if it isn’t the prettiest emotion. Work from
the bad stuff—what did you learn from the experience? How did it impact or change
those involved? This doesn’t mean you have to only focus on the negative. It
does mean you must be authentic, even if you aren’t perfect.
2. Be fearless. I’ve written about this on my blog before;
almost any writing book you read will confront the idea of confronting your
writing fears. If you stop to think about it too long, journaling is a little
bit scary. You’re putting yourself down on paper—what if someone laughs? Or
rolls their eyes? What if you sound stupid, or cheesy, or boring? What if you spell
a word wrong or make an enormously embarrassing grammar mistake? I obsess and
worry over those things, too. Sometimes they stop my writing completely, and I
have to take a little break. (Chocolate is generally involved.) But what drives
me to keep going is a deeper fear: what if I didn't write it? What if what I
journal is something someone will need? The fear of not-writing influences me
more than fear of the grammar police.
3. Be specific and concrete. Emotions are abstract. You
can’t hold love in your hand, you can’t take a big whiff of joy. (Except
metaphorically, of course.) Especially when you’re writing about emotion,
specificities and concrete details relay meaning. For example, say you’re
journaling about your newborn, and you want to convey how much you love her.
You can just say it: I love you. Or
add some modifiers: I love you so much.
Or get even more modified: I love you so,
so, so very much! But you’re still not saying much because all of those
words are worn out and overused. Try getting specific and concrete instead: The
rosebud of your hand curls free from the swaddling blanket and then, as you
sleep, it opens and closes as if you are welcoming the world. You can convey
emotion by using specific, concrete details and with your word choice. (If I
had written something like The baby's sticky, sour hand creeps out of the
swaddling blanket, convulsing open and shut as if to beckon something dark into
the world you feel something completely different, even though the structure of
the sentence is nearly identical.) You can write “I love you” without ever
saying the words. The things we can sense—touch, hear, smell, taste, see—are
what our hearts respond to.
4. Be a rule breaker. Nothing stifles creativity like a
“should.” Someone telling you that you should write journaling will make you
want to never write it again. Break the rules; ignore the shoulds. You don't have to write down every detail of
what happened at your son's thirteenth birthday party; you can just write the
way it made you feel to have a teenaged boy. You can write journaling about
today and pair it with a photo you took ten years ago. Write a paragraph in
second person, then write the next one in first. Write your journaling from the
perspective of your Christmas tree or your lilac bush. Don't let yourself get
bound by “shoulds”; don't let expectations hold you to a course you don't want
to take. Write exactly what you want to write—how you want to write it.
5. Be yourself.
Sometimes, when I am reading a particularly good book, I want to fling the tome
across the room in sheer frustrated envy that I will never write so well. I
feel that way about other people’s blogs and scrapbook journaling, too. Am I
alone here? I hope not! Still, there is something to be praised about your own
writing. You might not manage words like your favorite author or blogger, but
you do manage words like you. And that is all you need to do. Try, as you
write, to find your voice, to speak with your words and word patterns and
rhythms.
Here’s a layout with journaling that I think embodies those
five suggestions:
In a sense, this could have been a throw-away photo. I
wasn’t really thinking very much when I took it, sort of snapped it just
because. But I managed to capture that look, the one that moms of teenage girls
will recognize. Then I had to ask myself: do I really want to document this
emotion? But it was aching to be told, and so I told it. I suppose I could have
written about her running instead. But I want to be honest, so I told the
honest reaction. I think the result is something worth keeping, even if it’s
not rainbows and ponies.
Amy Sorensen is a long-time scrapper and lover of words. Four kids call
her Mom; she's also a librarian and teaches scrapbooking classes at
www.bigpicturescrapbooking.com.
When she's not scrapping or reading or thinking about scrapping or
reading, you'll find her writing or quilting or working in her
flowerbeds. She's also a fan of running and hiking and anything that
gets her outdoors.
