Last week, I wrote about journaling, which has been an important practice for me off and on for decades now. But I know some people struggle with journaling, not knowing what to say or even feeling silly ‘talking’ to the page. While it seems to me that journaling can be whatever we want and need it to be and so really doesn’t warrant any self-consciousness, I understand that some people need a little more direction than that. So during this season of intentional play with different practices that can help attune us to the voice of the heart, I’ve also tried a couple other writing-based practices: automatic writing and using writing prompts.
Automatic writing was popularized by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way. Her practice, known as ‘morning pages’, involves writing three hand-written pages of text every morning. And that’s it. There’s no guiding question or intention beyond the writing itself. It’s the quantity rather than quality or content that is important here. While a lot of people have found this practice very beneficial, I find her method a bit much for me, even stressful (which is the last thing I want from a practice!), so I took off any length requirements this go around and just wrote until I ran out of things to say. Regardless of how you actually practice automatic writing, the goal is to exhaust your conscious thoughts, ideas, and anxieties — whatever is on your mind — so that all that’s left is the voice of the unconscious. That’s why Cameron calls this exercise “a trail that we follow into our interior.”
While in the past, I’ve found this technique helpful for getting past writer’s block, I don’t think I find it personally helpful for getting in touch with the unconscious. I find that, if I don’t have length requirements in place, I just peter out when I run out of conscious thoughts; and if I do, I just end up stressing about filling in the pages. But that’s just me; millions of people have taken up Julia Cameron’s challenge, and many of them have found it beneficial.
More helpful for me is prompted writing. In this case, we are given a question or topic to guide our writing. Sometimes the goal of this is just to break writer’s block or to build the writing habit itself. In these cases, the prompt might be to write about a childhood pet or a favourite vacation. But sometimes, when those prompts ask us to dig deep, they an become not just “a trail that we follow into our interior,” but a superhighway. Examples that I’ve done lately include “What are some recurring patterns in your life. What might you be getting out of them? How are they not serving you?” (YIKES) and “Ask yourself the 5Ws to take stock of your life: Who are you? What are you? Where are you? When are you? and How are you?” The second of these prompts was so rich for reflection that I think I’ll add it to my toolkit of practices. If we take them seriously, these kinds of prompts can lead us down corridors of the heart we’ve either been avoiding or didn’t realize were there. In other words, they can be helpful kinds of shadow work.
As should be obvious at this point, I’m all for approaching practices with a sense of play, trying lots of things and see what works for me. And so with this spirit in mind, I’d encourage you to give these a try: both fix-lengthed and open-lengthed automatic writing, and both general and targeted writing prompts. They might not all work for you (they don’t all for me!), but some of them just might.
Matthew Root 