Just Playing
Keeping my writer’s journal is a lot like playing in a sandpit. I go there to play. I fill buckets with sand to make shapes to build castles just to knock them down again. I dig holes and fall into them, bury my feet, pour water over the sand, watching the way the colours change and the sand turns hard and crusty. I push trucks and containers through the sand, moving it and rearranging the sand with every action. I fill my pocket with sand, let it stream out as I run around and scratch later when I feel it itching at my skin when I’m nowhere near the sandpit. That’s exactly how I see a writer’s journal; a place for serious play.
In my writer’s journal I use the tools I have to have fun, build, destroy and rearrange. The writer’s journal becomes a space for me to grow in, to dig around in. The golden sands are the words. I use the tools of voice and character, slant and opinion, fiction and fantasy, honesty and evasion, prompts and plans just as a child uses buckets, spades and various containers. I like to think of it this way. This helps me not to fear to write whatever comes to me. I write freely letting the sand trickle from one container to another. Aimless playing, watching the way the sand falls. This is how a writer learns what works. In daily play children develop and learn. The same idea applies to writers. I’ve learnt so much just mucking around with words. That’s why prompts and certain restrictions make good writing challenges. What better place to attempt these than in a writer’s journal?
I once attended a writing workshop where they challenged us to write a piece without using the letter e. Do you know how difficult that was? But what fun reading and hearing the stuff we wrote. We laughed and shared our joy in playing with words, just like kids in the sand pit with only one bucket and a margarine container to build an entire castle. I’ve been to other workshops where we wrote limericks; poetry; alliteration; drew pictures and wrote about the thoughts they inspired; used opening paragraphs from novels to start our own stories; put on hats to help create characters and wrote about them; and many other fun activities. Not all the writing has been outstanding, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all play, it’s all learning, growing and knowing what makes for more dynamic writing.
Play with the different voices in your journals. Make one entry in third person point-of-view, just to see how it feels. Speak in the voice of one of your characters; let them have the page for the day. Try different tones; authoritative, passive, assertive, friendly, humorous, playful, naive or express whatever mood we might feel coursing through our systems and thrumming in our veins as we sit to write.
Toy with your tone and opinion, approach one topic in many different ways, just to see which way clicks within your writing self. I like the idea of writing one situation over again in different genres; the same characters, situation, and setting, but try out romance, then fantasy, then murder-mystery, and so on, until you find the one you fit into most easily. The one you enjoyed most, because you’re just fooling around with your ideas. Youre putting them into different containers and changing their shape.
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POSTED IN: The Writer's Journal
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