I mentioned that I was going to do a series of guest blogs about personal writing in my email newsletter at the start of the year, and had this response from a reader, Melanie Langdon.

Dear Jenny,

My journals . Full of stuff and nonsense but all my own . Your email has inspired me to read them and use them. I may even get 500 words down !
Many thanks and Happy New Year .
Melanie

Here’s my response:

Oh my goodness, Melanie – those are beautiful! We could use that picture, and I bet you could get 500 words out of the experience of reading back over them! I read back over mine at the end of every year, and it’s always full of surprises. I’m glad my email inspired you 🙂 Very best wishes
Jen

Then a few weeks later, to my delight, Melanie sent me her contribution.

A few words about Melanie first. She graduated from Sussex University many years ago, lived in Norwich for a year and became a teacher. She enjoyed eleven years of teaching and then family came along, and she was happy to be at home with her daughter. She moved to an old Edwardian house in Cornwall, in order to start a small business, which has proved challenging but exciting and is an ongoing saga.

What encouraged me to keep a journal all those years ago? Probably a desire to control my life. I could examine in detail the way I was thinking what I was thinking and why I was thinking these thoughts. Control , yes that’s it . Everything seemed out of control but writing meant you held the pen , you wrote your life back.

Melodramatic piffle? Ramblings of a mad woman but it kept me sane . Well you know . Sanity is in the eye of……

There are so many thoughts and ideas in the journals: short stories, poems, lists, random comments about the world – my world and the wider, scarier one. They make me focus but also give me freedom to express myself and work out characters and plots.

I note down phrases I’ve read in books, slogans, addresses, reviews, recipes any thing that inspires me. I have lists of writers and books, films and plays I’ve heard of and intend to see. I sometimes get serious and try to compile stories or half thought stories. They combine to make fascinating reading matter in themselves . I can see the aspirations , career ideas, ambitions I held from 1998 to 2017.

I won’t stop keeping them. They make me laugh at my grand Ideas. They provide a space to be honest and open and allow a stream of consciousness to flow across the paper. No one else to read them but me.

My first journal had George Eliot on the cover ! As if ! I wrote tight and small and I can feel my anxiety and nervousness just by the size of the writing. There are resignation letters composed and revised. New words discovered, songs heard , pieces of music noted and forgotten . Even shopping lists and to do lists.

In many ways writing experiences down, real and imaginary , condenses thoughts. There’s bits of philosophy and history , cuttings and slogans stuck in to remind me of the person I was and how little I’ve changed. Just got to write . There is plenty of raw material in these books. I will write.

Thanks for encouraging me to re – read.

Melanie has exactly the same exuberant, everything goes approach to her journals as I do, and she started, as I did, when life felt out of control, in tiny anxious hand writing.

Leave her a comment, something nice she can copy into her diary today!

Today, we have another fascinating contribution to my guest series about personal writing, and it’s a double first – Alejandro De La Garza is the first contributor from across the pond, and the first to keep his diaries digital.

Not long after I began walking and talking around the age of 9 months, my parents started teaching me to read. The books were those simply-worded “See Spot Run” types, but I took to them with uncannily inborn sense of ease. Whenever my folks became engaged with some task, they made sure I was either asleep or sitting on the couch with one of those books. Many of those colorful pre-school tomes were “Golden Books,” the classics of childhood literature that helped to educate the toddler masses. I still have scores of them stored away neatly in boxes; surely they’d be collector’s items by now.

By the age of 5 – before entering kindergarten – I had started writing. Although I could speak in complete sentences and use seemingly grown-up words, putting those thoughts into written form became my primary means of communication. I’ve been reading and writing voraciously ever since.

I first started a personal journal in the summer of 1983, but stopped. I resumed the following year and have maintained a private journal for the better part of the past thirty-two years. I realized long ago these journals weren’t just a record of a mundane life. I could inscribe my most intimate thoughts and ideas. After all, no one would view them except me; or at least not until after I die. I don’t have to be proper and considerate of other peoples’ sentiments. Political correctness has no real place in these writings. The most authentic side of my otherwise quiet persona arises to expunge the wrath of a troubled mind or the glory of an exuberant soul. It runs the gamut, from the most brilliant hopes for an extraordinary future to the abyss of heart-wrenching despair.

In June of 2013, I suffered a freak, but critical accident here at home where my right upper arm experienced a severe gash that damaged nerves running down to my hand. Three months later a hand surgeon did her best to rehabilitate those nerves. Because it was almost impossible to write manually, I began keeping my journal in electronic format. The mechanics are definitely easier. But the purpose remains the same.

Whenever I’m in great emotional or even physical distress, I turn to my journal and let the anxiety melt onto the computer screen. Conversely, when things are going well, my journal captures the beauty of that moment. These journals are my refuge.

