Category Archives: journals

Interview with Mari L. McCarthy

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Today I am happy to share an e-mail interview with Mari L. McCarthy.  It is all about the power of journaling!  Check it out below:

  1. Why did you decide to start journaling in the first place?

It was for physical therapy purposes only.  I had an MS episode where I lost most use of the right side of my body, and I needed to teach myself how to write with my left hand ASAP.

  1. When did you notice a connection between journaling and how you felt physically, spiritually, and mentally?

Right away.  I got started with Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages, and the three stream-of-consciousness pages first thing every morning took me on a magical mystery tour.  I started hearing rhymes and started writing poetry for the first time in my life.  And, I started remembering things from my childhood 60 years ago and experiencing it as if it was happening right now.  I was able to process the events through the pages, became aware of how many erroneous thoughts and feelings I was carrying around in my body, and created new thoughts that reduced all kinds of mental, physical and spiritual stress.

  1. Who do you think could benefit most from journaling daily?

Everyone.  We all have had challenging childhoods where we just sucked in everything, including a lot of erroneous thoughts and feelings (I call them issues in our tissues). Journaling provides us the opportunity to understand the origins of our crazy thinking and shows us how to reframe our thought process.

  1. What advice would you give someone who is just starting on their journaling journey?

Journaling is about facing our fears, learning how to manage our negativity and inner critics, and reclaiming our power.  That is monumental behavior change.  Take it easy.  Journaling is about thinking with your heart and soul.  Our overanalytical head has been in change for so long she’s afraid of losing control.  My recommendation is to ask your journal a question and then free-write fast until you feel – my favorite 4 letter F word – like stopping.

  1. What do you think is the biggest roadblock for those who want to make journaling a daily habit and fail to do so?

We are our biggest roadblock.  We are experienced in self-sabotage and in having an unhealthy relationship with ourselves.  Fear has controlled us since forever, and it is scary and a lot of hard work to explore our inner world.  Plus, we were raised to think that alone time is so selfish.  It is a totally new experience to work through the pain and heal our wounds.

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  1. Do you prefer to handwrite or type your journal entries?  Which would you recommend to those new to journaling?

Pen to paper every day is the only way to get all the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health benefits that are available to you from journaling.  Jumping right in and freewriting is a good start.  Make sure you breathe and understand that your head (ego, inner critic, other voices…) will go crazy.  Writing fast will show them you are in charge.

  1. Why do you think journaling has such a profound effect on our lives and how we perceive ourselves?

 I don’t know.  I can only tell you that I have monumentally healed, grown and transformed myself thanks to journaling.  I live a compassionate (!) unconditional love-in with myself, and it grows every day.  In my first book, Journaling Power: How to Create the Happy, Healthy Life You Want to Live, I have results from scientific studies that are researching and monitoring this magical, mysterious self-healing process.

  1. Aside from journaling, how else do you think writing can help us lead better lives?

Writing is creative self-expression, and we have so much inside of us that we’ve been stuffing down for so long.  Writing is giving ourselves permission to be the truly talented (wild and crazy) person we are and share our brilliance with the world.

  1. What do you think we as writers can learn from our journaling patterns (i.e. the topics we keep coming back to time and time again)?

Besides the therapeutic value journaling has, it gives us great ideas for poetry, essays, characters for fiction writing.

  1. Aside from journaling, what advice would you give readers eager to live their best lives?

Carve out “ME” (self-care) time every day where you can just be with yourself.  We’re great doers and care takers and fixers and…. What we need to do is put ourselves first and work on reconnecting and staying connected to our true self every day.

Mari, thank you for sharing such great advice and insight with my readers!  Best of luck with the rest of your blog tour.

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Book Review: Heal Yourself with Journaling Power by Mari L. McCarthy

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In Mari L. McCarthy’s latest book Heal Yourself with Journaling Power, she outlines the many personal benefits of starting or continuing to journal.  Heal Yourself with Journaling Power offers writers and non-writers a concise overview of how journaling can be used to help resolve all kinds of personal issues through daily journaling.  The book itself serves as a roadmap and call to action for anyone desiring change or left wanting more out of life.  I expect nothing less from the author/creator behind CreateWriteNow.

Mari begins by describing the true power behind journaling:  daily habit.  It did not surprise me that she begins by mentioning morning pages.  The same concept fuels one of my favorite websites:  750words.  Deceptively simple, the humble act of writing daily drives later change.  Once journaling becomes a daily habit, the real work begins.  However, all true healing through journaling hinges on writing consistently.

