Monday, March 7, 2011

Writing, The Culprit

Through college and high school, I kept a very detailed journal with thought-provoking entries regarding boys, family, friends, but mostly boys. In the last several years, my journal writing has waned. And I'm sorry for it because these are the years I know I'll never want to forget.

The thing is, I can't recall details of a memory easily. So when something AMAZING happens, something I NEVER want to forget (which is EVERY day since I'm the mother of young children) I think, "I should write that down."

And most of the time I don't.

Then ALL these amazing moments crowd my heart and I'm afraid of losing them forever. Because I'll forget. But usually when I go to write, I open my book instead of my journal. I spend an hour in my book, and then in the end I think, "If I'm choosing writing about my pretend-world over writing about my real-world, am I making the wrong choice?"

Then again before I started writing, my journaling was already on the decline. So if it wasn't writing, wouldn' t it be something else? (Reading, movie-watching, scrapbooking...?) (For the record, I'm the world's worst scrapbooker.)

Have you found the balance between journaling and writing?

(Do you ever blame writing for taking the place of something else...maybe something else that you can really do alongside writing?)

7 comments:

  1. I blame writing for taking away my ability to clean. Or is that just my time to clean. I know it's not the inclination. I never had that.

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  2. I was counting my blogging as my journal, but since I haven't written on my family blog in about a year I should be feeling guilty. But I'm not. I know that I will get to it when I can. Also, I sometimes facebook the cute things my kids do and just copy and paste it into a word doc. That helps sometimes too.

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  3. Lois-For me, it's the inclination :)

    Nikki-I'm not very good about my family blog, either. Or facebook. Great idea about copying and pasting your status!

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  4. I keep a family blog, and that's my journal. My seven year old daughter is itching to take it over, so our family journals may start to be from her POV :)

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  5. okay, so i don't want to spark any controversy here, but this is what I've done to keep my personal journal from being neglected. I write my novel, my morning pages, my poems and my blog posts (and anything else that strikes me) six days out of the week. On Sunday, I devote as much time is needed to my personal journal, and it has worked well for the last 5 years.

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  6. Jolene-You should let her. I bet it would be interesting:) I like your new profile picture!

    Tamara-I love your method! Sunday is a good time for pause and self-reflection and prayer-a great day to set aside for writing in a journal.

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  7. I stopped journaling after I got married,now I rely on our annual Christmas letter to remember stuff.

    I like Tamara's idea of Sunday writing.

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