You can say read more from Alejandro on his blog https://chiefwritingwolf.com

Alejandro’s story reminds me of when I was a child; as soon as I could write, writing became an immediate and necessary response to experience. Does his experience of journal-writing resonate with you?

I’m so enjoying reading about other people’s personal writing in my new guest series. It feels like a privileged glimpse into secret worlds that most of us don’t usually talk about.

Reading about other people’s experiences is making me notice the particular qualities of my diaries that I hadn’t thought about before; they were just an organic thing that had been developing over the course of a long lifetime, with a sort of inevitability. They were just what they were.

For example, I’ve never kept more than one journal at a time, and it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone might. My teenage diaries were mostly about my family life, school and friends, and they make fascinating, if embarrassing, reading to me now.

Even my handwriting was quite different back then, but one thing I still do in my journals seems the same – I’ve always paper clipped and stuck things in.

I stopped keeping diaries when I went to university, but started writing a dream journal a few years later. At first, these were just recounts of my dreams, with no commentary, in tightly-packed tiny writing which is almost impossible to read. I used school exercise books, and continued to do so for the next ten years, though the content evolved to make space for some notes on interpretations, which meant I had to also record something of the day’s events.

As my dream diaries gradually into a record of my whole life, both my sleeping experiences and my waking ones, I needed more space, so I upsized to A4 folders, and from there, finally, I moved away from the school/student stationery look to my first hardback A4 journals.

The first ones were very plain, nothing like the gorgeous notebooks I use now.

I think of my notebooks as dream journals, although they include all sorts of other things, such as notes on what’s been happening in the daytime, thoughts and ideas, sketches, book reviews, exercises I’ve done from other people’s teachings, tarot readings, meditations…

All the entries are dated, and they record different parts of my experience in the moment – mind, body, heart and soul. I can find old entries quickly because I’ll remember other things that were going on at the time, what I was doing/thinking/feeling or dreaming.

I colour code. Red gel for my dreams, black for my thoughts about dreams, blue for my day life events and reflections. I write when I feel like it, which can be several times a day, or nothing at all for several weeks. It never feels like a burden, but a a pure delight.

Every New Year’s Eve, I read back over my whole year of writing, noting the major themes, achievements, and problems I’m carrying forward. On New Year’s Day, I write a page of goals for the year to come, and record my New Year tarot spread.

I find my diaries are a wonderful resource for reconnecting with the authentic past which the story-making processes of memory tend to soften and refine over time. They’re a place where I develop my ideas for non fiction, write poems and enjoy adventures in imagination.

They’re like a very old friend I’ve been talking to since I was a child, and I hope they’ll be with me until I’m very, very old.

I generally like to keep things short and snappy on the blog, but I’ve found I’d like to hear more fully about other people’s experience of personal writing. So if you would like to contribute to this series going forward, feel free to choose any length from a few sentences to 1000 words and email them to me author@jennyalexander.co.uk. Include images if you would like to.

I’ve got some lovely guest posts about personal writing lined up for you already. Please keep them coming!

Whatever kind of writing we do – fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, poems – it all comes from somewhere inside the self, and bears the hallmarks of our individuality.

The writing process is one of the ways we can open up to the themes and dreams of our inner worlds which, if we can’t find a way of opening to them, to use Ted Hughes’ analogy, lie dormant and inaccessible to us, ‘like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish.’

In the first instance, what creativity requires is surrender – the willingness to explore inside your mind and allow whatever is there to emerge. But to shape our stories and poems into something other people will enjoy reading requires a different skill – direction and focus. Two parts then, both needing to be well developed: surrender and control.

Last year, one of my work resolutions was to let go of the desire to be helpful in my writing, which has been a main driver in all my work, both fiction and non-fiction. I’m not sure why it suddenly felt like a good idea to try and distance myself from it, but the upshot was that I barely wrote anything at all.

I was talking to a friend about this, and she remarked that maybe we didn’t really have a choice about what kind of writer we can be; the writer we are is the person we are. When she said that, it was obvious.

It made me think of the early years of mothering, when I gave myself a hard time because I couldn’t be the kind of mother I wanted to be. It took a long time for me to understand that to be a different kind of mother I would have to be a different kind of person, and that wasn’t something I could achieve, however hard I might try.

When I stopped trying to be a different kind of writer and thought about this year’s goals, I straight away found four exciting book ideas. Well, exciting to me. And each one is strongly driven by that old desire, to share ideas that can make life better.

Evidently the process of becoming a writer is like the process of writing itself, a combination of surrender and control. First, be open to finding out the kind of writer you are, and then develop the skills to make the best of your raw material.

Has writing given you insights into the kind of person you are?