In the book, Mari provides readers with an outline on how to use this power to heal their own lives.  She includes different aspects of her personal story and anecdotes of others who have had similar experiences to drive her points home.  In addition, she provides readers with journal prompts in each chapter.  As a result, it can easily be viewed as a textbook by anyone wanting to use journaling to fundamentally change his or her life.  Part memoir, part writing manual, and part self-help book, I would recommend Heal Yourself with Journaling Power to anyone remotely interested in self-improvement, journaling, or writing generally.

In fact, a few simple tools will put anyone on the path to healing through journaling.  Personally, I would recommend using 750words or another online journal to get started journaling daily.  Add in the community and resources over at CreateWriteNow along with a copy of Heal Yourself with Journaling Power to keep motivated and moving forward.  I don’t see the need for much else when it comes to journaling, although different prompts are always fun and often provide insight that moves the process along.

As a writer, I found myself largely agreeing with Mari throughout the book.  While I haven’t experienced some of the more dramatic physical changes she attributes to journaling, I have journaled consistently enough during various stages of my life to attest to its power.  I particularly agree with Mari that journaling provides a clarity that is difficult to find anywhere else.  The clarity that comes from journaling consistently can help writers overcome a myriad of obstacles that may be in their way, no matter what they might be.

While I would recommend Heal Yourself with Journaling Power to any writer, non-writers may benefit from it message to a greater degree.  The techniques outlined in the book can be used by anyone to help identify roadblocks and move forward on any goal, dream, or ambition.  Using the journaling process to help organize one’s thoughts and formulate a plan of action may not be obvious to non-writers.  The power of journaling needs to be experienced to fully understand just how lifechanging it can be.

Stay tuned!  Next week I will be interviewing Mari L. McCarthy.

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About the Author, Mari L. McCarthy

Mari L. McCarthy is the Self-Transformation Guide and Founder/Chief Inspiration Officer of CreateWriteNow.com. She is also author of the international-bestselling, award-winning book Journaling Power: How to Create the Happy, Healthy Life You Want to Live.

Mari began journaling to relieve the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis (MS) over 20 years ago. Through journaling, Mari was able to ditch her prescription drugs and mitigate most of her MS symptoms. Now she teaches people throughout the world how to heal, grow, and transform their lives through the holistic power of therapeutic journaling.

She lives in a gorgeous beachfront home in Boston, where she has the freedom, flexibility, and physical ability to indulge in all her passions, which include singing and recording her own albums.

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Book Review: “Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg

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It isn’t every day that I can say a book fundamentally changed the way I view writing and how I write.  Such is the case with Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Somehow, I thought I read the book nearly a decade ago.  No. No I didn’t. That became clear when I picked it up recently.  I wish I read it ten years ago! Better late than never, I suppose.

I finished the book several weeks ago at this point, but I couldn’t quite capture the impression it left.  I took my time reading her essays and highlighted (in my Kindle version) what I perceived to be the best writing advice contained in each essay.  That is one feature I love about this book. Her advice is all nice and neatly wrapped up in small essays that make you feel as if you know her. So, how did it change the way I write?

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Well, here are a few changes that I made as a result of her book:

  1.  I finally got journaling right.  Finally.

I may have mentioned this before, but I have had a love/hate relationship with journaling for as long as I can remember.  I love the idea of journaling every day. Better yet is starting a new journal. Add online journals into the mix, and the entire thing is one huge mess.  I collect journals. I hate actually writing in the more beautiful ones at times. Beautiful journals call for beautiful words. No one gets it right the first time.  After a short period of time, I always wanted to start all over again. Repeat.

So, what changed?  Well, I started acknowledging there is a need to get the junk out of the way first.  That is where 750words comes in. By writing daily in this online journal daily – no frills, just the junk that comes to mind – I tend to become much more focused when I write a blog post or in one of my beautiful traditional journals.  I limit what I write in a traditional journal to one short page a day. It is much more focused.

Natalie refers to the “junk” as monkey mind, and that concept deserves its own blog post. The idea is that we all tend to think in circles. We have to write through our wandering thoughts before we can write something meaningful.  She discusses this concept throughout several of her essays.

  1.  Find What Works for You.

This seems so cliche, but she suggests experimenting to find what processes work for you.  No judgement regarding pen versus typing, morning versus evening, and so on. Writers need to write when and where they can.  She provides several wonderful examples of this and how the local atmosphere can seep into writing.

What really made the difference for me was her discussion of what works for her – writing in cheap one subject notebooks until she fills them up.  She goes on to say that the tools truly do not matter. While I knew that wouldn’t work for me, it did get me thinking. It finally hit me. A three-ring binder I could decorate with my favorite writing quotes and fill with tab dividers and loose-leaf notebook paper would work well.  I could plan, write, and revise blog posts without having to worry about destroying bound notebooks. A binder would allow me to reorganize different pieces as I see fit. So far, I love it. I also included some of my favorite blog posts, lists of topics, and writing prompts – anything to keep me writing.

