I'm a firm believer that the "nouns" in my life are one of the best ways to capture important stories. By nouns, I'm talking about the literal grammar term: a person, place, thing, or idea. Chances are, you probably scrap about important people and places all the time, but you may not spend as much time on objects.
Today's lesson focuses on using a song title or lyrics to jumpstart a story about an important personal belonging.
USING PREWRITING STRATEGIES
The hard part about journaling -- about any type of writing, in fact -- is that the words don't just spring full-blown into your head. Sure, that happens occasionally, but more often the truth is that you have to work for every word, every sentence, every paragraph. The MOST IMPORTANT writing work you can do is the preparation leading up to that final act of recording your journaling on your layout. In terms of writing stages, this is called prewriting.
Prewriting consists of a variety of techniques that are all designed to help you come up with ideas, make connections, and develop concepts. Here are several that I use most often:
- Freewriting. This is like carrying on a conversation with yourself. It may follow a certain train of thought for a few minutes, but then skip to a variety of other images. There are no rules to freewriting -- no focus on grammar, punctuation, word choice. The point is to sit and write and see where the words take you, what kind of connections can be made.
- Brainstorming. This is just another word for generating ideas. There are many ways to brainstorm, but the most common involves making lists. Begin with a general topic and create a list of specific details or related ideas beneath it. These ideas can reveal connections between topics and help you dig deeper into the heart of your ideas.
- Asking questions. This is a technique I use frequently, because it gives my brain that extra boost to recall additional details that I might have overlooked. Begin with the five W's and continue from there: Who? What? When? Where? Why?
- Clustering. If you need to see your ideas in order to make connections among them, then this technique may be the best choice for you. With clustering, you begin with a term in the center of your page and then you create clusters of ideas that branch off from it. I've seen this concept take the form of trees and other objects as well.
You can use each of these strategies as is, or you can combine them; there's no right or wrong way to use them. But taking the time to explore your ideas before you begin writing can be the step that takes your writing from so-so to SO AMAZING!
PLANNING:
There are many ways to go about the next steps -- I'll leave that up to
you. But here are the basics: you need to choose a song that makes you
think of a certain object or personal belonging.
Here are some ideas and activities to help you narrow down the list:
- Read through the titles on the back of the CD case. Do any of them make you think of a certain object?
- Print out the lyrics to a couple of songs. Go through and circle any objects. In the margins, make a list of any details that those objects bring to mind.
- With the CD case in hand (or the album playing on your stereo, computer, or mp3 player), walk through your house and just look at the things that surround you. Do any connections make themselves obvious?
Note: That last technique is what I did. I was looking through a list of song titles and happened to glance at my inspiration board. The picture (below) of my parents was hanging there and the starry background brought this song to mind.
Once you've chosen a song that describes your important place, use one of the prewriting techniques above to brainstorm specific details about this object. Even though your layout will be focusing on a particular object, you still need to generate ideas to help you get at the story represented by that object.
WRITING:
As you begin your journaling, many of the tips from yesterday's post about describing a setting can also apply to describing an object. Another thing to think about is how you organize your description, because the order in which you reveal details affects how the reader "sees" this object. There are a few options:
- spatial order: You present readers with a general description of the entire object, and then reveal details in the order in which the eye would naturally perceive them
- thematic order: You divide the object into mental categories, much like classification, and then group details based on how they support this theme rather than how they are literally related
- impressionistic order: You reveal details based on how you think they would catch your reader's eye -- what would they look at first? second? and so on
DESIGN:
This is a perfect opportunity to use the album art as a jumping-off
point for your page design. For each lesson, I'll give you the option to focus on
one component of the album art. Today, we'll be focusing on the overall design -- be inspired by the arrangement of photos, title, journaling blocks and embellishments. I've found that if I think of them in terms of different colored blocks (red for photos, blue for journaling, yellow for titles, etc), then I can break the design down more easily into its related parts.
credits: A New Leaf collab by Paislee Press and Audacious Designs, Est. collab by Paislee Press and TaylorMade Designs (date stamp, dot border, and word strips), Photogenic collab by Paislee Press and Audacious Designs (star)
MY LAYOUT:
I chose the song "At the Stars" from How Does Your Garden Grow? by Better than Ezra. There honestly wasn't much in terms of the lyrics that I was able to include, but sometimes just the title of a song is enough spark to get a layout going. In this case, I focused on a photo of my parents when they were just out of high school and hadn't been married more than a couple of months, if that. I don't have many pictures of them at all, so this is really a treasured object to me.
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