More Than a Productivity Hack?
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How a writing journal can help you draft mindfully
When I was in my teens, my friend and next-door neighbour described to me the gloomy feeling he’d sometimes get on reaching the end of a day with the sense that he hadn’t accomplished anything. At the time, I couldn’t relate at all. Unlike him, I was not a triathlete or a musician and I was not aiming to finish school among the top three in my class. As far as I was concerned, if I reached the end of a day without anything bad happening, then things were going alright. Even better, if I could get away with watching a movie instead of doing my homework — well, that was just a plus.
Since I started writing fiction, however, I’ve come to know that gloomy, unproductive feeling intimately. Now that I have a goal I’m striving for, it’s always a disappointment when I reach the end of a day without feeling like I’ve moved any closer to achieving it. Even when I have got something done, it often doesn’t feel like enough. If I have a whole day set aside to write, I should be able to get more than five hundred words down, surely?
I’m not sure this development is a good one. Don’t get me wrong; my writing has certainly been a net positive. Apart from the fact that I’ve met some of my best friends through writing groups, the experience of writing itself is a wonderful one. Whether it’s moving a pen across paper or watching a document take shape on a screen, the feeling of creating something from nothing is one of excitement — of endless possibility. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, it’s what gives my life purpose. When it’s going well, it makes me happier than almost anything else can.
But perhaps that’s the reason why it can make me feel bad too. Like any serious relationship, I’m very emotionally invested in how it’s going. I have to remind myself sometimes that preserving my mental health is as important as generating output. That gloomy feeling of self-judgement comes at the cost of my sleep, my (other) relationships, and ultimately my writing too.
That’s why keeping a writing journal has become a crucial part of my daily practice. This isn’t a particularly revolutionary habit. Lots of writers will tell you about the importance of “warming up” your writing muscles before you start working on your serious project for the day. It gets the false starts out of the way in a low-stakes environment and gets those creative juices flowing so that you can hit the ground running, as it were. In writing, as in sports, adequate preparation is important to optimise performance.
And as it happens, my writing journal does make me more productive. Speed-typing 200-300 words about whatever comes into my mind before I open my manuscript doesn’t take enough of my time to constitute procrastination, but it does allow me to keep track of my goals. (How many words did I promise myself I’d write today? Which chapter am I supposed to be on by now? Can I beat my own high score for a 15-minute sprint?) In fact, I’m convinced that jotting down notes like these in my writing journal had a lot to do with my NaNoWriMo win this past November.
But for me, this “hack” is not just about productivity. If anything, it’s more about getting out of my head. My writing journal is where I set down all the anxieties I have about my draft being rubbish, or the fact that I don’t know where I’m going with it next. Writing these thoughts down saves me from venting them at whoever is closest to me at the time, which is generally a good thing for the conversations I do end up having. And while it doesn’t get rid of the thoughts, it does sometimes help me get them out of my brain so I can move on. Perhaps the more important thing it does, though, is make me more conscious about my state of mind as I approach my manuscript. Just being aware of that enables me to take better care of myself.
It’s basically a kind of mindfulness practice, but one that happens through writing rather than mediation. The goal is the same: to become aware of what’s happening in my mind as it unfolds in the present moment. If I find myself typing that I’ve only written 300 hundred words today and it’s not good enough, for example, I can catch myself in the act and make a conscious effort to turn to positive thinking instead. This probably wouldn’t happen if these thoughts were just swirling around on a semi-conscious level in my brain. They’d just be making me feel bad without my realising. That sense of gloom about reaching the end of a day feeling unproductive comes from a negative self-talk that I’m not even aware of unless I put it into writing.
I’m so convinced of the benefits of the writing journal that I make all the students in my expository writing class keep one. The practice works just as well for writing essays as it does for writing fiction, and the importance of keeping on top of your mental health whilst juggling assignments for multiple classes can’t be overstated. While I find students don’t tend to do the work I set for them unless there’s a grade incentive involved, I try to make the writing journal less about productivity than about practice for them too. They get the points just for writing something — I don’t particularly care what.
Another interesting thing happens when I write down my anxieties. Not only does the act of doing so bring them into my consciousness, but it also helps me work through them on a level that isn’t possible on a purely internal level. I’ve solved some of my most knotty plot problems just by free-writing about them. Because just deciding to think about a problem usually gets me nowhere. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who has resolved to think of ideas for my WIP walking to work or going into the shower and just ended up daydreaming about something else instead. Even if I do manage to keep my mind focussed, the ideas just go around my head on repeat. If the problem is complex enough, I don’t have space in my brain to figure it out.
But while thoughts can be repetitive, writing is less often so. In writing, having one sentence fixed in front of us allows us to move onto another that logically follows it. As such, keeping a writing journal stops ideas from going stale and repetitive in the mind. This, too, is what mindfulness does. In fact, as gurus like Eckhart Tolle would have it, repetitive, semi-conscious thinking is the cause of almost all of our suffering in life — this is the crisis that mindfulness aims to correct.
This blog is another one of the things that has developed from my writing journal. As I used my journal to track how writing was going, I noticed patterns and techniques that had been helpful to me. I also noticed myself making minor edits to those ideas as I put them on the page: polishing them up a bit. This isn’t just my perfectionism making an unwelcome entrance — there’s a value in expressing something clearly on paper — it helps me solidify the idea in my own mind, too.
Of course, there’s a relationship between productivity and mental health. It’s not just that we work best when we’re feeling good. It’s also that achieving meaningful goals offers us a fulfilment that we can’t get from watching TV and eating ice cream. It’s only when productivity becomes pressure that this cooperation gets thrown off balance. Watching this relationship play out in a journal is, for me, the best way to make sure that it’s the mutually beneficial kind, rather than the downward-spiralling kind.
