Freewriting > Journaling

I have beef with journaling, and I'm not entirely sure why. It's definitely not because of any antipathy toward cultivating a strong writing practice - that's the basis for my entire life, for crying out loud!

It's more so a hangup with the terminology. I know it's rather silly and nitpicky but journaling, to me, has the unsavory connotation of something forced or flat. It's not really about creation it's about recitation.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with using journaling for self-care purposes along those lines. That is, to purge overwhelming emotions or catalog memories. But, as I started my writing journey, I found myself at a loss about how to utilize a notebook most advantageously for my creative pursuits.

The way my brain was wired, a journal seemingly wasn't going to cut it. But was there even another option?

Turns out there was, and I would discover it, inadvertently, through my high school creative writing class.

/

You can imagine my discontent when the teacher told us we had to have a mandatory "journal" that'd be turned in intermittently throughout the semester.

Said semester made up the home stretch of my senior year. On the cusp of 18, I was coasting on well-worn friendships and trips to local coffee shops. More despairingly, my grandfather was terminally ill with a brain tumor. He'd be dead by March.

I don't think I truly knew how to write then - at least, outside of your standard 5 paragraph routine high school English paper. I was a good student, but I didn't really know what it meant to be a writer. The term felt nebulous to me. Too weighty.

In a few short months, grief pushed me to write in ways that I hadn't yet attempted. Outside of assigned entries, I experimented with stream-of-consciousness prose that revealed more about my own personal mythos than I had the wherewithal to even recognize at the time.

My first Moleskine notebook thus became a relic of my first steps into adulthood. Long after graduation, I continued freewriting intermittently. Maybe once a week. A couple of times a month.

I came to write willfully, never on autopilot.

Further, I began to take note of this feeling, this impetus to go to the blank page to uncover something. Unlike the many journals of my youth (bejeweled diaries from Justice with a heart-shaped lock included), what I wrote was not meant to be hidden away.

Usually, this will to write would be set in motion by a word or phrase in my head. This little glimmer of inspiration would bounce around in my brain for a while and, eventually, when I had some spare time, I'd sit down, turn to the next blank page, and simply commit. Pen and paper. No erasing. No second-guessing.

I've done as such for three years now, learning more and more about the intricacies of my creative process. All of the freewrites I've compiled since 2019 have, in some way or another, evolved into my poetry and prose.

For instance, "Waiting Room," which received one of the Vocal+ Fiction Awards, started out as an entry in my second Moleskine notebook loosely titled "layers."

Another short fiction piece of mine, "Chinchilly," published in ARTWIFE Magazine in January 2023 evolved from two written entries - one of the same name and one titled "in the bath."

Given that first drafts tend to be the most daunting and frustrating part of the writing process, using freewriting as a way to simply create without judgment and fear has been both effective and assuaging for me over the years.

All of which is to say that now I do call myself a writer. I think we should all be more wont to use that term. For, you don't magically become a writer when your work is published or when you complete your magnum opus.

I think you're a writer if you're always creating. Ideating. Evolving. Engaging in this inner dialogue over all the highs and lows of life.

If I trace back my writer's journey by this definition, I find myself at age 8, attempting to pen an entire novel by hand in this little black notebook with a Buddha on it. I'd titled the project "Lilac Lane" and the plot had something to do with three sisters..?

Obviously, I didn't get very far but it was this sentiment, this will to create from a young age that shows me that I have, indeed, been a writer all my life.

/

In all, my return to pen and paper was not a one-time event - a flip of the creative switch in a high school classroom. My return to pen and paper is ongoing. Every time my brain plants another seed, I come back to the blank page, no matter how overwhelming or futile it sometimes feels.

I've even begun configuring major college essays and seminar papers with a freewrite in my notebook. Indeed, I'm still finding new and exciting ways to freewrite so as to explore the breadth of my expression through language.

You can call this whole introspective process 'journaling' if you wish. I won't take any offense. At the end of the day, it's my personal hang-up at work, dividing (perhaps unnecessarily) the writing act.

I just can't escape this oddly entrenched feeling that freewriting is about beginnings while journaling is about endings...

Anyway, no matter what name I give to the pages that house my thoughts made visible, there is, overarchingly, a cathartic function to all true and honest storytelling. This function has been best realized for me in the practice of freewriting, which helped cement my commitment to understanding and communicating the human experience.

With that, I leave off with a snip-it of my recent freewrite about freewriting (go figure), inspired by Ocean Vuong's Louisiana Channel interview:

Out of anger, I rise shakily to collaborate with my vulnerability. The page is not always forgiving. I do not always feel exorcised. Useful.

Some days, I am a writer for a sentence. Others, for a chapter. Writing does not provide a steady stream of solace - you must always ask yourself 'now what?'