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A Trail Through Leaves
Journal Writing Guide


 
At seventeen, when I started my first journal, I was working with the raw material of a self, at the same time that I was trying to come to know my home landscape, the woods and fields of Ohio. A clumsy drawing of a newly discovered flower might be surrounded by an impassioned manifesto about the kind of person I hoped to become. Over the years and volumes, I've come to love the literal tabula rasa of each new page spread, and how it can be filled in an infinity of ways. And I've learned to respect the power of the journal to make the most ordinary moment shine with unexpected significance.

In this book, using examples from my own journals and from the many workshops I've taught on the subject, I've tried to show the possibilities and rewards inherent in this modest but powerful tool.

Here are some ways you can use the journal:
  • as a way to study and appreciate nature and landscape
  • as a way to gain deeper insight into your own life
  • as a way to organize your life, to make future plans and choose priorities
  • as a place to collect memories, for yourself or your family
  • as a way to get the most out of travel experiences, better than just photos
  • as a way to admire and appreciate the overlooked pleasures of daily life
  • as a way to work out problems, as a safe place to vent anger and frustration
  • as a place to develop other creative projects
  • as a playground for whimsy or a field for daydreaming
  • as a place to work out values and convictions, to make you a better person
  • as a place to go to slow down and get some thoughtful private time
  • as an antidote for the machine age
When's the best time to begin a journal?

The best time is whenever you feel the urge to begin. You can think of it as arriving at a watershed: All your past is available to you to think and write about, as well as all your future. And the present moment you inhabit is full of undisclosed richness. Look around, become engaged, and the process will develop its own momentum.

What kind of journal should I get?

Though 90 percent of the journals you see for sale in stores have lined pages, I feel strongly that blank pages are better. Here's why: because the most exciting and rewarding journals include the visual as well as the verbal, and lined pages prevent that kind of exploration. Suppose you decide not to start in the upper left-hand corner of the left page? In truth, a blank page spread invites you to reinvent everything. You can arrange the space any way you want—fill it up or leave it sparse, let the writing curve or slant, let it be big and sprawling or tiny and neat. You can put mostly sketches on a page and fit the writing around it. You can make a map of anything. You can make lists of things you see and think instead of writing in sentences or paragraphs. But get a nice stout journal or sketchbook, one with a sturdy binding and fairly heavy paper; otherwise it won't stand the loving abuse it will get.

All these blank pages intimidate me. How do I get over that?

This book's value lies in the fact that it's a record of your life, your experiences, the things that draw your attention, the things that move you. It's not meant to be something tidy and flawless. Mine is a goofy accumulation of notes, sketches, quotes, hours-long diatribes, garden diagrams, to-do lists, careful meditative drawings, geometric doodles, calligraphy practice, overheard conversations, weather reports, maps, and ideas for other projects. Virginia Woolf once called hers a "capacious hold-all," and I tend to think that's the best way for a journal to be. When I look back over old volumes, it's this unstudied cross-section that holds the flavor of a lived life. Once you're well into the first volume, the blank pages will become inspiring rather than intimidating. But you may want to start a new volume by flipping several pages into the book and starting there, just to get over the momentousness of beginning. Then go back to the first pages later.

But I can't draw! Why should I try it in the journal?

But you can draw. Drawing is not the arcane process it's widely believed to be. Anyone who can eat with a fork has enough hand-eye coordination to draw. The only trick is in trusting your eyes, paying attention to what they are telling you, and in allowing your hand to follow your eyes. Drawing is the most direct and satisfying way I know of to take delight in, and learn about, the structure of the world. It's a way of being in a place, rather than just passing through it. Drawing is a conversation between you and the world.

Visual elements in the journal can be:

*colors *textures *shapes for their own sake *maps (of almost anything) *letters or words (lettering can be an artform) *diagrams that combine words and images *tones and shades *arrangements: where you place words on a page is an artform *decorations *scribbles, just to get the overall sense of something you saw.

Say you want to record the way a great blue heron looks as it takes off from the bank and settles into flight. The best way to do that might be a series of simple lines, showing the basic shapes of the neck and legs, and the way they change as the bird lifts off. Or say you are fascinated by the look of a certain seashell. A diagram might be more satisfying on the page than the most careful rendering—you can come to understand how the shell is constructed, where its symmetries and asymmetries fall, how it's balanced. Most of us are stuck in thinking that a drawing has to be "realistic" and buffed to a high artistic finish. In the journal, there are many ways of making a successful drawing.

