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I love dumping thoughts onto a page. There is nothing more satisfying than purging one’s brain, pouring out thoughts and non-thoughts via a stream of broken prose onto a page (or screen). Ok, maybe there are a few other things that are a little more satisfying. But it’s great, that’s what I’m trying to say.
I’ve been using 750words.com recently to push myself to write a daily journal. Well, it’s not really “writing” per se. I would describe it as purging. But 750 words a day? That sounds a lot, right? Well, actually, when you’re writing in a pure, unfiltered, stream of consciousness manner, the words quickly stack up.
I find myself waking up and itching to get thoughts down into writing. It just so happens that I’ve been dreaming quite a lot recently, so I wake up with a head swimming with experiences from parallel universes to get down on the page.
I’ve only been writing the daily journal for a week or so now, but I’m finding I want to write even more. I can normally bash out 750 words in the morning quite quickly, say, in around 15 minutes. But by the end of the day, I could easily write another 750 words from all the clutter that has stuck to me from the day’s activities.
There is very little that I would consider publishable from these daily journal entries. In fact, 750words.com is designed for “private, unfiltered, spontaneous, daily” journalling. The notes are meant to be shared. This is a key point. It frees you up to express yourself without any constraints. The occasional nugget of a compelling idea embeds itself into these journal entries, and it is fascinating to read back over them to see what stands out.
Bizarrely enough, even though I know I am never going to publish these notes, a part of me cannot help but mask some of the people I refer to in my journal. I do not mention my daughter’s name. I do not mention my friends’ names. I may refer to them as single letter nom de guerre as if I must protect their identity from prying cyber criminals. Yes, I believe this is called paranoia.
I just said that I will never publish any of these private notes. Well, why don’t I just share a couple of snippets with you anyway? Let’s just put this down to my mercurial temperament, shall we?
On taking daily walks…
I feel the need to go for a walk soon, I am trying to make it a daily habit. The more daily habits I can stick to, the better. I think, anyway. Is that right? Or maybe the daily habits will just push out any meaningful desire or freedom to do anything else. I don’t know. We will see, I suppose.
And then I was feeling a little… frantic…
I have an urgency, an itch to write and write and write. For three days straight. For five. For more. I wish to plunge to the depths of Kerouac and produce a frantic essay on life and despair.
I’ll leave it there before I reveal anything further that may irreversibly incriminate me.
About J M Jackson
Dad first, etc second. Prefers writing about life instead of facing it. Occupied by unruly Nabokovian irritation & irrepressible Kafkaesque positivity. Working on his first novel.
