Try writing journals your own way!
I started the habit of collecting and writing down my thoughts a couple of years ago maybe because at that time I felt that I badly needed an escape or an outlet where I can cope up and find the surest acceptance that I could possibly found through writing.
Those are the years when I was experiencing difficulties on rearranging my life after a series of health issues that I've been dealing with ever since.
Through writing I found myself, my purpose, and my sense of worth as a person that is capable to withstand the challenges that will come may way all through the coming years.
The free-flowing of words that I had penned have had given me the comfort and healing that can never replace by a spoken word...
Why don't try journaling yourself?
Some of you may know already that personal journal writing can improved your emotional health as well the recent studies by scientist at Southern Methodist University and Ohio State University College of Medicine have proven that writing contributes to physical health too.Journal writing helps to integrate and organize our complicated lives in a variety of ways. At the same, it resolves traumas that stand in the way of important tasks, it helps in remembering significant events and turning points, it captures our creative stories, poems and ideas, helps discover and define our values and purpose, reap the wisdom of our dreams and discover what is sacred in our lives.
Also a recent study conducted by researchers like James W. Pennebaker, M.D., professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and Joshua M. Smyth, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at North Dakota State University, are proving what journal writers have always known, journaling is good not only for the soul, but for the body as well. The first studies, in the late l980's, examined healthy people and journaling. Researchers have found that people who write about their deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding upsetting events have stronger immunity and visit their doctors half as often as those who write only about trivial events. And more recently, exciting and innovative research appeared in the April l4th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
As well a research, conducted by Joshua M. Smyth at the State University of New York at Stoneybrook, showed that writing about a stressful experience reduces physical symptoms in patients with chronic illnesses. The team monitored 112 patients with arthritis or asthma. The subjects were asked to write in a journal for 20 minutes three days in a row about either an emotionally stressful incident or their plans for the day. Of the group who expressed their anxiety on paper, 50% showed a large improvement in their disease after four months. Only 25% of patients who wrote on neutral topics showed any relief of symptoms.
Many people who are journaling on a regular basis do admit that it makes them feel better. Journal writing has the lowest risk factor imaginable, mentally as well as financially, providing you with the gentlest and safest of therapies. No expertise required, no minimum time required, and you don't lose the benefits if you miss a time period...
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Art Journals are fun! Go buy a blank sketch book and Ill show you what you can do with it.
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Tips for you on How to Use a Journal for Your Health
by Ray Bruce, Ph.D.
Tests conducted by a team of clinical psychologists and immunologists demonstrated that subjects who wrote thoughtfully and emotionally about traumatic experiences achieved the following results:*increased T-cell production;
*a drop in physician visits;
*fewer absentee days;
*generally improved physical health.
You don't need special tools or abilities. You can use any notebook or paper for your writing. Although there are many blank books available in stationary and book stores, notebook paper or a class notebook will work just fine. Since journaling is for your own use, spelling, handwriting, and grammar are not major concerns. The purpose of writing in the journal is for you to get your feelings and experiences down on paper. You're not writing for a grade or for review by someone else.
Writing in a journal uses simple techniques. Here are three that will get you started.
Reflective Writing:
Be an observer of your life. Write about events that are happening to you or around you, in a way that helps put them into perspective. This is especially effective when writing about life changes, job or career, relationships or illness.
Begin writing with the phrase, "It was a time when...," then let yourself describe the event in detail, use as many of your senses as possible. What were the sounds, smells, sights, feelings, etc. that were present?
Write about the event as though you were observing yourself. Use "she" and "he" rather than "I" in your sentences. Describe the activities as an outside observer. Frequently this helps give perspective to an otherwise very personal experience.
Cathartic Writing:
Write about your feelings, all of them. Put your pain, fear, anger, frustrations, and grief down on paper. Say what you want to say, need to say, on the page. The journal won't judge or criticize you. You can use it as a safe place to let out everything you feel. Sometimes you may choose to throw away your writing, or burn it as a rite of letting go of the event or feeling disrupting your life. Let your intuition lead you in your writing, and in what to do with the words once you've written them. Try it when you're feeling joy and gratitude, too.
Begin with the phrase, "Right now I feel...," then let yourself write whatever comes out. If you run out of feelings, re-read what you've just written and then write the next thing that comes to mind.
