Write what you observe, not what you know

mā te kimi, ka kite, mā te kite ka mōhio, mā te mōhio ka mārama

Look to see | See to know | Know to understand

Just joining us? Read this first: The solution to cringey writing is not to stop writing.

A note on the author of this blog (me, lol). All the advice I share here is based on my own experience (30 years of haphazard journaling plus about 5 years of dedicated practice). Initially, my goal in developing a consistent journaling practice was simply to improve my writing. But these hacks ended up being so useful they helped me achieve a life long goal - to publish a book - even though that was never the intention. So many of the essays in Slowing the Sun first started out as musings in my journal, despite the fact that I never wrote them with any other audience in mind except myself.

I wanted to share some of these hacks with those who have a tendency to get stuck the same way I did for years - both in writing and in life. I've never done a formal creative writing course, and have found much of the writing advice I've encountered over the years to be unhelpful, counter-intuitive, or intimidatingly pompous. My prompts, by comparison, are so easy you'll be like: 'uh, is that it? I already know that.'

Why yes, you do already know!

If there is any hack - to anything - it's just practice. We never see enough of the messy 'working out' that writers do; their abandoned drafts, the earnest attempts and overused cliches. It means we end up thinking that writing comes 'naturally' to gifted people instead of being a skill that, like all trades, you learn and hone over time.

I also deeply believe in democratising access to the tools of both healing and creation. Whether you have aspirations to publish a book or not, journaling is an amazing, life-affirming art form with massively underrated emotional and spiritual benefits. I'm proud of my book, of course, but my journals - full of 'mistakes' and 'bad' sketches - give me so much joy.

Very few of us can take a year off to enrol in a writing course, and university programmes are structurally gatekept anyway. But no-one is stopping us from taking the pen into our own hands at the kitchen table (or in the stairwell at work or the car park waiting for the kids to come out).

Plus, there's no better time of the year to be journaling than summer when so much is happening. So let's get started.

Why Journal?: Spiritual Hacks

Overcoming the most pervasive and stubborn barriers and blocks is fundamental to creating a consistent journaling practice. You have to know and understand why journaling is an activity worth spending your time on. These hacks just have to be trusted - especially if you've never journaled before, or if you do journal but only on bad days. I mean, who can relate to this person?

#1: The Joy Hack.

Part of the reason I think we cringe at our past journals is because of what we've chosen to record. This is a fine balance, and when we get to the different intellectual hacks I'll give you a variety of prompts to help you document and work through both the good stuff and the hard stuff.

But for now, let's just adopt a subtle mental shift towards joy. Crafted in an intentional way, journals can delight, entertain, make you laugh, help you remember things we might otherwise forget. And now, more than ever, we need to document the beautiful delightful things that happen in an average day in spite of all the persistent oppression and cruelty and violence in the world - whether it's a conversation with a neighbour in the street at dawn or a meteor crossing the sky.

#2: The baseline data hack. What you're really gathering in your journals is source material: the baseline data of your own life. It's not always pretty, but you have to gather it. We'll be de-constructing the idea of so-called 'good writing' and 'bad writing' later, but for now just remind yourself that this is proof of life stuff. Documentary evidence that you you're experiencing the full range of human emotions, just as the environment goes through different seasons and weather.

The white fathers of literary criticism will call personal writing of any form, especially memoir, indulgent and navel gazing. In Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, the brilliant Melissa Febos shreds those white fathers and their patronising scorn:

“Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work that would like to withhold it from those whose stories most threaten the regimes that govern this society. Fuck them. Write your life.”

The important thing to remember about baseline data is that you need a lot of it to make meaning and to see the narrative arc over time. The memory alone cannot always be trusted. Journals are a gentle form of verification. They hold important clues about what actually happened, especially if you catch the right details. Tiny observations on their own won't necessarily mean anything at the time, but the picture will get clearer the more data you gather.

You could call it monitoring or witnessing or journaling. It doesn't really matter, just so long as you do it.

How to Journal: Practical Hacks

Creating the conditions to love the practice.

