Sunday, 21 January 2018, 10:42PM
A decision has been reached: Sunday nights shall be henceforth devoted to reflecting on my week and checking in on the state of my writing. A feat I’ve avoided since the first grade for good reasons—who on earth wanted to hear about my outwardly boring summer? I certainly didn’t want to share it, and all the good parts—the parts I believed my eight-year-old peers would not understand, and most definitely tease me about—I wanted to keep to myself. So, learning one of our semester-long assignments for this class involved a weekly journal had me cringing with dread. I hated writing journals and it was worth 10% of my final grade.
Yet today I found myself hurrying throughout my day, desperately hoping I wouldn’t work another 14-hour shift two days in a row. I wanted to go home, eat, and sit down to write, even if I had no news to write about. Then again, it’s probably for that reason I looked forward to this session all day. I had been dying for some sort of creative release, but getting lost in some fictional world of my own wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Now don’t think this means I’ve fallen in love with journalling. I’m still wary of sharing, even if it’s with myself. But I will admit, the pent up frustration of not writing alleviated with this short burst in expression and creativity, does feel great.
I hate to admit it, but I do need to journal.
On another note—more like keeping with the topic of the creative process—, my initial understanding for this assignment thought of it as a routine tracker for our writing time and how we went about creating. But the creative process isn’t confined to the routines we set in place to get ourselves actually working. A lot of the time, it starts off with the metro ride into campus, your coffee growing cold and your quiet observation of people’s ticks.
(originally written for ENGL 224, winter 2018)
Note from the author:
The above text was originally written for a lecture on the Creative Process taught at Concordia University. I took the course during the winter semester of 2018, and was required to fill out a weekly journal about my creative process. At the end of the semester, I transferred the texts over from my university student portal to a handwritten journal, before I could lose my work. They will now live on The Finn Press as a means of giving them a new life beyond the physical binding of a notebook. The texts are by no means perfect and predominantly written hours before the midnight deadline in a tired blur. Do enjoy!