Unsent Letters:
You can write a letter in your journal to a person, place, event, or belief. The journal gives you a powerful way to express what you experience and feel about any situation. Your journal will give you a place to express your true feelings when you may not feel comfortable doing it more directly. This technique is especially helpful in dealing with death or divorce. These are situations where we may not be able to talk with the person directly. It it also a powerful way to process the emotions that come up on the job or in a relationship. How about frustrations with your kids?
Begin with a salutation, just as you would if you were writing a letter, "Dear....". Then let your pen and paper lead you. You may be surprised at the power and clarity you experience from your writing. Your journal may be just a starting place for a whole new level of communication with others.
While you are writing, or after you've written, you may feel deep emotions. They're normal and healthy. In fact, the emotional release is just what contributes to the healthy impact of journaling. If you want to do more with what you've written, share it with a friend, counselor, clergy or physician. Your writing is for your health, not for public display. Make sure that members of your household know that you're writing in your journal and that you want it to be private. You will find that others are very respectful of your writing, especially when you ask them to treat it that way.
Add journaling to your tool kit of ways to keep yourselfhealthy. Its benefits will go far beyond the pages you fill.
Read the rest of the article...
Discovering Yourself through Writing...
A must have books on journaling.
Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives
How writing can be used to recover from trauma and as a tool for personal growth: encouragement and suggestions from a professor of literature and creative writing.
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Put Your Heart on Paper: Staying Connected In A Loose-Ends World
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Room to Write
It is a compact writing workbook because each page is a door into one of the places from which creative writing emerges: imagination, emotion, intellectual, and soul.
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Writing to Heal: A guided journal for recovering from trauma & emotional upheaval
In this book, the preeminent psychologist and researcher in the growing field of expressive emotions therapy, or EET, takes readers through a series of guided writing exercises that help them explore their feelings about difficult experiences.
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Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: Breakthrough Techniques for People Who Write
A revolutionary approach to writing that will teach you how to express yourself fluently and with confidence for the rest of your life.
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On Writing
Reader's Review:
The cover shows an inviting scene, a country house with a warm light glowing in the living room window, a set of double doors leading down to the cellar, the house lined with pink and white flowers. "Come on in," the picture seems to say. "I have a story to tell."
It generally takes Stephen King about three months to finish the first draft of a book. He began "On Writing" at the end of 1997, but put it aside a few months later, unsure how to finish it. Over a year later, in mid-1999, King decided to spend the summer "finishing the damn writing book."
The events of late-June, 1999 interfered with those plans. King spent three weeks in the hospital after he was struck by a van. In late July he decided it was time to start writing again, and it was "On Writing" that he chose for his return to work. The finished product, "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft" will be released by Scribner in early October, 2000.
It was a discussion with Amy Tan while on tour with the Rock Bottom Remainders that inspired King to write this book. "No one ever asks about the language," Tan said in response to King's query about the sorts of questions that she doesn't get at author appearances. "Serious" authors get asked that but they don't ask the popular novelists who, he says "care about language in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper."
King opens with a lengthy memoir that "attempted to show some of the incidents and life-situations which made me into the sort of writer I turned out to be." He calls this section "C.V," as in "curriculum vitae," his list of accomplishments and job skills. Some of the story is familiar, though many of the details are new. He works his way through his stages as a writer from childhood to novice to apprentice to worldwide success.
For the first time in any detail, King addresses his battle with alcohol and drug abuse, when it started, how it evolved and how he eventually was forced to confront his problem. He reveals that he has little memory of writing "Cujo" ("I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page"), that he hadn't realized that when he was writing "The Shining" he was writing about himself, and how Annie Wilkes in "Misery" could well be seen as a symbol for coke and alcohol. "I decided I was tired of being Annie's pet writer," King says.
King is more revealing of his life in this book than ever before. He is frank in discussing the merits and deficiencies of many of his books. Of "Rose Madder" and "Insomnia" he says: "These are (much as I hate to admit it) stiff, trying-too-hard novels." He talks about how he reached a point in "The Stand" where he had to set the novel aside for several weeks until he could figure out how to go on. If he had written a couple of hundred pages less at that point he probably would have abandoned the book completely. Also described in some depth are the issues he had to deal with in writing "Carrie," "The Dead Zone" and "The Green Mile." He spends some time relating an event that inspired him to write the upcoming novel "From a Buick Eight" and the research required for the second draft that had to be deferred after his accident - a couple of weeks riding with the Pennsylvania State Police.
