Be you; be true; be emotional; tell what you really think; reveal who you are; don’t hide…

How easy it was to read these words…

How hard it is to follow these instructions…

Writers that follow this path make the best writings, no doubts. Readers love to read how and what the writers think. Readers like to know the moods and emotions a writer’s experiencing. Readers like to know that writers are like them, humans with forces and weaknesses.

How to become such a writer? Personally, it’s a lot work. It’s not easy to write and talk as freely as this. It’s no natural to me to talk as deeply as I wish. I have a strong censor. A voice that talk to me each time I’m about to say or write something. I think it’s a sort of fear; a fear of being discovered: truly discovered.

This censor seems to be in every human being. Da Vinci had his and tried to work around it to create all his incredible innovations.

I try to tame it. I try, slowly, to get rid of this fear, to open myself to my relatives. I try personifying my writings… I try to be myself.

The process is slow and hard. I never expected that it would be as hard as it is. In reality, I never expected to write and talk, truly, about me.

How I work on this fear? Step by step.

By example, I sent an email of my article about Internet in High Schools to my friend teacher (the protagonist of the article). She seemed to be really happy to read it. We talked about it and I tell her that I was not sure if I should send it to her. She asked, puzzled, why? My answer: I don?t know. It was not really true, it was my censor that tried to stop me; my fear.

Which fear? She is probably asking.

–I don?t know.

But I done it and it helped me in my process.

I try and I’m trying hard. What help me to continue? I see benefits. I learn on myself in the process.

What make me to talk about this today? Two things: my talk with my friend about my high schools article and my current rage of reading about writing.

I’m currently reading On Writing Well. The book goes in search of two of the most important qualities of a good writing: humanity and warmth.

“Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me?some scientific quest, perhaps. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field. How was he drawn in it? What emotional baggage did he bring along? How did it change his life? It?s not necessary to want to spend a year alone at Walden Pond to become involved with a writer who did.

This is the personal transaction that?s at the heart of good nonfiction writing.”

He is right. It’s what people like to read. The best blog posts are them where I can ear the voice of the writer.

“Who am I to say what I think?” they ask. “Or what I feel?”

“Who are you not to say what you think?” I tell them.

“There’s only one you. Nobody else thinks or feels in exactly the same way.”

“But nobody cares about my opinions,” they say. “It would make me feel conspicuous.”

“They’ll care if you tell them something interesting,” I say, “and tell them in words that come naturally”.

“Still, we have become a society fearful of revealing who we are.”

I can easily visualize myself in this conversation with William Zinsser. Is it a rational or irrational fear? I wish I would be able to answer to this question soon.

In the same trend, I would like to finish this post with two quotes of a book I’m reading in parallel with On Writing Well: Mes Démons by Edgar Morin; one of the most influence French sociologist. This book is his short autobiography and a repository of ideas that haunt him since ages.

“[..] voulais-je avant tout affirmer une fidélité à moi-même et à mes idées. ”

“En 1958, au terme d’Autocritique, je me posais la question : Ai-je été sincère?, et je comprenais que la réponse à cette question était indécidable : La sincérité n?est pas une pure flamme qui jaillit de l’esprit; la volonté d’être sincère, quand il s’agit d?être sincère sur soi, se perd toujours dans les labyrinthes et les doubles fonds intérieurs… La sincérité ne peut être pure qu?à un moment particulier de combustion entre les gaz qui la nourissent et la fumée qui s?en dégage.

Aujourd’hui, avant de commencer, je me demande : “Serai-je véridique? ” […] “

Technoratie: [writing] [writer] [fear] [yourself]

This is a little thought I had. It can seem naïve.

Why do I write? I can write for myself. I can write for others.

I write to clarify ideas, situations or thoughts to myself or to others. I write to try to understand myself or to be understood by others.

The fundamental aim of my writings is to clarify things.

So, why do people are using symbolism in writing? If their goals are the same as mine: I can’t understand their choices. If not, then, I can’t understand why they are writing.

Why could I want to obfuscate my ideas? This act would be again my goals, again me and again my readers.

Why would I try to work against me?

Why do people are using symbolism in their writings? It’s that because they fear what people could think of their ideas?

Writing is an act of truth. I any writing, fiction or nonfiction, the author is here and his truth is talking, just waiting to be listened.

It’s why symbolism in writing doesn’t make any sense… to me.

Technoratie: [writing] [symbolism]

Thousands of personal journals were coming from every state and several countries. Dream journals, idea journals, journey journals, travel journals, sketch journals, war journals, anything else journals. She read them, analyzed them and discussed of them with their authors, know or unknown.

