Journals

I keep a journal. To be more precise, I have kept a journal without pause for roughly a decade and a half, but in high school, I kept one on and off.

Luckily, I was keeping one on the day Mark walked into Sunday School, and I spent the entire hour having an internal crisis about whether or not to reach out to him. That journal was a green, spiral bound notebook, a semester-long assignment from my homeroom teacher, Dr. Waples.

I discovered this when I found that journal again a few years ago. I flipped through and spotted this story, as seventeen-year-old Shelby had told it to herself, a day or so after it happened. As an adult, looking back at my teenaged words, I could watch my younger self organize the events into a story structure and transmute all my big emotions into meaning.

This is still how I process big emotions. With overwhelming feelings, you have only a few choices: freeze at their arrival, run from them, or dive in and try to navigate.

Journals help me to do the last one, and this method has been extremely effective at helping me process significant events in my life and the emotions that arise in them.

That said, you may be wondering: why does this process make it into my Creative Toolbox?

Because the flood of your emotions isn’t much different from the flood of your imagination, and I use the exact same process to sort them out.

Raw Material Doesn’t Yet Make a Good Story.

It is not enough to just experience the story—whether you are living one or imagining one. Your emotions are swirling around, and if you had to explain them, they aren’t going to make sense to anyone except for the people who know you well. With raw material (i.e. the experience you’ve just lived or the scene you’ve just imagined), you’ve got more feelings than structure, more sensations than meaning.

The events of a lived experience or a story plot lack impact unless you also know and communicate the meaning of those events. For example, in the second story of my last post, I could easily say: One day, when I was seventeen, I saw a classmate whose mom had just died, and after class, I told him that I was sorry about his mother.

This is factual but not a compelling story.

(Actually, as we’ve seen in the story about the librarian, people don’t like to talk about death. Sharing such a factual account of that event usually shuts down a conversation.—Most people don’t know how to respond. Telling it as a story makes it more relatable and therefore easier to approach.)

So, after speaking to Mark, I sat down with my journal. I wrote out the raw experience, throwing all of my feelings on paper, exactly as I felt them. Basically, I was venting. That, in itself, is extremely useful, especially if you need a safe space to unpack how you’re feeling. But it’s not only venting.

Journal-writing is the methods I use to tell myself the story of my own life. The venting portion is the first draft. It’s the draft no one sees except the writer, and it is a vital and necessary step.

As a teen, I attended a writer workshop, where they gave every attendee a t-shirt with a E. M. Forster quote: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Having lots of feels, I have lived by the modified version of this: “How do I know what I feel until I write it out?” Journaling is invaluable for me, because I am often crowded with so many feelings that it’s hard to articulate them all.

However, as helpful as venting is, what happens after you have written out your feelings is even more useful.

You Have to Re-examine to Connect the Dots.

An experience is part of your life.

Because you are living the story of your life, each experience is a scene from that story. It’s in your hands, waiting for you to make meaning with it.

You can ask yourself:

What’s important about this experience?

How does it fit in the larger arc of your whole life?

Where do you want to go next?

Just by asking these questions, you begin to create their answers. Maybe the answers aren’t complete right away, but it’s a start.

After writing out the experience at Sunday School, for example, I gave myself room for all of my big feelings. Then I kept going—I looked for the structure. If I were to apply my story structure terms to it, it would look something like this.

• Backstory (original normal): As a child, I hear stories about about the year my mother lost her dad at eighteen, and as a teen, I feared losing her the same way.

• Catalyst: One Sunday, I see an eighteen-year-old classmate, who’d lost a parent during the holidays of his senior year, and his experience reminds me of my mother’s.

• Murky Middle: I have a storm of feelings as our class progressed.

• Significant Shift: I reach out to my classmate and give voice to my sympathy.

Now, this is where it gets tricky. You would think that the resolution was his response, or us both going home, but that is only important, not pivotal.

The resolution happened when I sat with my feelings long enough to understand them better, and through that process, I also understood myself better.

Taking the time for that, I could see the full arc of the story and recognize why it was important. One element stood out—both during the hour-long storm of feelings and during the process of re-examining the experience later. I had a lot of clarity that my decision on whether or not to reach out wasn’t just about Mark. It would also impact the way I would feel about myself forever: either I was the kind of person who let internal turmoil stop me from doing what I knew was right, or I was the kind of person who could show kindness even when it was hard for me. And because I framed the choice in that way, I chose the latter. It helped me act. That understanding was critical to how I integrated the whole experience.

So, that was the final part of the story:

• Resolution and New Understanding of Self (New Normal): I knew I could become the kind of person I wanted to be, because I chose to act in a way that brought me closer to being that person.

You know that you’ve really hit a new normal when you settle into clarity, especially around the questions I mentioned before:

• What’s important about this experience?

• How does it fit in the larger arc of my life?

• Where do I want to go next?

Over time, with the questions, you create meaning that is wholly and uniquely your own. You begin to live on a foundation of unshakable meaning: you know who you are, and with that knowledge, you gather confidence and courage to go forward in the way that is right for you. You may not know everything yet, but you learn to trust that you know enough to take the next right step.

So, what does this have to do with writing fiction?