I’ve been talking with parents these past few weeks about how their kids are doing with their return to school and all the newness: new teachers, new classrooms, new classmates, new textbooks, new notebooks, and new clubs to join. I know that when I am faced with so much new, I get especially concerned with doing things right and fearful that I won’t somehow. “Will people like me?” “Will I be able to do the work?” “Will I get chosen to be on the team?” are my persistent questions.

Young people feel self-consciousness and so do adults when they start writing. Writers ask questions as they scribble that are not all that different from the questions kids ask about school. Will I like what I write? Will anyone else? Will I be able to keep writing whatever it is I see that I am getting at? Will it become something good enough to get published? One of the many forms writing self-consciousness takes is a vicious comparing and self-editing that smothers voice: “If only I could write like that,” we lament after reading or hearing writing we admire. And then it’s sometimes only a short distance to the decision that saying “if only” means we can’t. And sometimes, we worried about our ability to write because of our own school experiences. Perhaps we had trouble spelling or writing grammatically or punctuating our sentences correctly. Even though we know none of this should matter as we write in our own journals, it is hard to eradicate those many strokes of the red pencil from our memories and the grimace we made seeing our graded papers.

While we want to bring feeling and emotion to our writing, we hate experiencing discomfort about our presentation. How sad that one of the best ways we have to communicate with ourselves–thinking through writing, making leaps of imagination and association to find our true thoughts and feelings–is contaminated by these self-defeating ideas. Luckily, we can muster some power over these voices and images from the past through exercises in our journals.

I believe that trusting in exercises and following the dots helps a great deal, if the exercises help us tap into more than we knew we could write about. Here’s one that will help you get started trusting an exercise and your journal to get you past the questions about your abilities:

Dialogues to Diffuse The Power of Critical Voices
One morning years ago, I was flying Southwest Airlines from Seattle to Tucson where I was going to teach a weekend writing class. Southwest Airlines gives boarding passes at the gate, first come, first serve, and then they load their planes in boarding groups rather than assigning particular seats to passengers. The boarding passes are given out one hour before departure and people start lining up before the agent has actually arrived behind the counter so they can be in the first boarding group. On line that morning, I was standing behind an elderly man and a middle aged man, both dressed in western gear, tight jeans, cowboy boats, and cowboy hats, their belt buckles sparkling under the florescent lighting. They may have been father and son. Their conversation went something like this:

Older man: There sure were a lot people downstairs at the check in.
Younger man: Yup, these days, you can never give yourself enough time.
Older man: They sure wanted us here early and there’s no one ready to see us.
Younger man: Yup, that’s how it is, hurry up and wait.
Older man: I guess we could’ve gotten all jammed up at that place where they check the carry-ons and the people for weapons.
Younger man: Yup, these days you can’t have enough security.

 On the plane preparing for my class, I found that the conversation I overheard was inspiring a writing idea for my class. The conversation hadn’t really allowed either party to say very much. The answers they gave one another were so like clichés and just seemed to shut things down. What if, I thought, we applied a strategy like this to a situation where there were higher stakes? I asked people in my class, to think of an area in their lives where they used to or now do have to interact with someone they feel has annoying power over them. The title would be the name of the person or area. Next I would want them to think of lines that annoying person would say to them. After each line, I would ask them to imagine answering with a cliché, which would naturally have a patronizing tone and put the “I” in the driver’s seat. The results were funny and freeing.

Here is the exercise I shared with the class:

1. Think of a place or situation in which someone has power over you that you find annoying.
2. Name your journal entry after this place or situation: Talking to the Head of the Board of Directors in the Board Room; At Lunch with My Mother; When My Teenage Son Comes Down From His Room.
3. Write a dialogue in which the annoyingly powerful person speaks the way they normally do and after every line they say, have yourself replying with a cliché or something similar (an aphorism, an expression). Don’t worry about how it fits. Just write down what pops into your mind.

You may want to do a dialogue like this for yourself before reading and enjoying the following samples. But if you need to peek at the samples, go ahead:

Here’s a case where a writer chose to have a dialogue with her inner critic by answering in clichés:

That’s not bad for a first try, but why are you calling it a final draft?

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

This little part isn’t historically accurate.

Historical, schmistorical.

People aren’t going to like it.

You can’t please everyone.

You may think you can write, but how do you know other people will thinks so?

Bite me.

Why would you want to write literature when there are plenty of good books to read by other people?

Stick it where the sun don’t shine.

Your ego is getting in the way of your writing.

Takes one to know one.

Your style is too uninventive, not colorful enough.

I’m saving my pennies for a rainy day.

You shouldn’t show this to anyone, it isn’t ready.

And who made you the boss? What are you, God?

You could be spending your time more productively.

Penny wise, pound foolish.

You aren’t listening to me.

Whatever.

By the time this dialogue ends, I feel the writer drifting into her own space. She is leaving the critical voice that gets in her way behind for now.

Any time we capture our resistance to feeling pushed around, we are helping to free ourselves from the forces that trample our desire to express ourselves. Try your hand at such a dialogue.

Six Extensions of this Journal Keeping Idea:

1. Choose more people who, annoyingly, also have power over you and write dialogues between them and yourself that are similar to the one you did above.
2. Take each cliché that you came up with in the dialogue or dialogues and do a freewrite for each about what meaning that cliché has for you, not only vis-à-vis the person you were responding to in the dialogue, but in other life situations and with other people, past and present.
3. Take your dialogue or your favorite of the bunch if you’ve done more than one and write a letter to the person you are speaking with telling how you feel now that you have had this “conversation.”
4. Take one or more of the dialogues and describe the annoyingly powerful person in great detail. What do you see, hear, taste, touch and smell when you think of this person or persons?
5. Think of yourself in one or more of these dialogues. Describe yourself in detail. How old are you? How do you look? What are you thinking about? What is making you uncomfortable, a pebble in your shoe, an eyelash in your eye? What would you rather be doing? What does the person you are having to respond to remind you of? What would make you laugh thinking it quietly to yourself?
6. Think about the critic you hold in your head who is always judging you. Write a death scene for this critic. Where does it take place? What or who causes the death? How does the critic struggle? Why does the critic’s struggle fail? What was the critic’s Achilles’ heel? The critic is dead and you are free! Write about that–how does it feel and how will you use this freedom?