#3: The conditions hack. You can’t do anything consistently unless you love it. So you need to create the conditions to love journaling. For me this means living a sober life. My best writing (and by best, I mean 'truest and most authentic') is always written in the morning. If I'm hungover, I can't write or won't. But if I'm not drinking, I wake early when the veil is thin and wairua is free and uninhibited and in charge. I don't think about mahi and I try not to open social media or let in any unnatural light in at all, I make coffee, and in winter light a candle (one of Wik's - to match the season!). Most importantly, I sit down in the same place at the same time every day.

I don't have an expectation that I will write, and somehow this absence of pressure means I always do. I look forward to mornings now, because I know that journaling will almost always be the best thing that happens in a day. The conditions I've created have a way of producing the most interesting and unexpected writing. Writing that is free. Yes, I do get up at 5.30am to fit it in, but that's just what works for me and it's worth it.

What are the conditions you need to love journaling, and how can you create them and guard them, in spite of all the pressures against you?

#4: The stationery hack. Just as you'd get a good mat for yoga or a pair of shoes for running, get a decent journal. Decent doesn't need to mean expensive, it means a journal that suits you.

I have one small journal that goes everywhere with me, and a bigger one that I use for longer entries in the morning. My preference is the Paperblanks because they're uniform in size but have different covers which I like because I like variety.

The Filofax clip books are beautiful and tempting, especially if you prefer to use the same journal all the time. But I don't recommend this system for anyone just starting out with journaling because it's too easy to get rid of pages you don't like. You don't tend to rip out pages from a spine, so it's a safer bet (Filofax are also spenny).

I want to mention a couple of beautiful bilingual journals I also recommend. Whakawhetai by my mate Hira Nathan (and his latest book Māori Ora). Hira's interview on RNZ affirms so much of what I have learned from journaling, and the gratitude that goes hand in hand with a focus on joy. His latest journal includes some really great prompts and meditations on our atua that I think people will really connect to, especially 'non-writers' or people who can't think of things to write about.

Another friend, Tehani Buchanan, has created the beautiful Ora Journal journal based on Te Whare Tapa Whā - a really practical way to bring the focus out of our minds and into our body and physical environment.

I personally prefer journals without lines - and I appreciate lovely paper stock and pages that open flat. I also use a typewriter about half the week, so even if I'm using prompts from Whakawhetai or Ora, I will use my blank journals to write on and then stick in. I love to sketch and collage and get crazy, so I tend to find I am too space-restricted with a template-style journals. But if you're intimidated by blank pages, one of these could be perfect.

#5: The Systems Hack

I've tried heaps of different journals and you should too. Whatever you go with, trust me when I say that chronological journaling is a must. Like any social scientist, you need to be systematic, and in my experience, chronological journaling wins out over thematic or kaupapa journals every day.

I generally use two journals per half year; one small and one large running concurrently (a total of four per year). I start at Matariki and go through to the Pākehā new year. The second set takes me from summer back to mid-winter. I keep track of the journals in an excel spreadsheet for ease of future reference. [I'll share more about this in the final post].

Although I journaled digitally for a decade, I've since gone back to handwritten / typewritten journals. Not just for technological reasons (risk of loss), but because of hack #1: Joy. Even with the ability to include photos and filters and tags, digital diaries simply don't offer the same experience when re-engaging with them later. It's convenient being able to access digital entries quickly, but it has come to feel like an extractive activity. When I engage with my digital diaries I don't tend to read them in order; instead, it feels like I'm treating my life as content to mine. I'm also prone to editing entries later - and also deleting whole chunks of text I can't bear to re-read.

Some people worry (ok, all of us) about our journals being discovered or falling into the wrong hands - and digital diaries have an advantage in being password protectable. But over time you'll learn the skills to help you journal in a way that doesn't leave you feeling vulnerable or exposed - these hacks also happen to be the ones that really help you become a 'better' writer.

#6: The 'find a club' Hack

The idea of writing being a solitary craft is as persistent as the advice that writing is easy, you just 'sit down and open a vein.' Ffs! No pressure then.

A few years ago, a group of friends and I got together and started a poetry prompt club for the four weeks of summer. Each of us took turns for a week sending daily prompts. We created a Trello board and we didn't give feedback so much as witness and encourage each other. It was a challenge to post something every day -not everything was great - but it was an achievable goal and one that provided just the right amount of external validation and encouragement.

