Photo from
http://blog.notesolution.com/2012/07/26/to-bring-or-not-to-bring/
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.Â
William Wordsworth
This is one of my favorite quotes of all time, about writing or anything else. A writer has to do this, I think, but there is a lot that can stand in the way of hearing our hearts. We can get so involved in research, edits, revisions, plots, and character development, that we lose the sense of why we began the book in the first place. That’s why I think a journal is so useful to a writer, even when we write pages every day in our novels and blogs. A journal is a place where we write for no one but ourselves, where we reflect, take stock, both of our lives and our work. On some days it seems like a luxury I can’t afford to pick up my inefficient pen and write on a real sheet of paper instead of typing quickly into my laptop. But there is something in the motion of the pen putting my thoughts into ink that is soothing in itself, that leads me out of the wilderness of all that must be done, to why I am doing it all in the first place.