I tried Virginia Woolf's journaling routine for a MONTH 📖

this video is sponsored by squarespace the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence i think i'm just sort of spilling out a whole lot of feelings i really love that this challenge has forced me to make a little time capsule on this day 100 years ago virginia woolf wrote i should be reading ulysses this is 102 written pages [Music] hello everyone and welcome to another video you want to know something that i've always been very very bad at keeping a journal but i've always been incredibly intrigued by this process and practice that some people have of consistently committing their thoughts and feelings to paper and for writers especially this seems to be an incredibly useful practice i was watching this don attar interview and she describes the writer's notebook as something similar to an artist's sketchbook i keep my notebooks very much in the sense of an artist's sketchbook a hand a face a bottle of glass little things that don't fit together a tree branch just little bits and bobs when i think of writers and their journals the very first person that comes to mind for me is virginia woolf in addition to being one of my favorite writers and in my opinion one of the most talented writers who's ever lived virginia woolf was also a prolific journal keeper and in addition to keeping journals out of fun and self-reflection she also kept journals for the purposes of bettering her writing this particular exit is taken from her journal on the 20th of april 1919 but what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice it loosens the ligaments never mind the misses and stumbles and given that i myself am an aspiring novelist i thought it would be really fun and interesting to try out virginia woolf's journal writing routine to see what effect it would have on my writing so who was virginia woolf virginia woolf was an english writer he was one of the high modernist periods most prolific contributors with a number of her most significant works coming out through the 1920s her contemporaries were dias elliot ezra pound james joyce catherine mansfield just to name a few she also notably pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device in her prose she was an early champion of the women's rights movement and although we know now that her ideologies on gender massively lack intersectionality at the time her thoughts and writings were revolutionary just look at her nonfiction work a room of one's own which is about gender and writing and poverty and what a person needs in order to become a writer or her amazing novel orlando which was supposedly a love letter to veda sackville west and is about a person named orlando who lives for several hundred years and who changes gender we have one surviving clip of virginia woolf's voice which was recorded by the bbc in 1937. it is words that are to blame they are the wildest freest most irresponsible most unteachable of all things virginia woolf's writing and journaling routine according to this website on the days that she was well she would write either fiction or reviews every single morning from 9 30 to 12 p. m after lunch she would revise in the afternoon she would go for a walk and then after tea time she would journal or write letters the last time i wrote a letter to someone have i ever written a letter to anyone i don't need to fulfill this part of the routine challenge she would write in her journal after dinner i'm gonna go out i'm going to get a journal i don't currently own a journal yes i have a lot of notebooks but i feel like this requires a channel of its own this is an excuse for me to go and buy a nice journal really that's the whole reason i'm doing this video every single day for the next 30 days i'm going to try out writing in it every single day and basically just trying out virginia woolf's writing and journaling routine but before we do that before we jump into this video and this challenge for the next month i did very quickly want to thank the sponsor of this video which is squarespace squarespace is a website builder which allows people to create stunning dynamic and lovely websites with ease i've been working with squarespace for almost two years now i still absolutely adore their platform setting up my website was the easiest process in the world maintaining it is super simple squarespace is the perfect platform for setting up a website and connecting with the people who are interested in the things that you make in addition to being affordable and easy to use squarespace has loads of benefits from fabulous e-commerce features to powerful analytics tools if you're looking to make a website head to squarespace.

