An Entry A Day: How Journaling Daily For A Year Shaped My Creative Identity
It was the summer of 2014. I was a bum.
I had just finished a season on the festival circuit as a steward and had a few weeks of work as a dishwasher on the horizon. It wasn’t clear at the time what was up and what was down, I existed and that was about it. I had quit the film industry a year ago and still didn’t know how I could fit into the Arts, how I could make a living from stories. I was desperate to be a writer, the way a thirsty creature is desperate for water. It felt like I hinged on it, my identity, my integrity, my ambitions. I didn’t have the funds for a masters. I didn’t have the funds for much. But I had a green moleskin journal. I opened it on the last day of festival freedom and wrote a poem.
It felt good. I hadn’t written in an age. My world had been about the words of others. But in this moment the words flowed freely, without judgment, and I thought, this poem’s ok, but imagine if I wrote everyday, how much better could my poems be? Imagine how much material I would have?! Maybe I could do something with it…
So I decided, on the 14th August 2014, I’m going to write everyday in this journal. And I did, more or less, until the journal was full. It spans 14/08/2014 to 14/06/2015.
I had two rules:
1. Write anything, any form, any style, any subject. It doesn’t matter if it’s ‘dear diary’, prose, poetry, a script. Just write.
2. Write anything, as long as you write, any quantity, any amount, one word - fine. Ten pages - fine. Just write.
So the experiment began.
I played with form. I tried rhyming poetry, beat poetry, spoken word, free verse, narrative poetry. I wrote short stories, little vignettes, scenes, worlds, exchanges between imaginary characters. Don’t mistake these efforts for success. These weren’t GOOD poems, or stories, or dialogue. But they were there, and that’s something. I was trying and I was enjoying it. There was no pressure because I got to choose what came out of my pen.
As long as something did, right?
In terms of subject matter - I tried purely observational angles, using my surroundings as a starting point. Then I went full blown introspection and tried to describe the minutiae of my emotional processing. And there was weird stuff. A story about a woman who loved a beekeeper and drowns herself in honey. A short but epic poem about a duck who gets a phone call from the local priest and goes on an adventure. (No, I don’t know either.) But it was these weird tangents that feel so precious now. In what other moment would I have allowed myself this trivial absurdity? And yet, it was fun and the outcomes were kinda good.
And this is part of the magic of this process.
All this material.
All this weirdness.
All from me, my brain, my experience.
And as I read back I got to choose what I liked and what I didn’t. What did I want to write more of? Which characters came back to me late at night, demanding my attention? Which forms came fluidly?
When it was finished I went through the journal and copied out all the pieces I genuinely liked and I set to work on them. Some of them turned into short performance pieces, some went off to zines. Some are precious and will never see the light of day. Others are being grown into bigger, meatier pieces. And then a few are waiting in the wings, knowing there will be a time when they get to flourish.
Lots of my writing didn’t make the ‘get copied out’ cut, and that’s good too. Because I could make a conscious choice those pieces didn’t sound like me, or weren’t interesting, or were too serious, or whatever criteria they didn’t meet.
I learned more about my inner world, and I don’t necessarily mean I became more self-aware. That kinda happens, but it’s not the whole of it. My aesthetic became clearer and clearer, each time I wrote was an opportunity to hone in on what I like to write and how I like to sound. As it happens I like absurd things, I like tragic things, I like sugar coating melancholy. I like adventure and the fantastical. I sound like: matter-of-fact meets rookie-performance-poet, it’s a weird mash up but it’s me. It’s my voice and I forged it in that journal.
You can’t have a voice if you don’t actively write.
I was always there, sounding like me, but it was only when I could see myself on the page that I stepped into the role of the writer, the artist that I had longed to be. What had been missing was the material. Once I had material I could share it, I could hone it, I could own my words and my voice. I had words that stood up on their own. They were mine.
So, write anything. Just write.