We didn't know each other very well when we started this club, but these friendships have since gone on to become the most supportive writer-relationships I have today - another unintended outcome that just happens to be very similar to what you have access to when you enrol in a formal programme. Because it seems writers are highly reciprocal beings. Who knew!

(Yours might be a club of 1 and that's totally fine too.)

What to Journal? Intellectual Hacks

Okay! Let's get the actual writing hacks for this week. These are simple, non-intimidating and you can use them every day.

#7: The Taiao Hack (write what you observe, not what you know)

The most common advice writers tend to hear is seriously fucked up: "Write what you know" - closely followed with "find your own voice". Honestly, is it any wonder we feel like a possum in headlights when we sit down in front of a blank page? [*p.s. it's not that hard to find your voice. What's hard is accepting that that's how your voice sounds... but that's a separate post 🫠 🥴 🥶]

My advice is much more straightforward. Just write what you observe. Literally, start with weather. Sit down, preferably at the same time and the same place every day and write about what's going on in the world around you. What do you hear and see and notice?

Grounding your journal in te taiao, rather than attempting to excavate what you 'know', will very often reflect back to you where you are spiritually and emotionally. It can feel like a magic trick, but it's also obvious. We are always connected to the land. What we feel and know is entirely a mirror for what is happening around us externally.

In fact, it can almost feel redundant to talk about your feelings or what you know when you're writing about te taiao, because what you have selected to observe and the language you've chosen will convey the emotion that lies within you. This focus reveals how we're in relationship with our surroundings all the time, from the people we live with and next to, to the land we all share. Writing about the weather is such a powerful metaphor for the human emotional landscape. It's both inevitable and mysterious.

The best thing about starting with the physical environment is that you remove all the pressure from yourself to write. You don't need to extract the words from within, the words are out there and all you need to do is go and find them. All our energy and sustenance and creativity comes from Papatūānuku, so if you want to connect with yourself, connect with the land.

This is serious work but it's also playful. It's also mundane. This hack will test your vocabulary as well as your skills at observation. It's a challenge to look at the same scene day after day and describe it in uniquely. This is maramataka 101 stuff, I'm sure. My morning pages document the banal and the extraordinary: from the green fence to the hazy hills to the scrapping starlings to the sound of Nick's ute coughing to life at 6.30am on the dot.

#8: The Must Remember hack. This is my most reliable, simple, tried and true hack. I've been keeping "Must Remember" notes for almost two decades. You simply write 'Must Remember' at the top of a page and a brief note about something that happened in the day that you will most likely forget, but is worth remembering. It's almost like a summary or a note you'd put on your "To Do" list. It's not prose, it's not poetry, it's the kind of stuff a good zine is made of. In the expert form, you can see these kinds of observations in the work of acclaimed poets like Mary Oliver, Ada Limon, Padraig O'Tuama and Andrea Gibson (to name just a few).

The real 'hack' to this hack is that I never - and I bet you won't either - choose to remember shitty mundane stuff. I wouldn't write, for example, "Must Remember: the fine I got from WCC for accidentally driving in the bus lane. FFS."

When you've got little "Must Remembers" sprinkled through your diaries, it's like emotional confetti. You're consciously cultivating the sense of gratitude Hira talks about.

Okay, so to re-cap. Your focus for this week:

• Reframe journaling as a joyful process
• Know that you're just collecting data, not all of it (or any of it) will be or needs to be amazing or even 'good.'
• Commit to a regular writing time & space, and create the conditions to love it - and then GUARD IT.
• Get a journal that motivates and inspires you
• Know what system you're following (chronological recommended)
• Find or create an iti te kupu sub-club & set up a Trello board or way of sharing and encouraging each other.
• Write what you observe, not what you know
• Write one "Must Remember" every day

Behind the paywall are some working examples from my journal for the super keen. If you would like to access these but can't afford to subscribe, please let me know.

I'll be back next Monday - hopefully a bit shorter (there was a lot to get through today!)

Arohanui

Nadine