guest blogger: Amy Sorensen

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.

 

Comments

[Lee Currie]

WONDERFUL article. I love how you broke everything down into bite-size pieces. I am terrible at explaining "process". I can totally relate to the want to throw a book across a room or slam down the laptop. So much good stuff out there. And I'm VERY FAMILIAR with "the look" - we have our very own hagarella here in this house :)

[Amy]

Great article! I love journaling & definitely feel like you do- it's the stories/memories + the pictures that holds the key to what I hope to leave behind. Thanks for sharing some "tips".