Keep a Journal
Journaling is the number one way to organize your thoughts for a storytelling project and should be an early step that looks at your personal process as well as document where your thoughts lead. This is not about composing any completed work or writing anything to share with other people but a way to stimulate memories about recovery and reflections on what the events meant to you then as well as what they mean now — for this reason, I encourage allowing your thoughts to scamper to the page in whatever style comes to you with minimal thought about form. Personally, I find myself enslaved by plot structures, even when engaged in self-reflective babbles, and therefore I have a terrible time attempting stream-of-consciousness writing, but if you can let your words escape the constraints of structure, I encourage you to allow this to happen with no thought about other people understanding. Or jump between styles depending on the moment, doesn’t matter. This journal is intended for only you — your eyes and mind. This is not composing anything, but sorting out what’s happening in your head, so write in any way that makes sense to you. For the rest of this entry, I’m going to list some suggestions that work for my mind, but there is very little that must be done, as long as you keep up the journaling in some manner — the goal is to strike a spark that lights a creative fire in your mind, so play with it.
On to the list of suggestions:
A good place to start is setting up a timeline of what you remember from the recovery process, but keep in mind that as you continue, the events you remember and consider important will likely change and expand, and so the timeline you’re working from can also change. You can ask yourself questions such as: “When did my injury happen?”
What is important for the setting?”
“Is there a milestone I can use as a marking point for the beginning and/or ending of the story I want to tell?”
“Do I want to bring the story to some resolution and at what point can that happen?”
While the timeline should be allowed to shift as your understanding deepens, it can help to have a clear beginning and ending in mind for the story, as this helps with the formation of the dramatic arc, something that will come up in a later entry. That said, it’s important to understand that, while the truth of BI is that it’s a never ending process, it helps an audience to have a clear end mark for the story that is shared.Once a time line has been created, it also helps in separating events that you want to share in the performance — a sort of scene breakdown. My personal memory of recovery has events running together and one scene blurring into the next, but by marking each happening with a different label, it can be easier to understand how all these events, while related and possibly occurring simultaneously, are still separate moments. This serves two functions:
First, it creates a clear narrative that an audience can follow. While I recognize that making the audience feel confused may be a desired effect by a storyteller, it helps the composition process to have events clearly differentiated in the author’s personal timeline, allowing the audience’s confusion to be a choice as opposed to an unintended consequence.
Second, clearly separating the scenes allows the storyteller/survivor to reflect upon the recovery process and understand that different feelings and reactions come from different experiences. This helps in untangling the jumble of emotional threads that often get balled together when reflecting on the experience of recovery as a whole.Once events have been parsed into individual scenes, the storyteller can look at each scene individually and journal emotions and reflections about separate moments as opposed to the whole of the experience. Personally, this helped me view individual moments in my recovery with more clarity and helped me to decide exactly which scenes I wanted in the final narration.
You needn’t focus on a narrative — it can be a list of words, two words, an exclamation, pictures, short phrases, free verse poetry, metered rhyme, rambles, or a traditional paragraph format if that’s what best captures your thoughts — whatever will serve you. And you can play with it — this journal is only for you, so there are no requirements or limitations.
Write any thoughts that occur to you in this process. If an idea pops into your head when away from your journal, find a way to record it and add it to the larger journal when you have a chance. I encourage you to put down all your thoughts, but then feel free to scratch them out or hit the delete key later. Putting down everything you think keeps some potion of your mind constantly engaged in the process
Record this journal in a manner that feels best for you. Personally, I like to write with a pen in a notepad, because I can most easily switch between formats — from narration to sketch to mind map and so on — it’s about letting the thoughts flow freely. I also like to use a pen because I can’t erase — I can revise by crossing something out, or scribbling over, but it helps to record the progression of my thoughts and to see how they change. That, however, is only my preference. You can write with a pencil because you like having the freedom to erase, or type on a computer, or speak into a voice recorder, make videos with your phone — however you feel you can most honestly record your thoughts. The only requirement is that you can access these journal entries in the future. It is important to be able to review earlier thoughts as you continue with the process. Sometimes first thoughts are best, or it could be that recognizing a change in how you feel about something can inspire a deeper reflection.
Try some early composition of your piece. While I have repeatedly pointed out how this journal writing should not be shadowed by a need to share with anyone, it can also be a spot to start sketching some ideas. Maybe you write an outline of how you want your storytelling piece to come together, or you want to play with phrases that capture an emotion, or a paragraph, or even full scene. Remember, you’re not tied to anything that is written, but it can be a way to begin thinking about a first draft.
Write in your journal regularly. By pushing yourself to write something — anything — daily, weekly, or any relatively frequent period of time, it keeps you working on your storytelling. If journaling becomes a thing that you do only when you feel like you have the time, it can quickly become lost in the either of good intentions and you may loose focus on the storytelling project. I’ll talk about creating a schedule for yourself in creating the project in a future entry, but if you don’t hold yourself to some regular requirement, such as regular journal entries, it is easy for a project to become lost amid the maelstrom of other commitments that everyone must deal with. To be clear, you almost certainly will miss some days of journaling because life happens, but consistent journaling is one way to encourage the completion of your storytelling.
So that’s my starting list of tips on creating a journal. Nothing is finite, and everything should remain open to what works best for you, but I will say that starting a journal should be one of the first steps when creating a storytelling piece, and this is coming from a person who is terrible about keeping a regular journal. I believe it will be most beneficial if the journal is continued up until after your work is ready to be performed, as it’s way to sort out thoughts and watch as those thoughts change, but I must admit that all my journals tend to wither away once I get near what I consider a completed script, so I admittedly do preach an ideal as opposed to my reality — and I encourage you to strive for the ideal, but let your reality be whatever it must be.
That’s what I’ve got for today — I’m certain we’ll come back to writing in your journal as this blog continues, but for now, please share if you have any thoughts or suggestions on journaling. What is your ideal in a journaling process? Are you able to stick to it? I would love to hear what your thoughts are. Thanks for taking the time to read and I look forward to learning some more.