  1.  Don’t Beat Yourself Up.

I would love to write full-time.  The reality is that I substitute teach, spend summers working in the family business, and so much more.  I am trying hard to find time to write everyday, but every once in a while, I don’t. I am learning to just pick up the next day.  I don’t need to stress about it. It is a little thing, but it helps. Creating a simple writing routine helped simplify everything.

I love the fact that she embraces the fact that everyone writes garbage.  We have to work through the garbage to get to the good stuff. Authentic details are everywhere.  Even when not writing, we are still hard at work collecting details, situations, characters, stories, ideas, and so much more.  In fact, that is one reason why I started blogging: I wanted to experiment with and collect different story ideas – to think out loud.

  1.  Write Everywhere and Anywhere.

Write.  Write. Write.  Writers spend so much time avoiding writing.  Plotting, planning, organizing, and even cleaning are all brilliant distractions from the actual writing itself. This is one reason why I head somewhere else when I actually want to get something done.  I can always find something to distract me when I am at home. Natalie goes so far as to offer tips on how to effectively use cafes and coffee shops as places to write. My dream is to have a wonderful coffee shop near my house.  It won’t happen any time soon, but a girl can dream.

Conclusions

Writing Down the Bones may mean different things to different writers, but I would recommend it to anyone who loves to write.  I think there is something in there for everyone. It is a book I will come back to time and time again. Writing Down the Bones already fundamentally changed the way I write.

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Projects Old and New

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School

Over the last several weeks and months, I have finally recognized how important writing and reading is to my quality of life and my sheer happiness.  No joke.  If I have a writing project, I am happy.  As a student, I loved writing assignments.  Even if I didn’t love the subject, the book, or whatever it may be, I could always count on myself to do well. 

Some of my earliest and best memories of elementary school are of creating “stories.”  As I learned to write, my “stories” became less picture/drawing based and included more writing.  I love the fact that writing plays such a prominent role in my earliest educational memories.  By the way, I still can’t draw.

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What I’ve come to realize over the last week or so is that I didn’t value my early writing much. When I say early writing, I am not talking about childhood or even adolescent writing.  Those journals are safely tucked away never to see the light of day.  No, I am talking about the writing I did from 2005-2012.  During that time frame, I published dozens of throw-away articles for a now-defunct website called Associated Content.  As a writer for Associated Content, I wrote articles on all kinds of topics – reviews, how-to, and more – for a small upfront payment and then residuals.  Page views mattered!  After a couple of years, the site sold out to Yahoo!, which eventually shut it down.  Even though I had ample warning and could have saved my hundreds of articles, I didn’t.  I didn’t care enough.  The content just didn’t interest me enough.

While I don’t regret not putting in the time and effort to save my work with Associated Content, I do regret not saving my JamsBio work.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have much notice.  JamsBio, a now defunct online magazine, paid writers to discuss their memories as it related to music.  I only wrote ten blog posts, but it was the most fun I ever had “working.”  Even though I wish I had those articles, the ideas planted by writing those pieces live on.  I will eventually write something similar here.

The reason why all of this came to mind lately is due to different projects I am currently working on.  I just wrote my first piece for the Macbeth Post and had my first podcast published on Spartans Helping Spartans.  In fact, I am in the middle of writing a series of posts on study abroad for Spartans Helping Spartans as we speak. All wonderful stuff that I will share here.  

That’s just it.  I need to share some of my other work here.  There is an infamous piece I wrote on the Witchy Wolves of the Omer Plains for Michigan’s Otherside.  It is probably the earliest writing I did online or close to it.  I’ve toyed with the idea of a rewrite, but people keep finding it and sharing on Facebook.  Then there are a handful of articles I’ve written for the Huron Shores Genealogical Society Genogram. I’ve long meant to share them here permanently.  I just haven’t taken the time to do it yet.

As writers, we need to take care of our work and not let it become lost to time.  I wish were better at taking care of my own work. On a fun note, I came across an old online journal dating back to 2003.  Interesting doesn’t begin to describe it.  It brought back memories long since forgotten.  It is time for me to take better care of my own work.

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Why I Write

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Why do I write?  There are many reasons, but the best one I can think of is for my own peace of mind.  Over the last month or so, I have finally started writing daily – just for myself.  It grounds me in a way I can’t fully explain.

In addition to journaling daily, I also started using 750 words again.  There are rumors that Margaret Atwood mentioned 750 words in her masterclass on creative writing.  Personally, I love it.  I joined 750 words approximately two years ago, and I am finally starting to use it daily.  I use it to spill everything out onto the page, nothing more.  I let my mind wander and go from topic to topic.