"But I'm not a writer," the prospective reader of "On Writing" might cry. "Why should I want to read this book?" While a substantial section of the book is about writing, King's approach to it and his advice to writers at all levels of the art, there is much here for the non-writer as well. King's success has made him a high-profile personality, more so than many other authors, and the level of public interest in his life is easily demonstrated by the overwhelming number of requests for updates on his condition received by his office and official web site in the weeks following his accident. Here is the opportunity to read King on King, and on his books. He describes the symbolism in many of his novels, rarely planted intentionally on the first draft but uncovered, as an archaeologist uncovers a ruin, during the writing of the second draft.
For writers, though, the book is chock full of advice, some of it common sense, some of it uniquely King's. His taboos of writing: adverbs (especially those in dialog attributes) and the passive voice. His description of the writer's toolbox: Common tools on the top shelf (vocabulary and grammar), elements of grammar and style on the second level, along with an understanding of the paragraph as the basic element in fiction, and a synthesis of all of these along with innate and developed skills at the bottom.
"If you want to be a writer," King says, "you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." King calls reading the creative center of a writer's life. He advocates reading in small sips as well as long drinks - in waiting rooms, in line at the theater, in the checkout line at the grocery store, on the treadmill at the gym and in the john.
When it comes to writing, though, King is more selective. "We do best in a place of our own," he advises. The most important feature of this place: a door that you can and are willing to shut. No TV, no phone and no video games. Curtains closed. Write first with the door closed. Write for yourself without worry about theme, symbolism or accuracy of details. Those are for the second draft, which is usually written with the door open, after he has sent the book to a select group of critical readers.
King includes examples of both good and bad writing, sometimes taken from his own work, sometimes taken from such writers as Elmore Leonard and John Katzenbach. The final chapter of the book is an annotated rewrite of his first draft of the opening section of "1408," one of the three stories in the recent "Blood and Smoke" audio release. This section should silence critics who suggest that King doesn't rewrite his work. It is an interesting look at the creative process and what an author should look for when editing his or her own material.
He also describes his approach to research. It's all about back story, he says. "What I'm looking for is nothing but a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck into a really good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off."
Toward the end of the book, King tackles the subject of his accident. This section, called "On Living," is partly a bully platform for him to get his version of the story down, as well as his opinion about how the legal system handled the case of driver Bryan Smith. It also describes how an otherwise ideal day went wrong, the minute details of his injuries and some of the challenges of his recovery process. "Life isn't a support system for art - it's the other way around," he concludes.
Throughout the book, but especially in this chapter, King pays tribute to wife, Tabitha. She is King's "Ideal Reader," the person for whom he writes all of his books, the one who he wants to make laugh or cry through his writing. His love and admiration for her shines through, from a touching scene in their early courtship where he sits at her feet as she reads her poetry in a workshop, his hand on her calf, to her organization of a group intervention to make him confront his addiction problems, and all the way through to her support and encouragement of him during his convalescence.
At the end, King includes a list of nearly a hundred novels that he considers the best that he's read in the last three or four years. "A good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work. Even if they don't, they're apt to entertain you," he concludes.
The same might be said of "On Writing."
-Dr Beverly R Vincent "deadzone" (The Woodlands, TX USA)
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On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Reader's Reviews:
When I opened this book the first time, I fancied myself a good writer. I had just landed a job as a copywriter, and I felt pretty good about myself. Then my boss walked into my office and dropped a copy of Zinsser's classic on my desk. "This is your first assignment," he said. So I read.
What a revelation! According to Zinsser, I was guilty of a multitude of sins: clutter, fuzzy thinking, poor usage, passive verbs, you name it. So I repented, and now I'm a disciple.
This book is as engaging as it is instructive. It's so easy to read and understand, you can't help but improve. It spells out everything that's wrong most people's writing, then provides simple solutions. You'll cut pounds of fat from your writing. Your sentences will sparkle and your paragraphs will dance. Best of all, your readers will read, not groan.
-Bob Dickson (Valencia, CA USA)
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2008 Writer's Market
Book Description:
The 2008 Writer's Market features all the great information writers have to come to expect for more than 80 years and then some. This edition takes Writer's Market to a new level of excellence with high profile author interviews and five new market sections. Of course, it's still packed with all the information writers rely on year after year including the keys to successful query letters, advice on how much to charge, articles from successful writers, as well as listings for book publishers, magazines, lierary agents and more!