com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace. com christy ann jones to save 10 off your purchase of a website or domain foreign [Music] i have been doing this challenge for a few days now and what i'm finding is that i'm not very eloquent at all comparing your raw thoughts and feelings to the writing of virginia woolf is pretty rough but i think because it's been such a long time since i've written a journal i think i'm just sort of spilling out a whole lot of feelings like in in these early pages there's nothing really i can share because it's all so personal like i'm literally just writing down all of my feelings verbatim as they're coming out and so i feel like this has been startlingly therapeutic so far we're four days into this challenge and i am hoping at some point i start you know writing imagery and maybe doing something a bit more well i mean there's interesting bits in here i filled out more of this journal than i thought i would have by this point i'm scared of filling up the whole thing in a month this this journal is huge it's very thick so surely i'm not gonna fill up the whole thing in a month [Music] we are currently just over a week into this challenge today is august the 6th i just also finished writing my entry for august 6. it was a really really big entry i had a lot of feelings yesterday nine pages i'm finding that at this early stage of this challenge i'm still very introspective in my writing and i was going over some of virginia woolf's journals and i haven't read them all in totality but i've read snippets here and there and a lot of them are really quite eclectic like there's snippets of criticism of other novels there's her describing personal stuff and i think a lot of it is probably not reflected because the journals are edited right there's entries here and there like every few months because probably it was too much to include them all i find it really interesting to look at what she wrote about and what she cared about and what she thought i really love that this challenge has sort of forced me to make a little time capsule of this month of august 2022 because i'll have this journal and i'll be able to look back on it in such intricate detail again i'm very bad at keeping journals this isn't the type of thing i would usually do of my own volition but i'm enjoying the process so far really i like that i feel motivated to journal especially when i've had a bad day and i want to get all my feelings out [Music] so [Music] today is the 16th of august 2022.

it is a tuesday today i tried out a new little exercise with journaling rather than just spilling forward my thoughts and anything that i i wanted to whinge about during the day i tried actually describing the imagery of my apartment which interestingly is not something i've ever done before i think that's a really interesting exercise to try and describe spaces that you're very familiar with i don't want to get bored for me if i start to get bored with a challenge or a thing really anything in general i will just not do it anymore and that's a really big problem for me so doing little structured bits and pieces in here i think is very useful so as i think i've mentioned i've been going through virginia woolf's journals here and there just sort of looking at snippets i really need to sit down and properly read them because they're really beautifully written and very interesting i have on my tablet the complete works of virginia woolf i think i bought them for like four dollars five years ago it was a very good deal and i found a journal entry from august 16 1922 so that's a hundred years ago today so on this day a hundred years ago virginia woolf wrote i should be reading ulysses and fabricating my case for and against i have read 200 pages so far not a third and have been amused stimulated charmed interested by the first two or three chapters to the end of the cemetery scene and then puzzled bored irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples and tom great tom thinks this on par with war and peace an illiterate underbred book it seems to me the book of a self-taught working man and we all know how distressing they are how egotistical insistent raw striking ultimately nauseating oh my god virginia woolf she just did not like ulysses for my own part i am laboriously judging my mind for mrs dalloway and bringing up light buckets i don't like the feeling i'm writing too quickly i must press it together i wrote 4 000 words of reading in record time and when jacob is rejected in america and ignored in england i shall be philosophically driving my plow fields away but i need no excuses since i'm not writing for the lit's up shall i ever write for them again it's really interesting that she criticizes james joyce for being a self-taught working man because that's it's quite classist um but in addition to that talking about mrs dalloway and being rejected from literary spaces and that is a really interesting little window into where she was 100 years ago today i've been going back and forth between trying to write at night time and then trying to write first thing in the morning and trying to see what works for me because one of the things i like with these challenges is that it gives me the opportunity to try out new things basically because of the haruki murakami video it essentially got me back into running which is a really positive thing i'm trying to do virginia woolf's writing routine but i'm also trying to find ways to make it work for me what i'm going to be doing today is i'm going to grab my journal i'm going to sit down and do some dedicated writing sprints now i've done these in vlogs a bit it's kind of like a writing warm-up basically and it helps with your prose on a word-to-word basis essentially when you're writing it's very very easy to slip into cliche into repeating the same images that other people write in um if you say things like the envelope was read like roses right