Lifetime journal keeper Ruth Folit combined her passion for journal keeping with her technological experience to create LifeJournal, a software program to help those who journal using their keyboards and computers. It wasn’t too long before she decided to create what she calls flavors to the product. One of them is LifeJournal for Writers, for which she asked me to write content, including journaling prompts for keeping and mining a writer’s journal as well as other content for organizing a writing life and evaluating progress.

This week, we offer Chronicles Software Company’s founder Ruth Folit’s observations on journaling and some of her research on how famous writers used their journals.

On Working with the Internal Critic
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” Author Susan Perry has taken Csikszentmihalyi’s work and examined the “flow” state within the context of writers and their writing. Perry’s Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity specifically looks at how writers can get into a flow state while writing. In her book she states:

The optimal conditions for creativity (and thus for flow entry) include a condition of psychological safety from external evaluation. When you feel (and fear) your efforts are going to be judged, you quickly lose the ability to marshal all your mental and emotional resources in the quest for a new way to express yourself. No one wants to fail or look foolish for writing something that others (or you yourself) will judge to be bad, stupid, or silly.

Journal writing creates a safe haven. I write with no intended audience. I don’t feel judged by some unwelcome, sneering being, breathing over my shoulder. I have the freedom and space to think, to express, to be as I please. It’s not easy to find that in the everyday world.

However, even within the confines of “no audience” journal writing, I can sometimes find myself being both writer and audience. This inner and sometimes negative inner voice has been dubbed by many as the “Internal Critic.” Sometimes the Internal Critic can be as cruel and damaging as an external audience. The Internal Critic seems to be universal. Everyone has heard that nagging internal voice saying something akin to “What are you thinking? This is horrible! You think you can write?”

To make journal writing psychologically safer (and hence increase your creativity) you may want to learn to tame your Internal Critic. Here are some thoughts about working with the Internal Critic:

 1. Acknowledge that everyone has Internal Critics of some kind. Get to know yours. Usually, people incorporate parts of their parents, teachers, siblings, or others that may have been critical when they were younger to create their Internal Critics. Bring those Inner Critics out of hiding, into the light of day, and learn everything you can about them. You may want to dialog with your Internal Critics using the dialog tool within LifeJournal. Write down what your Internal Critic is saying: It may be an eye-opener. After a while you will be able to identify the voices of the Internal Critics.

2. Recognize that Internal Critics have both beneficial and damaging qualities. At times your Internal Critics may be protecting you from external criticism. They may motivate you to edit your writing one more time and improve it.

3. Discriminate when it’s a good time to listen to your critics and when to dismiss them. When you are first gathering your thoughts and putting them into words, the Internal Critics may limit your thinking and confine the range of ways to express yourself. In the early phases of writing, keep your critics distant. They will never really go away, so consider different ways to detach from or ignore them.

You may temporarily turn a deaf ear, like when a neighbor’s dog is barking loudly: sometimes you confront your neighbor and his dog, and other times you choose to turn the din into benign background noise. You may choose to talk to your Internal Critics directly — perhaps kindly and firmly, or harshly and bluntly — and let them know that you know that they are there, but you’ll interact with them later. Or you may work with them proactively at the start of the day, as Julia Cameron suggests in The Artist’s Way. Cameron writes “morning pages,” the daily routine first thing in the morning of writing three pages about whatever you want as a way to clear out, clean out, and prepare for a day of creativity. Within your morning pages you may want to have a conversation with your critics, letting them know how you will interact with them that day.

The more you acknowledge your Internal Critics, the more you’ll be able to make them smaller than life.

4. Stay committed to staying in control of your Internal Critics. With time and patience and practice, you’ll figure out the best way to use these interior characters to your advantage.

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Better Health and Other Benefits of Keeping a Journal
James W. Pennebaker, PhD, author of Opening Up: the Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, has done a lot of research about writing and the effect it has on the health of writers. He conducted experiments that assigned college students who had volunteered to be a part of the study to write for 15 minutes on four consecutive days. Each student was randomly assigned to only write about (1) something superficial, (2) the facts of a traumatic event, or (3) his/her emotions related to a traumatic event. Pennebaker then tracked the number of visits each group made to the university health clinic during the four months after the four days of writing. Those in group # 3 went to the health clinic HALF as often as the students who just wrote about superficialities or just the fact of the traumatic events. Those who expressed their emotions stayed noticeably healthier than the other two groups for up to four months after the writing!

