HOW TO KEEP THE "LIFE" IN YOUR JOURNAL: Re-experiencing Your Experience, by Roberta Allen

I always keep a journal when I travel. Before I knew better, I kept a journal because I was afraid I would forget something important. Now I know that when something is important to me, I don’t forget. Well, maybe I forget a few details. But even if I do, it’s no big deal. What matters to me is the experience itself. If I am writing about something while it is happening, I’m not experiencing it. Or, at best, I’m short-circuiting my experience. It took me a long time to realize that I need to let an experience sink-in, before I can write about it. Sometimes that means waiting several days before I write. Keeping a journal is important to me only if, through that journal, I am able to re-experience my experience.

For example, when I was in the White Desert in Egypt at dusk, I saw a jackal—a rare sight. I watched in awe as the jackal, which seemed almost transparent, played with the cord of my sleeping bag. At that moment, I was aware of the strangeness of my surroundings, the immensity of the desert and the sky, the stillness, the silence, the paper-thin quality of this creature who seemed totally unaware of my presence though I was standing less than twenty feet away. After what seemed like a very long time, but was probably no more than ten minutes, the jackal disappeared. I didn’t see it go anywhere. It was as if it had suddenly dissolved.

When I touched the cord of my sleeping bag, it was wet with saliva. That didn’t bother me until a British judge, who was traveling in my party, screamed, "Don’t touch it! That jackal might have had rabies!" Of course, her words came too late. If the jackal had rabies, which was a possibility—jackals  usually sleep during the day—there was nothing I could do in the middle of the desert. Somewhere else I might have panicked. But in the desert, rabies didn’t seem real.

That night the travelers in my party scattered and chose places to sleep far apart from one another. I could not see anyone from the place I had chosen on the sand. As I lie alone in my sleeping bag looking up at the star-filled sky, I felt as though I had risen out of my body and merged with the stars. The part of me that remained on the sand knew no fear. I felt safer than I’ve ever felt, though scorpions and deadly snakes able to leap twenty feet in the air lived in that desert. In the morning, I saw the footprints of creatures inches from my head but I awoke in the same state of bliss I felt the night before.

I didn’t write about this experience until I was back in my hotel in Cairo some days later. While I was in the desert, nothing could have been further from my mind than writing in my journal. When at last I felt able to write about that night, what I did was this: I jotted down the first few words that came to mind about my experience.

dusk, sand, stillness, space, jackal, stars

Then I chose the word with the most energy, the word that felt most charged, and started writing—as fast as I could write. I chose the word "space". If I were someone who paused to think, I would have used a timer for five or ten or fifteen minutes to bypass my critical voice, the voice that might keep me from living inside the moment I wanted to re-create.

I wrote incomplete sentences, fragments, until I felt within those words an experience. All I wanted to do was capture that particular experience. The only way I could capture the life in that experience was to re-create it in the moment of writing as though it was happening for the very  first time. I had to re-create the cool evening air, the sand, the feeling of infinite space in the desert, the infinite space of the sky, the sight of that nearly transparent creature, the strangeness of its movements, and so on. I had to create a movie in my mind in which I was the main character: everything I saw was happening through my senses.

If I had tried to capture that experience nearer to the time that it occurred, I would have been unable to write it. I would have written just words. They would not have had any life. Whatever you record is just words unless you make those words live. The only way to make them live is to re-create or re-experience whatever you are writing. Once you’ve got the experience down on paper, once you feel the life in your words, then you can refine them or revise them if you like.

You don’t have to be in the Egyptian desert to have an experience. You don’t have to be on a trip. Whatever you are feeling is an experience. The paradox is that sometimes you need a day or two to pass before you are able to experience on paper what you have experienced in your life.

Roberta Allen latest books are THE PLAYFUL WAY TO SERIOUS WRITING, Houghton Mifflin, 2002, and THE PLAYFUL WAY TO KNOWING YOURSELF, Houghton Mifflin, April 2003. Her other books are THE TRAVELING WOMAN, stories; THE DAUGHTER, a novella-in-stories; AMAZON DREAM, a travel memoir; CERTAIN PEOPLE, stories; FAST FICTION, a writing quide; and THE DREAMING GIRL, a novel. She is also a visual artist, who have exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  http://hometown.aol.com/Roall