If it makes you freeze, it's not a prompt.

Kia ora fam x

Hope this edition of the Summer Journaling Club finds you doing ok, despite the truly horrific things happening in the world. I'm glad you're here. There are ways to work through and document all that we are witnessing and living through without giving way to despair (I promise!)

I've had some awesome feedback after last week's blog - thank you for letting me know. I am stoked so many of you found the hacks helpful.

I wonder if the the reason these hacks feel revolutionary is because they're not difficult? In my experience, writing prompts have a way of making us freeze. That makes them anti-prompt by definition. Just look at these. Some of them sound inviting on the surface, but faced with the blank page, I know a lot of us would feel as if we'd been asked to dead-lift our own body weight.

By comparison, these hacks feel more like a gentle jog around the block. Sometimes a good challenging writing prompt is just what we need, especially to extend our technical skills, but for a daily consistent practice of journaling we need the opposite kind of prompts. That's why I call them hacks. The last thing we need to do is to assign ourselves a weighty intellectual and emotional exercise to solve first thing in the morning.

We need to set a pace we can enjoy and make a regular habit of. The aim is to remove pressure, eliminate self-judgment and get comfortable enough that the mind can move out of the way and let creativity take over.

This is the substance of Week 2.

Why Journal? Spiritual hacks

I find that the most stubborn blocks to shift are almost always spiritual. They're hardest to shift because we're often unaware they're there. Time is a big one. Perhaps the biggest of all.

#9: The Thief hack: Journaling isn't like other kinds of writing - you need to remind yourself that every time you sit down to write until it becomes second nature. First and foremost it's is a gift of time to yourself. This is why we often have to steal it.

Time to write is always stolen
so get used to thieving

I think of all the words I've ever written furtively, fearfully, faithfully
Hiding notes inside the spines of books penned

by others. Never daring to describe myself as a writer
despite writing being the only thing I have ever done with any consistency - and not once because someone gave me

Time.
I am a thief, not a writer

Taking time to do something that has no obvious material reward, and is valued for what it is, as opposed to what it produces, is a tiny, wicked little liberation from capitalism. You can be quite sure there is no financial reward to be derived from journaling. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

One thing I can say about journaling, though, is that it is not extractive. It is reciprocal. It is replenishing. In other words: it is wholly the right way to be in relationship with ourselves and the world. We're creating something from what we have and can offer - the hard stuff as well as the good stuff. Journals reflect our experience of the world back to us.

Journaling is different to other kinds of writing in this way. The focus is all towards the input as opposed to the output. I'm sure there's many gardening analogies here, right? Investing time in this practice requires us to shed so much colonial indoctrination around what activities matter and have value (or not), why, and whose voices and experiences matter enough to record. Even just the fact that I used the word "invest" to start this sentence shows how pervasive the training is within us. The rewards of journaling directly contradict value systems that have trained us to think that the only point of doing something is to make money or attain perfection.

Practical and intellectual hacks can get around all kinds of blocks - from procrastination to overwhelm - but unless you fundamentally believe that journaling is a worthwhile activity in its own right, for what you can give rather than what you might get, you won't show up to the page.

That is why I like to think of myself as a thief rather than a writer. You have to steal back what is rightfully yours. Namely, time.

#10 The Wairua Hack

We could spend a long time on this one, but it's particular to each person and the only way to find out what that looks like for you is to be open to it. I think of wairua as the invisible energy that binds us to the physical and social world. It's a relational, spontaneous, creative energy - a bit like electricity. You can't see it, but you can watch how wairua animates everything it touches and moves through. Journaling, like all creative pursuits, is just a conduit for wairua.

The hack here is about cultivating a curiosity to find our where true creativity might lead you. By 'true' I mean: you haven't already decided what the thing needs to be. You're open to let wairua lead. The more you cultivate this kind of practice the more genuinely rewarding the practice becomes.

More often than not, the words will find you rather than the other way around. And when something isn't extractive, it stops being work, and becomes play.

How to Journal: Practical Hacks

#11: The Decrease the Stakes Hack

It's time to embrace “bad” writing. No seriously. Decrease the stakes. Give yourself permission. If the stakes are too high you won't make a habit of it, and habit is the only way to improve. Bad writing is better than no writing, and good writing is the writing you did however it sounds on the page. Bad writing is good too. It counts towards the 50,000+ hours you need to achieve mastery at anything. All expert writers and artists and musicians were once amateur. It takes humility to be bad at something. It can even be an act of generosity. Representing yourself honestly gives others permission to be their whole, authentic, imperfect selves as well. And anyway, we just got to gather the source material, like the Baseline Data hack says.