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The Elements of Style: The Original Edition
Reader's Review:
While skimming through Stephen King's book ON WRITING, he highly recommended THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE. Taking his advice I searched for a copy and found one in a free bin--of all places! I looked at it and decided that it was so much better than any other textbook that I had seen that I decided to WRITE IT. Three pages a day for a month or so. It's a very short book, only about 80 pages or so. You learn everything from words that are often spelled wrong, to punctuation, to style, etc. Very blunt and to the point. No exercises in here, problems 1 - 10 all. Nope, you just read this book and enjoy it. Why, there's actually a little humor in it at times, which is pretty good for a textbook. Now I've heard some people say that this book is bad because it is saying to follow all these rules and don't stray from them. I think they got it all wrong. This book is essentially saying this: you can't blaze new trails in the English language without having a solid foundation in the basics first! This goes for ANYTHING. You don't suddenly set off an a 200 mile trek, you slowly work up to it, starting from the basics. After you have mastered the basics, then you can break free. One thing that this book continually points out is that it is OFTEN A MATTER OF EAR. Meaning that if you are experienced enough, you will know whether to stick to the traditional or whether to be liberal when phrasing something, for example. By far this is the most talked-about textbook that I've seen and the most valuable.
-EMAN NEP
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Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Reader's Reviews:
This is not a how-to book. This is not a New Age manual for freeing your creativity in ethereal ways. This is Anne Lamott, for heaven's sake...and that means it's funny! As in, laugh- till-you-can't-read-the-words-through-the-tears-in-your-eyes funny. (Some call this therapy, and I'm inclined to agree.)
Though aimed at writers, this book is full of sage advice and razor-edged honesty for the average joe. If you're a writer--and I claim to be one--it's more than a few anecdotes and good advice; it's a lifeline in the thrashing seas of rough-draftdom, a foothold on the sands of jealousy and vain ambition. Anne makes it clear that writing must be pursued for something other than mere publication. (Though, to be honest, I know she's just trying to let the majority of us down easy.) Writing is about letting go, growing, facing truths, and holding on.
I'm hooked on Lamott. She slaps me in the face with her startling revelations, nudges me in the ribs with her unpredictable humor, and prods my frozen little writer's hands back into action with warm compassion. This book won't solve the mechanical aspects of my writing, or lead me on the path of structural excellence, but it will spark my creativity, free my characters to be true to themselves, and, ultimately, shake me from my doldrums back into the writing mode.
In a society addicted to mindless facts and information, "Bird by Bird" reminds us--writers or otherwise--that it's all about heart. Heart and mind and soul dancing together, even if they step all over each other's feet.
-Eric Wilson "novelist" (Nashville, TN United States)
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Music for Productivity
On this CD:
Music Composed by:Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Philipp Telemann, Richard Lawrence, Giuseppe Tartini, and Antonio Vivaldi with Arcangelos Chamber Ensemble.
Wear to Impress!
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Write me a comment? Go Ahead!
Your words and thoughts are highly appreciated...
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Reply
- JaguarJulie JaguarJulie Aug 13, 2009 @ 9:26 am
- Journaling is truly such a great release! I found that I used to do a lot more before I started Squidooing -- now Squidoo to me is like writing in a journal -- in chapters!
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Reply
- BigGirlBlue BigGirlBlue Aug 5, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
- Journaling is becoming such a universal past time.
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Reply
- Irenemaria Irenemaria Jul 23, 2009 @ 5:14 am
- Yes Naiza - I have been writing down my experiances and events for many years. I even painted drawings of what took place. But when my Husband died I could not write. It was too painful. I could not draw or even start to try. I know it helps to get you move ahead. Share if you want to!
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Reply
- mukunda22 mukunda22 Jan 18, 2009 @ 2:06 am
- Julia Cameron's Morning Pages are well worth doing.
Instructions for doing them can be found in "The Artist's Way," and "The Right To Write."
All her books are excellent for writers!!
I loved your lens!
Thank you!!
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Reply
- CrypticFragments CrypticFragments Oct 7, 2008 @ 9:50 am
- great lens naiza! I have many journals but I only write in them sometimes...also have a visual journal; I wish I could unpack all my art supplies but it's too messy for my roommates!
5*
keep up the great work
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Index:
- Why don't try journaling yourself?
- Your Best Writing Stuff!
- Visual Journaling
- Movies I Like to Watch!
- Tips for you on How to Use a Journal for Your Health
- Discovering Yourself through Writing...
- Music for Productivity
- Wear to Impress!
- Writing Journal Links
- Let's See What's on the Bid@eBay
- Blog Posts from Google
- Write me a comment? Go Ahead!
Writing Journals :: Cheaper than Therapy by Naiza Oclares is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.squidoo.com.
by NAIZA
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