like that's a cliche that's really boring that doesn't mean anything so doing these kinds of exercises really help with trying to push yourself to think more creatively about things basically gonna go to this website which is a random word generator generate random words we've got repeat page attachment those are kind of boring let's try one more time so we have broken young and reluctance and what i'm gonna do is i'm going to set a timer for two minutes for each word and then stream of consciousness like right whatever comes into my head [Music] do [Music] done don't mind me covering up what i wrote yesterday because i did actually have a few notes about my upcoming novel in there which i don't actually want to share so i'm going to cover this left side of the page up first word really is a jumping off point or at least that's how i've always interpreted this exercise so i've got number one broken glass shattered eggs birds beaks and spindly legs and then i just sort of keep going with this every time i get stuck i go back to this word and i just kind of keep writing here we've got young youth the thing lost moment by moment hourglass rotting fruit the fleeting difference between mayflies and those really old sharks greenland sharks are the ones i was thinking of um and then i just keep going and then of course i went over the other page i don't have the dexterity to write as quickly with a pen as i do with a keyboard maybe i'll try tomorrow doing sprints that are a little bit longer maybe i'll pick two words and i'll do five minutes for each one and then i'll have a little bit more time so i don't feel so panic to try and get down every image in my head we are almost done with this challenge we're currently on the final stretch today is august 25th 4 p. m just past four and i'm going to be doing my five minute sprints that i said i was gonna do yesterday i'm gonna do them now where can i film in this room that isn't bright i'm gonna choose the word myself i'm gonna pick something from this room jumper pac-man lamp teacup moose i'm gonna write about moose this little enthusiastic guy here i realized that i actually forgot to write the date on it i keep doing this i keep having to retroactively put the dates on things because i just forget to put them on today is the 25th i don't think you can see it you can just see yourself in the cloudy sky behind you trust me this is going for five minutes [Music] [Music] i got a page roughly so this side and this side was where i wrote about moose i know this isn't what virginia woolf does but i don't know why but for some reason i've really really latched onto this exercise as being really good for helping me change the way i think about certain things how do i explain this so basically in terms of writing figurative language so when we talk about figurative language metaphor simile figurative language is when you take the literal thing that exists in the scene and you put a figurative spin on it to change the meaning right so if you have a bus let's say you have a bus you have a yellow bus you describe the bus as daisy yellow right that tells you a lot about the narrator and how they perceive school buses it probably implies that your narrator is optimistic so when you describe something as leica that's a simile a bus is like a daisy simile or if you have the daisy bus it's a metaphor if you describe a bus as yellow like a corn cob that's a lot more of a practical image if you use that similarly in your work it's probably going to reveal about your narrator that they're practical maybe they grew up in the country they see things as more utilitarian if you see the bus as being crime scene tape yellow then that's a much much more dark and violent image maybe your narrator the character who's perceiving what's going on has a sad past maybe there was a crime that happened you still just have a yellow bus it's the literal thing that's in the scene is the yellow bus but the figurative language completely changes the perception of that thing right i sort of find that working on my figurative language because i love figurative language i love the symbolism and how we give meaning to objects and colors and types of flower and crime scene tape and all of this stuff this imagery the aesthetic the the way you build up the atmosphere of the scene through describing words all of this i love it so much it makes me so happy this is the type of thing that i want to work on in little snippets in a journal you can't really work on things like big structural elements like payoffs and and and character development and things like that you could work on dialogue dialogue is the type of thing that you really need to study when you listen to people and when you analyze like other bits of writing and novels and things like that and yeah that's my little spiel about figurative language and the reason why i do these little sprints and why i work on this just because i find that this is really helpful and so that's what i'm currently working on in my journal i have found that as the month has gone on i am being less introspective i'm describing things more i'm working more on craft i think having the last couple days where i'm doing specific tasks like these little writing sprints this has been really helpful for me to motivate me [Music] this challenge is now officially complete today is the 27th of august in actuality i'm pretty sure that's 32 days not 30. so technically it's like slightly longer than a month but anyway so how many pages did we write one two three [Music] this is 102 written pages in my journal maybe like 40 of the way through which is a pretty sizable effort with only one month's worth of writing some days i wrote a couple of sentences and paragraphs i think there was one day in there where i wrote i don't feel like doing this today and that was like all i did but there were other days where i wrote like 10 pages i think there was probably a day where i wrote like 15.