Julia Cameron – author of The Artist’s Way– has a blog post from January 2018 which resonated with me a bit. It is titled,”The Wall.”
The author says that when writers cannot think of anything to write – hitting the wall- they try to force optimism into the scenario, or we doubt our own creativity. This does not work towards reaching your goals. Instead, she says the following:
“…there is a better way to conquer The Wall, and that is to surrender. Instead of trying to convince ourselves of the brilliance of our idea, we need to say instead, ‘I am willing to finish this piece of work even if my idea is terrible.’ In other words, ‘I am willing to write badly.’
The moment we are willing to write badly, we begin to have freedom.”
Imperfection is one of the toughest things to accept in your writing. It has kept many from journal writing again or from ever starting in the first place. I have heard many people state that they did not like the way in which they write; it is not like the published books that they read all the time, so they do not want to come face-to-face with unedited writing.
Does your journal consist of a wall of text? That’s OK. It’s not beautiful, but functional. Is your attempt at an art journal laughably rudimentary? That’s OK. It is fun to do. Sometimes we are our own worst critic which is keeping us from the fun of journal writing. As we keep going, day by day, at some point we reach a journal writing habit which helps to ignore what we have deemed as imperfections, and we just get on with it.
Keep going.
Have you ever hit The Wall in journal writing? What did you do about it?
Peace,
Deborah