Leaving a Trace is praise to personal journals. It’s a compilation of all personal journals that Alexandra Johnson read over time. Why people are writing in personal journals? How most famous personality of our history used journals? How to keep your personal journal? What type of journal are people creating? It’s the question she asks and answers with his personal love of journaling. She do her demonstration with thousands of quotes took in personal journals of know and unknown writers.

I had doubts when I received the book by Amazon but it was a revelation. Every page is a pleasure to read. It’s a travel through personal and collective history. What I remind of the book? The power that journals and diaries have to help us to clarify ideas, create inspiration and inflame creativity. Do I recommend this book? Yes, to any human being.

Bellow are some quotes, extracted from the context of the book, wrote by Alexandra or other journal keepers cited in it. It will give you an overview of the richness of her work.

Through these citations, I’ll say things; things that tell you what a diary could be for me; how I see it… the essence of it.

“There looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which the diary might attain. I might in the course of time lean what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it.”

– Virginia Woolf

Personal diaries are a multiple purpose toolkits. They help you to find your path, to tame your creativity:

“[…]how others used a diary to deepen a life, or negotiate the obstacle course of creativity.”

It’s a way to talk to you… in the future. You fill it with thoughts and feelings. You project yourself in the future and wait until these thoughts fade in your mind. Then, you reread your entries and remember all things you were thinking about… but now… you know the truth about these old assertions. You do it in hope to find something new; something that you didn’t expected to know before that time:

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself… into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life.”

– Virginia Woolf

“‘Who are we really writing for? ‘ A future self, usually. Journal keeping is that rare activity centered in the present, contemplating the past, yet aimed for a future self.”

“Gail Godwin […] I write for my future self, as well as my present mood. And sometimes, to set the record straight, I jot down a word or two in old diaries to my former self; to encourage, to scold, to correct, to set things in perspectives.”

There is a paradox: you create a personal diary. You want to keep it for yourself, prohibiting others to read it. But, in the deepen your, you want to leave a trace of your apparition on earth; of your living. While you live, you don’t need others to know you but once you know you will die, you want others to know everything about you:

“The past, Virginia Woolf noted, urges us to leave a trace.”

“Yet no matter how incomplete of fitfully kept, journals honor that most human of instincts: our need to leave a trace.”

Journals are a way to clarify your thoughts. To organize them in a way to keep your foot on earth:

“Mansfield, who’d burned ‘the huge complaining diaries’ of her childhood, kept journals for process: to practice craft as much as to clarify thoughts.”

It’s also a way to help you to know things that you didn’t know you know. It’s a way to look at things differently, from another point of view: to see things with new eyes:

“Once I begin the act of writing, it all falls away; the view from the window, the tools, the talismans, and I am unconscious of myself… one’s carping inner critics are silenced for a time… there is always a surprise, a revelation. During the act of writing, I have told myself something that I didn’t know I know.”

– Gail Godwin

“Proust […] The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

It’s a way to bind together your two self: the conscious and unconscious ones. It’s a way to see new things; things that were there without being aware of them:

“Journals allow one to reflect, to step outside oneself. They create a third space, an invaluable pause between the conscious and unconscious self. Above all, journals are a way to let the world be reconsidered not taking in the habitual. They’re a master switch on tracks, moving us from the familiar, from not seeing, to seeing anew.”

“[…] record of conscience.”

“[…] sharpening consciousness.”

It’s a tool to observe; to take time; to be aware of your environment; look at it trying to understand it:

“Today, sitting for even five minutes with a journal offers a rare cease-fire in the battle of daily life, a time when we’re not graded, not performing. It’s a time when one attempts some truth, silencing those carping inner voices.”

“The deeper benefit of keeping a journal is that it offers a way to be consistently aware or mindful. As Katherine Mansfield note, her journal became a way ‘to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being.'”

“Samantha Harvey […] The diary helps me weigh thoughts and opinions about life […] For me, the diary is the outward expression of this inward quest; to understand my relationship to myself, to others, to the world, to the spiritual […] I’m making coherence out of the chaos.”

“Jim Cummings […] To me, a diary is a record of verification. It is a proof that one has lived and that one has cared enough about a precious life to describe it.”

“To keep a journal is to learn how to play. Deeply”

“The journal is the ideal place of refuge for the inner self because it constitutes a counterworld: a world to balance the other.”

– Joyce Carol Oates

It’s a tool that gives hope. Hope to have something to work with that will eventually lead to something significant:

“The scene rings true for other reasons: our image of writing in a journal, the necessity of privacy, out fear that someone might read it, and, secretly, the hope that a diary will be the start of significant work.”