Here's my list of ways to avoid making drawings that disappoint you:
  • Take time to figure out what really interests you in what you're seeing.
  • Err on the side of boldness: Plunge in, trust your eyes, and make confident marks.
  • Choose the right tool: Don't try a dramatic, high-contrast drawing with an anemic, little pencil.
  • Don't think the whole drawing has to be brought to the same level of completion.
  • Learn when to stop.
How can I write about a place without it being just boring description?

If your own writing seems boring to you, it's probably because you are sticking to habits that you don't need in the journal. Most of us learned in school to substitute the official-sounding word for the direct one, the safe word for the surprising one. We were taught that a piece of writing must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We still relate our experiences in the form of "then I went there and did that." We deflate clear prose with insipid words, bloat it with unnecessary ones, and have to fight ourselves not to attach "majestic" to "mountains" automatically. The journal is a good place to play with words, sift through them till you get hold of the right ones. You are writing for yourself, for the pure pleasure of feeling the correspondence between words and experience. Look again, look harder and longer. Then deliberate, and listen carefully to the words you choose and the ways you combine them. Excise the meaningless and the habitual.

How do you find the time to keep a journal?

At first it's hard to justify the time for such an apparently selfish activity. But the rewards are tangible. They tend to reflect back into daily life, adding a level of clarity and attention that affects everything from negotiating traffic to family conversation. The act of recording, even noting things to record later, amplifies wakefulness and curiosity, counteracts irritation and boredom, invites engagement, and begets energy. The act of recording fulfills a hunger, and the feeling of satisfaction it brings makes me want to do more of it. So I find the time. I decided early on that I wouldn't make the journal into a daily regime; otherwise it might become a duty. Sometimes I open it several times a day, sometimes not for a week. But now it's become a well-established habit, an immensely rewarding one I'd never want to forgo.

My first book (though it assumed that any journal-keeper would also be a lover of the woods and fields) emphasized the interior changes wrought by making a record of one's life. A whole life, with its dark turns and its apparently dull stretches. In it I attempted to make new converts to the joys of joining art and writing on blank pages, pointing towards the increase in "wakefulness" that is one of its chief rewards.

In this second book, I've allowed the scientist and naturalist a freer rein, and that seems to go well with my somewhat more mature point of view: I write less about interior shifts, and more about what's right in front of me, knowing better how well they mirror each other. I invite creatures, plants, objects, clouds, landscapes, and people into the pages in the form of words and pictures. Those moments of focused attention have an almost magical effect; they seem to coax out of concealment details, quirks, gestures that would remain hidden to the cursory glance.

When I teach workshops on the illuminated journal, I explain what I call a "scale of journals": On one end is the Informational journal, the true naturalist's field journal. It concentrates on the quantifiable and identifiable, gathering names, facts, and observations with an impartial thoroughness. It contains drawings, but they are meant to be explanatory. There is little room for the personal in this kind of journal, though I admire it for the valuable role it serves in adding to the body of knowledge. On the other end of the scale is the Reflective journal. It's purely personal, mostly concerned with human-generated culture, investigations of the psyche, relationships, responses to art and writing, dreams, memories—as in Anaïs Nin's diaries. The self is the subject rather than the world. The art in this journal might look more like William Blake's paintings.

In between the two poles are two other kinds of journals that have become more and more central to my interest. The first is the Investigative: It documents the outer world, but includes many unmeasurable and unnamed phenomena, like the effects of light, ways the seasons change, patterns and textures in nature. It goes outside the categories of the Informational journal and finds links between apparently dissimilar things. Thus it includes more of the person making it, because it's up to that person to invent new categories. Art in this journal would look more like what we find in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.

The other is the Resonant journal—so called because it acts as the place of interweaving between the person and the world. Curiosity extends both inward and outward: You are a naturalist on the trail of your own life, and you search for insights in the more-than-human world as well as the human. These two kinds of journals, as embodied in Goethe and Thoreau, seem to me the richest of all. The art included in them might look like anything from Dürer to Paul Klee.

The journal has been for me both a room and a door. It's an entirely private refuge for musing, raging, and celebrating. But it's also an entry point into the larger world, a way to engage what's going on around me. A Trail Through Leaves asks you the reader to go outside first—in hopes that you will find the outside finally the most encompassing inside.