INTRODUCTION

WHEN I was in New York last year, I bought a notebook at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s black (naturally), A4 in size, but thicker than the Yellow Pages. Weighing in at nearly three pounds, it sits beside my bed like a tombstone waiting for me to write in it.

I’m very keen on the whole concept of journal-writing because I think that everyday events can be shaped, manipulated, and developed to provide inspiration for poetry and fiction. The trick is to regard the day as valuable, worth pondering, describing, or fictionalising in the first place.

Keeping a creative writing journal is also good way to try out different writing styles and explore your individual voice. In this way it can help you change or expand your range. Journal-keeping can also simply warm up your writing muscles for any strenuous serious work you want to do.

The creative journal is different from the traditional factual journal that records what happens in a day. Though often the most tedious to keep, factual journals are the most fascinating to re-read, and can become a rich reference source for writers. If I’d kept a factual journal, I would know the price of Brussels sprouts in 1981, for instance.

Then there’s the therapeutic journal. The therapeutic journal can operate like an extension to your house or flat, offering psychic space, room to breathe and expand your ideas. A whole programme for using diaries to get in touch with your inner-self has been recently developed in the US. Even if you’re not interested in this kind of self-help, a therapeutic journal can be a revelation.

Approaching your work from a less controlled, less crafted, more instinctive direction can give you access to material you didn’t know you had. Such material may often have a special symbolic power: because it’s been shaped by the unconscious.

For those seeking self-awareness as well as inspiration, the therapeutic journal can also be a place to clarify goals, visualise the future, understand the past, focus energies, explore dreams. If you want to read more about using a journal in this way, I’d recommend
The New Diary: How to use a Journal for Self-Guidance and Expanded Creativity by Tristine Rainer (St Martin’s Press)

Three types of journal: creative, factual, therapeutic. You can even keep three in one by changing the colour ink you use. Or one in three, but using different notebooks as Doris Lessing did in The Golden Notebook.

If you’re like me you’ll obsess self-indulgently about the notebook itself. Do I want something beautiful? Portable? Lockable? Something I can hide? Symbolically burn?

Here’s some ideas to get you started – one from each of the three categories of journal-writing (see Introduction, left). They all use the recorded events of everyday life as a catalyst for writing which can be developed into more finished work.

But back to my Big Black Book (made by Michael Roger Press Inc, Middlesex, New Jersey: Books, Binders, Albums since 1949): my idea was to start a creative journal to keep myself supplied with fresh writing ideas. But it’s become slightly more than that. I find I’m using factual events to trigger lost memories, which expand into free association and gradually evolve into pieces of experimental prose. From factual, through therapeutic, to creative? Whatever, it’s working for me.

Here’s my entry for 3 April:
A writer with sightless blue eyes and two pairs of sunglasses reminds me of DM. I think about the summer we lived together. It’s very hot. I wash my face with a bar of black soap. I drink lots of coffee. Since I started my new job, I’m smoking again. Everyone on the mag smokes. I remember buying a pack on the way to the interview. My heartbeat never returned to normal. They knocked on the door and woke up the child.
They made a noise. They brought cakes. The
child stood up in his cot when he heard their voices. He already had the kind of personality that was not restful.