Holding on to the Momentum

Left: Day 20 entry from my 2014 fake journal. Large acrylic markers on 22 x 30 inch paper (toes present at the bottom of the image for scale reference). My character didn't feel inclined to write anything on this day.

One of the great gifts an intensive, daily project can impart to your creative life is momentum.

As we are now at the two-thirds point of International Fake Journal Month, with only 10 days remaining (if you haven't created your entry for today), it's time to think about post-project momentum.

During the next few days take time to select a new journal for your regular journaling habit (if you don't have one that is in process). Or select a new journal to create a new project within.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What has worked this month so far, and what hasn't worked? When have I been most likely to work on the project? What factors contribute to this?

Perhaps you've found that late evening work is easiest to maintain because that's when your family duties are completed. Or perhaps you've found that working in your journal first thing is the best way to start your day and ensure your participation in the project.

2. Look at your commitments for May. It may help you to mark them on a calendar: family, work projects and deadlines, special events that you'll hope to attend, etc.

With your calendar in front of you work out a strategy for maintaining your desired level of journaling time and write those commitments on your calendar if necessary. (It helps some people to make "dates" or "appointments" with their journals.)

3. Ask yourself what media you would like to work with in May. Do you want to perfect your colored pencil skills? Are your watercolors calling to you because you couldn't use them this month?

4. Is there a project you want to do with that medium? Perhaps you want to work on your watercolor skills and have a favorite "how-to" watercolor book that you want to work through. Set up a simple project where you read a chapter of the book each day and do an exercise or some sort of practice based on that book each day. Keep your subject matter simple and accessible. I recommend studies of fruits and vegetables. You always have them on hand; they can be set up quickly; they contain simple shapes that can be interestingly lit and composed; and you can apply most drawing, painting and color theory exercises to them. Do you think it will be boring to draw a couple fruits or vegetables every day for the next several weeks? Well it's up to your creative instincts and insights to find ways to delve into the subject and capture your own interest, while you work on your skills project.

5. Assess the amount of time the project you want to do in items 3 and 4 might take. I recommend that if you've been working for 30 minutes each day of IFJM that you not increase your daily time beyond 60 minutes a day.

6. How will this new time commitment fit into the calendar that you have prepared in item 2?

7. Ask yourself what types of emotional issues came up during IFJM. How do you expect to deal with them? Are you able to deal with them in conjunction with the project you've considered going on to? If not, is it more important to deal with those emotional issues before you jump into a skills-based project? If it is, then make a list of the issues that came up and make a schedule of how "ideally" you would like to cope with them—writing about an issue for one hour for two days is probably as much as you'll feel up to. Maybe just one hour on one day.

Realize you aren't going to solve these issues you're just going to sit with them for the time that you're assigning.

8. Redo your calendar to fit your "issues" project. Let's say you have 9 issues on your list—things like my inner critic is too loud when I work in color, when I try to draw realistically, etc. Assign one or two days to each "issue" when you'll spend 1 hour writing about and brainstorming ways you might fix it.

9. Mark your calendar May 1 through 12 let's say because you have 9 issues and you want to write 1 hour on some of them and 2 hours/2 days on others.

10. Mark May 12 as the start of your new project. This will either be your skills based project you decided upon in items 3 and 4, OR it will be an new project that has come up in your May 1 through 12 discussions with yourself.

11. Gather all the materials you need so that you can execute your plan on May 1. Gather any additional items needed for May 12. (You might as well combine as much of this as you can to save time, if it seems clear to you.)

Remember, gathering materials DOESN'T MEAN SPENDING MONEY! Gathering materials means you go to the library and pick up that book on color theory you wanted to work through, or it means that you pull out the paper you've been saving for a project, or you do research on the internet for subject matter that you want to read and respond to in your writing. (Put it all in one folder on your computer so you can find it all again, or put all the links in one document.) You might simply go through old magazines and gather materials for collage. Put things in 6 folders such as Women, Men, Animals, Things, Words, and Color. These will contain the materials you'll work with during your project—materials you already had. If you start gathering things before you are ready to start your project then you'll be able to jump right in on that project the first day—momentum retained!

Spending money and running about buying more art supplies is one of the major ways in which your inner critic can derail your efforts. Don't buy into the thoughts that there are perfect supplies out there, or the perfect time to use certain supplies. This is all a fog of perfectionism and scarcity.

Now if you've been paying attention you'll say, "wait a minute I'm actually doing several things on several days and I don't get a day off."

That's right—you'll be multitasking, which is one of the key ways to keep momentum going.