Wanting to create a follow-up study that would either further support or refute this first study, Pennebaker’s next study had volunteer college students divided into the same three groups, as above. This time, he measured the immune function of the writers. He took blood samples of the writers before they started the writing days, after the last day of writing, and again six weeks after writing. The results backed up the first study: People who wrote about their deepest thoughts and feeling surrounding traumatic events they had experienced showed stronger immune function compared with those who wrote about more superficial topics. Pennebaker and other researchers have shown again and again that writing about emotional upheaval improves physical health. It doesn’t have to be about the most traumatic event in your life, but among other things, focus on the important issues that are current in your life.

Pennebaker also sees other benefits of writing. Actively writing about a topic — whether it’s academic and fact-based or emotional and subjective–helps the writer organize, re-organize, and assimilate the material. So, if you are working your way through some complex material and want a better handle on it, try writing about it, reviewing it, re-organizing it, digesting it and, ultimately, more deeply understanding it.

Pennebaker also suggests writing to clear the mind. Writing about what’s in the forefront of your mind–the small stuff that you are worrying or thinking about that is a distraction to the real work ahead –seems to clear the way to focus on the real task at hand. Julia Cameron’s morning pages would be a good technique here. She encourages you to write every morning continuously for about 20-30 minutes about anything and everything, with the result that you have expressed distracting and perhaps negative feelings, attitudes, and worries that otherwise would interfere with your creative energy. You can start the day with a clean, fresh mind.

Pennebaker claims that writing fosters problem solving. This is because writing helps in understanding complex problems by forcing the writer to focus on the subject longer than just merely thinking about it would. The writer must spend more time thinking about details, as writing is a slower process than thinking. Have a knotty problem that you are trying to untangle? Write about it!

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How Famous Writers Used Their Journals — Some Lessons

• “Don’t get it right the first time,” James Thurber admonished. “Just get it written.” The journal is the perfect place to get it written the first time — to have the space to work within the bounds of imperfection. Writing within an environment where there is no audience to please helps most writers loosen up.
• Allan Ginsburg took the prose he had written in his journal and changed where he broke the lines and created poems. Re-read journal passages with this thought in mind. You may also consider going back to a list that you have created and see if it has potential as a poem.
• Notebooks that Dostoevsky kept while writing Crime and Punishment are notes to himself about how to write more convincingly. For example, he wrote “in giving it artistic form, don’t forget that he is 23 years old.” You may want to use your journal to coach yourself about guiding principles you want to remember when writing a piece.
• Virginia Woolf used her diaries to sort out her feelings about the writing process. She reported her doubts as well as her confidences about her books, as well as her worries about how the reviewers would respond. Expressing how you feel about your writing process may free you to write with greater ease.
• Graham Greene used his journal to store all kinds of information that he might later include in his writing: the big picture of a plot, anecdotes, and minute details. About how he utilizes this information, he remarked in a footnote in one of his journals:

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife, who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Or perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

•  Writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Tan, and Spaulding Gray credit their dreams as inspiration for their stories. Keep a notebook by the side of your bed so you can write down a few notes about your dreams before you get out of bed. Once at your computer, write as many of the dreams’ details as you can remember.
• Eavesdrop shamelessly. Maeve Binchy, author of Circle of Friends, describes in an essay in The Writer magazine how she purposefully goes to particular places to overhear dialogue that overlaps with what she is writing. If, for example, you are writing a conversation between eight-year- old boys, spend time in a nearby playground or video arcade. Listen astutely and you’ll learn not only what people are saying, but how they are saying it: speech patterns, slang phrases, and the rhythm of the conversation. Keep these overheard conversations in your journal, under a topic such as “Conversations.” You may want to also create a topic called “Characters” to include the cast of characters on which you are working.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald used a special notebook exclusively to write possible titles for his works. Create a topic or a journal entry called “Possible Titles” and add to it whenever an idea surfaces. You’ll have a plethora of possibilities handy next time you look for a title.