Keeping diaries is a discovering process of the inner you:

“The secret of keeping a journal is seeing it as a draft, a stepping-stone, a process.”

You always have a voice in you. This voice always tries to stop you writing and saying what you really want to write and say. Everybody have it; it’s hidden deep in each of us. We need to work with it, around it, against it. Passing over it could help you to express you, to being you, to create great things:

“You’re not the only one with these voices homesteading in you brain. Da Vinci, a terrible perfectionist, kept journals for forty years as a way to generate work and outwit his Censor. In the morning, he recorded his dreams. In the afternoon, he jotted notes for ideas. In the evening, he recorded passages from his reading. He did each with lightning speed, his goal solely to map out as ideas as possible before his Censor could veto them.”

“A journal is how memory and meaning finally meet, finding a core image that begins to unlock important connections in a life.”

Writing about something is observing it, trying to understand it:

“Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see…. It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open.”

– Annie Dillard

It’s a way to invite inspiration to knock at your door:

“‘Inspiration, ‘ says poet David Lehman, isn’t something ‘to sit and wait for. ‘ For him, it comes when you invite it.”

It could be a diagnosis tool:

“”When I find I’m not writing in my journal daily,” says Cindy Riede, “I know I’m shut down in some way and that I need to wake up and pay attention.””

It’s a tool to find the shape of the connections between your thoughts:

“Writing is one way of discovering sequence in experience…. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effects begin to align themselves…. Experiences…. Connect and are identified as a larger shape.”

– Eudora Welty

Journals and diaries take all forms. From the traditional Italian handmade notebook to the toilet paper; from printed email to blogs; from sketch book to home movies; everything can be a journal.

This praise to journal keeping is intended to anybody. From the writer to the business manager. Anybody, who cares about himself; who wants to know more about him and his environment; who create things. As a computer scientist and human being I keep journal for these exact reasons.

I keep many journals: Blogs, Moleskine notebooks, binders full of lined sheets, writings and highlightings in books. All these journals have their place; each try to cope with a specific task; all are priceless.

Someone could think that I ripped the essence of the book with those citations but it’s nothing like this. This is only an overview, a snapshot of the inspiration and creativity enclosed in the book. Buy it, read it, think about it and re-read it.

Why writing is now so important to me?

Because writing is thinking.

While I write things, I think about them. It’s a moment I take in a day to think about things that fly in my mind.

Sometime I wrote my short and long term goals on a sheet. I check them; I check what I’m doing right now to reach them. While I’m writing them down, I think about them, I make them clear in my mind.

Because writing is learning.

While I write things, I learn from them. Sometimes, things will emerge from my unconsciousness: I’ll learn from them. It will give a new angle of attack to understand the thoughts I was writing about.

Technoratie: [writing] [thinking] [learning]

I just started to read the fifth book of the Dune chronicle: Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert. In the ACE edition, they added a little letter of Frank to his readers after 10 millions copies sold. I’ll retype it there because I think that this is a really interesting reading for people interested in writing and Dune. It describes his intentions and the process of his writings. There it is:

… there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book’s success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experiences.

It was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah.

It was to produce another view of a human-occupied planet as an energy machine.

It was to penetrate the interlocked workings of politics and economics.

It was to be an examination of absolute prediction and its pitfalls.

It was to have an awareness drug in it and tell what could happen through dependence on such a substance.

Potable water was to be an ecological novel, then, with many overtones, as well as a story about people and their human concerns with human values, and I had to monitor each of these levels at every stage in the book.

There wasn’t room in my head to thing about much else.

Following the first publication, reports from the publishers were slow and, as it turned out, inaccurate. The critics had panned it. More than twelve publishers had turned it down before publication. There was no advertising. Something was happening out there, though.

For two years, I was swamped with bookstore and reader complaints that they could not get the book. The Whole Earth Catalog praised it. I kept getting these telephone calls from people asking me if I were starting a cult.

The answer: “God no!”

What I’m describing is the slow realization of success. By the time the first three Dune books were completed, there was little doubt that this was a popular work ? one of the most popular in history, I am told, with some ten million copies sold worldwide. Now the most common question people ask is: “What does this success mean to you?”

It surprise me. I didn’t expect failure either. It was a work and I did it. Parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were written before Dune was completed. They fleshed out more in the writing, but the essential story remained intact. I was a writer and I was writing. The success meant I could spend more time writing.

Looking back on it, I realize I did the right thing instinctively. You don’t write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you’re really doing it, that’s all you’re doing: writing.

There’s an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a bookstore and sets down hard earned money(energy) for your book, you owe that person some entertainment and as much more as you can give.

That was really my intention all along.

Technoratie: [writing] [reading] [dune] [publishing]