When you finish a large project it's not time to take a breath and stop. It's time to start another one. And keep that momentum going. Use the great gush of good feeling you have from finishing the previous project to propel you into the next.

A week or so into the new project it's time to take stock.

And you'll do that in the same way that you took stock at the end of IFJM—by looking at what worked and what didn't and planning, and well, by starting at number one on this list and working your way through again.

Momentum.

Keep it going, it's the best creative gift you can give yourself. Don't fritter away the creative habit building you've banked this past month.

You won't get tired or exhausted because your creativity will buoy you up. Your internal critic will however get pretty fed up with you because you aren't giving him a moment to shout out at you.

Fine, let him go play with someone else.

You've got creative things to do.

Another word about Issues…

I think we all need to do self-evaluations and look hard at what are our real strengths and weaknesses so that we can address them in a realistic way and improve. But I also believe we can wallow in emotions that are self-indulgent and non-productive.

That's why I always suggest people look for skills-based projects. What do you want to learn how to do or to improve upon your existing skills? If you look for projects like those and work hard at them the emotional issues you are concerned with will float up to the top and demand periodic attention in the natural course of things. Don't spend too much time running in circles, that's your inner critic trying to delay you again, telling you it's impossible to move forward if "everything isn't settled and right."

Nothing is ever going to be settled until the day you die. Somedays you'll settle an issue that may have bothered you from the age of 2; the next day you settle an issue that has bothered you since you were 35. Then you just "plod" along working and learning and mastering a skill and not setting any issues or any emotional import at all, until one day, perhaps a month later you realize that while you've been working hard at your creative task and plan another issue has sorted itself out on its own.

If you'd waited to start a creative project until you sorted everything out you've be poorer—both emotionally and in the skills you'd developed. Instead you're now in a totally different place with creative work under your belt—creative work that's getting better and better.

So don't wallow. It's so boring.

Narrowing Your Choices to Increase Your Fake Journal Success

Last week I wrote about expanding your choices in character development in order to increase your chances for success with your fake journal.

Today I want to write about the opposite (so much in fake journaling is about opposites). There are ways you can narrow your choices to increase your chance for success with your fake journal.

Narrowing Your Character Choices
The simplest way to keep your character choices down to a minimum and still have a great fake journal is to actually be an alternate self of yourself. So you will still be the same age, sex, etc., but you will be in a different job, or life situation, or have a different attitude (suddenly goth instead of little pony). You might also find yourself in an alternate world where things don't work the way they work in our world. This might be useful to you because you have questions about social and interpersonal relations which would benefit from such a close fit.

A next step away would be someone who isn't you, but has only one or two key differences. And so it goes down the long chain of choices.

Sometimes by keeping our creations close we can better examine what is close at hand and with only a slightly skewed sense of perspective we can nevertheless develop new insights.

Narrowing Your Media Choices
I have written about this a lot on this blog. If you have never kept a fake journal before or never worked with a project that requires you live inside the head of another character, then the tools and materials you use for this exploration might actually cause you to lose focus or fracture your attention.

If your character is complex and the issues facing that character are complex, perhaps working simply in pen and ink will be sufficient for your progress with that character. Or perhaps colored pencils gives you the little bit of color that you need as an artist to stay with the project. It's a balancing act that you need to consider before you start your project. Do you want to sit down every day and decide what media to use in addition to what your character is thinking and working on? Wouldn't it be easier to simply pick up a tool and let that character work? Which challenge do you prefer? Which challenge will you still welcome on day 28?

In 2009 my fake journal I worked with dip pen and watercolor. These are two items I routinely use, but I don't use dip pen daily and I don't use it out in the field much. If you look at my 2009 fake journal you can actually find a lot about the character that is not that distant from me—she loves birds, she studies and sketches birds, she loves to ride her bike, she doesn't play well with others (when those others are simply being stupid!), she is a fiercely loyal friend. We also both had to deal with the death of a friend.

In reality I am many things that this character is not—first, I don't live in a post-epidemic, post-apochalypic present. In 2009 the sky was still full of birds, Interstate 94 was still in good repair, and rule of law was for the most part in evidence. Also, I'm pretty gregarious and I do play well with others (especially when they aren't being simply stupid).

Electing to limit my media fit my fake journaling needs in a number of ways. As far as my character's situation went it was appropriate that she only have one medium to work in because she begins her journal by acknowledging that all her tools, supplies, and even her journal, have been lost in transit. She can't simply go to the art supply store for replacements; she borrows materials from others.

