Write what you observe, not what you know [summer journaling club week 1]

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