Getting the garbage out of the way helps.  It doesn’t matter if I write in my traditional journal before or after I write my 750 words entry for the day.  I am much more focused.  When I sit down to write a blog post, I am not nearly as distracted by random thoughts.

Journaling, I only write approximately a page a day.  It isn’t 750 words, but I usually have something to say that is focused on my inner life or events going on that grab my attention.  I finally found a type and size of journal that works for me.

There is a difference writing on a laptop versus writing pen on paper.  I do both daily, no matter what type of writing.  For example, I may write a blog post during lunch or conference hour.  I then type, edit, and then post it when I get home.  Allowing myself some flexibility really helped.  I don’t beat myself up if I don’t write in 750 words or my journal every day.  I am beginning to feel “off” if don’t write at least something each day.

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It comes down to finding what worked for me.  I am in the middle of reading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.  I love it – and I don’t want to rush it.  So far, I tend to agree with her.  There is a need to process whatever is on one’s mind before writing something for public consumption.  It doesn’t have to be done that way, but it tends to make the entire process easier.  Writing Down the Bones is a collection of essays on writing, and my favorite so far discusses the tools of the trade.  She talks about how we get all too caught up in fancy journals (so guilty, just ask my ex!) and being afraid of writing garbage in something so beautiful.  She makes the case for using cheap one-subject notebooks and just filling them.

This gave me the idea of decorating a binder and filling it with loose-leaf notebook paper.  It works like a charm!  If I completely screw up, I just start over.  I have something with a good aesthetic, but I am not worried about permanently wrecking a notebook.  For me, it is the best of all worlds, and this simple change made me much more productive.  Natalie stresses this principal throughout Writing Down the Bones:  Find what works for you.  I couldn’t agree more.  With my notebook, journal, laptop, Chromebook, and Android phone, I am set.  That isn’t to mention Google Docs, Google Drive, and 750 words.  I never have an excuse not to write or read.  More on Writing Down the Bones to come.

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Tools for Writers: A Few of My Favorite Things

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Here it is: A few of my favorite writing tools, along with a brief explanation as to how and why I use them.

Mid-Michigan Writers – I am proud to belong to one of the oldest writing groups in Michigan. If you are a writer without a writing group to help you polish your work, I am truly sorry. I’ve learned so much in the last few years I’ve been a member. One of the highlights for me is the annual Gateway to Writing Workshop held in my hometown every September. The friendships and critique process I’ve taken away from this group are invaluable. Once you become a member, dues are $15 annually.

Scrivener – Where do I even begin? This is the writing program I’ve been looking for from the very beginning. It is truly a digital studio for writers. There are so many features in this program, which is designed to be used by any and all writers, that the entire tutorial takes hours to go through. The nice part about the design is that the features you don’t use are not obtrusive, and yet, they are there when you need them. I heard the hype for years before I decided to see what all the fuss is about. I am sorry that I waited so long. It truly is designed by writers for writers. I will never be without it again. You can purchase Scrivener here. There is a one-time cost of $40.

750 Words – I just recently heard about this website and started using it. So far, I love it. The point is to empty your mind of nagging thoughts by just typing them out. It is all about reaching 750 words. There are no requirements, and it is private. The fun part of it all – and why I am considering joining after my free trial – is the analytics provided after you have written your entry for the day. Not only does it show you frequently used words, it tries to interpret your mood as you write and provide you a rating (similar to the movie rating system) for your writing. It is pretty fun, even if meaningless. Membership is $5 per month. Check out the website here to see what else is included for $5. There are many free online journals out there, but none are quite as fun and motivational as this site. You also get a true sense of community. Just getting it down works.

Evernote – I’ve known about Evernote for years, but it always seemed a little too fussy for me. Well, I’ve found it to be useful for jotting down writing ideas, keeping tracks of various lists, and more. There are many features at the basic (free) level of membership. It appears to sync well between PC and Android. I use it for personal notes as well, and I am considering using it to replace ColorNote completely. I tried to use Red Notebook for the same purpose, but Evernote is much better for making lists and taking notes. Red Notebook has better uses.

Red Notebook – If you are looking for a decent digital journal that isn’t online, this is it. You can download it for free (or a donation) here. I’ve used both Digital Expressions and Live Journal in the past. As much as I liked them both, Red Notebook offers a basic digital journal offline. There is no privacy setting to set. The possibility of accidentally sharing a post you did not wish to share is no longer an issue. It is simply a digital journal. Nothing more, nothing less. That said, it has quite a few features for a basic digital journal.

That is pretty much it. It has taken me years to figure out what works best for me, but I finally think I am there – at least until the next best thing comes along.

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