Over the years, I've found journaling to be stubbornly resistant to objective ideas about quality, anyway. What makes a brilliant journal entry is not the one that will win literary awards. It's the one that pleases you. Subjectivity is everything.

Even better than embracing bad writing, we need to let go of notions of 'good' and 'bad' altogether. Aspire instead for writing that is free.

#12 The Typewriter (or handwriting) Hack

To have the most fun with any of these hacks, especially the creativity and surprise that comes with wairua-led practice, you have to remove the ability to self-correct. The delete button is the enemy to wairua. That is is why I've stopped journaling on my laptop. I’m convinced wairua is far less interested in perfection than in authentic expression - and authentic expression, like everything in nature, isn't uniform or 'aesthetically perfect' - which is often precisely what makes it beautiful.

What even are "mistakes" if not opportunities to show your working out?

The best shortcut I've found for un-training the mind's tendency to edit is the old school manual typewriter. Just like handwriting, typing on a typewriter is a task involving your whole body. The average typing speed on the laptop is around 40 words per minute. Handwriting is closer to 10-25. I think a typewriter is roughly similar to handwriting, especially if your machine is pushing 50 years or more. Whenever your mind tries to race ahead, the keys just literally jam up in front of your eyes. It forces you to slow down and be present for every word as its forming.

We're so primed for the immediacy of technology, but the time it takes is more valuable than the 'thing' you ultimately produce. The process of writing is what's truly valuable. I think the body knows this instinctively. Mine seems to know that the laptop is a tool of deception and extraction, 'cos whenever a deadline looms I throw up every excuse to avoid sitting down to write. Even projects I ought to love feel hard.

So if, like me, you're chronically fatigued by blue light, try a typewriter. If you can't get your hands on one, handwriting works just as well.

What to Journal: Intellectual Hacks

#13: The Time Marker Hack
This one follows right on from #7 - The Taiao Hack (write what you observe, not what you know). Wherever that descriptive sentence about your surroundings and the weather or tohu ends, place a past or present tense time marker, eg:

"Yesterday...." "Today...." "Two hours ago..." "At 4pm....", "Right now...." etc.

Finish the sentence however you like, but I encourage you to pair this hack with hack #14, below.

#14 The 'First Thing That Comes to Mind' Hack
Okay, so you've got your time marker, what comes to mind as soon as you write that word? Visualise and describe it in detail. Hopefully it involves action or events. A scene is better than a feeling. It might be mundane stuff; "yesterday I saw...." or "this morning the neighbours were...." Sometimes it's politics or world news. The time marker brings a sense of immediacy to the memory.

This is a complex hack disguised in a simple construct, and it can unconsciously help you become a better writer. You want to be specific: who, what, where, when. I feel like I'm watching a movie when I write the first thing that comes to mind. If you're really faithful to it, you'll find yourself heading off on the wildest tangents. You'll be surprised how much insight you can draw out of the so-called mundane details of your daily life.

You might find yourself writing about things you hadn't noticed you'd noticed, or things you'd never planned to write about otherwise. Often, in a truly magical way, I find that what I've described has a metaphoric connection to te taiao - of course! Here's an example of just that kind of journal entry that later became an essay published in The Spinoff; parts of which made it into Slowing The Sun.

Over time, you get better at writing detail. But even better, you begin to notice and observe and listen with a writer's specificity, so when you sit down to write, you can recall things with ease.

#15 The Collage Hack

I wanted to give you The Collage Hack this week because it goes well with the Decrease the Stakes Hack. Sometimes we really do actually produce stuff that is displeasing for whatever reason. It might be something you don't want someone else to discover. It might be just something you know you needed to process but now don't want to be reminded of. That's when I like to collage. Whatever you do, don't rip out the page! Start building up layers with paint or paper.

The local newspaper is ideal - it's handy for capturing detail that's happening in the rest of the world. I sometimes buy the listener as their headlines are great for domestic politics. You can draw over a whole page or just a paragraph. I always think of "whakapapa" when I'm doing this. The words are still there, they're just concealed from view. You're still honouring the source of the words, but you're extending out from it.

Alright friends, that's it for Week 2. I know it's another massive one, but I think it's so important to address these spiritual and practical blocks - especially if you struggle with self-criticism. Next week I'll be sharing some more adventurous intellectual prompts, which hopefully stretch the writers among you.

Due to length (!!) the examples from my own journals can be found here. Thank you to everyone who has just joined as a paid subscribers. Your support, for however long you can manage, is so appreciated. I hope th examples are helpful for your own practice.

Arohanui and Merry Fucking Capitalismas

Nadine

P.S. here is a very wholesome video from the weekend. Who knew removing a weed could make a person so happy? Lyfe is infinitely circular. 75 going on 5!