Sometimes there are contextual reasons a character does something or uses something. Discovering that and honoring that will help you understand the character and create a successful fake journal.

Next limiting my supplies allowed me to play more with her response to her world, not her materials. And it allowed me to play with a commercially bound journal with waterproof pages. (For me IFJM is always a chance to use commercially bound journals because I tend to bind 99 percent of the journals I use. The use of a commercially bound journal for IFJM forces me to deal with what I am given rather than the "ideal conditions" I typically create for myself.)

I also believe that working with one medium only during IFJM allows me to focus on that medium and explore new possibilities with it, at the same time I am focusing more directly on the character.

In my 2010 fake journal I put further limitations on my character: she couldn't talk, she had memory problems, she only had a rudimentary commercially bound notebook, a pencil, scissors, and some colored papers. What she did with those materials was dependent on how she was trying to communicate. She was only like me in that she was a communicator. I don't have the same constraints she had and it was very challenging for me to wear those conditions for the 30 to 60 minutes a day that I thought about and worked in that journal. I believe that the end result was not only new insight into myself, but a new attitude about pencils.

Since I routinely work in color in my regular journals and I kept a regular journal throughout IFJM 2010, the lack of having color media to work with was not difficult. It actually freed up my attention.

I would urge you to look at ways that you can free up your own attention so that you can get at what it is you want to accomplish with your fake journal. Make conscious choices now about how you are going to proceed. If things don't work out the way you had hoped, or you find yourself hitting a creative wall you can always give yourself permission to ease into something else. By making conscious choices now about your character and your materials you are focusing your intention for the project.

Expanding Your Choices to Increase Your Fake Journal Success

As you start thinking seriously about your character for IFJM (because April 1 is fast approaching) I want to encourage you to think about all the options and choices you have which might be fun to explore within the framework of a fake journal.

Consider working with a character who is a complete opposite to yourself. If you are young, create an aged character, and vice versa (actually vice versa for all these choices I'm suggesting). Urban/rural, poor/wealthy, employed/unemployed (and any of the variables within employment as to type and location). You can even change sex but keep in mind that particular characteristic will take some deep thought to come out convincing and consistent.

When you make a decision about all of the components of your character's life and specifics keep in mind that your character has to be literate or at least visually literate in order to keep a journal. And your character has to have enough free time to make the keeping of such a journal a possibility—or he/she has to have such a burning desire to write and draw that even the most daunting of circumstances doesn't stop him/her. (If we are privileged to work one job, to have our basic necessities met, to have some leisure time, we can learn a lot from the perspective of a character who is driven to create despite severe impediments.)

Your fake journal is also a great opportunity for letting your bad girl, girly girl, inner geek guy etc. come out.

Ask yourself what you want to examine in April. Ask what is topmost in your brain as you think of IFJM. Jot down the first things that come to mind. Chances are one of those immediate answers will provide a direction to hold your interest for the thirty days of journaling.

And if your internal critic decides to help you with your choices by telling you to wait, to not participate, or by saying this is all silly, you couldn't possibly journal as a woman working as a grounds keeper at a zoo etc., tell the i.c. to take a break (in what ever verbage you wish to use). Now is the time to get firm with the i.c. This is creative play, he's not needed. He can take a break. Tell it to him kindly, sarcastically, playfully, loudly, it doesn't matter. Just tell him. He'll get the message. Maybe not the first time or the second, but after thirty days he'll know where the new boundary lines are.

May all your choices bring you insights.

International Fake Journal Month Ends, and the Seventeenth Entry in Roz's 2010 Fake Journal

Left: the seventeenth entry in my 2010 fake journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement.

Today is the final day of 2010's celebration of International Fake Journal Month. I finished my 30th sketch and the accompanying text this morning. The glue is still drying on the colored paper insert. Sometime tonight or tomorrow I'll take a little video of the completed journal and post it so that you can "page through it."

I'll still post the remaining images chronologically if you want to stop by and see them in more detail. Also those pages will give me a visual for a few more wrap up posts I will need to make—winners of each of the contests, some post-fake-journal-month notes about what I learned, that sort of thing. Maybe even a couple suggestions that will get you off the fence for next year's celebration?

But right now my focus has shifted to sorting through the two contest folders and making sure I have everyone in the correct folders, meeting the contest rules, etc. I was so excited to have so many people join in this year. I hope that it was a not overly stressful endeavor—in fact I hope it was challenging and fun.

I also am grateful for those who chose to promote the event on their blogs. I am hopeful each year that the project will grow and people spreading the word are a constant help to that.

I was so pleased with the participation on every level this year that I have decided to make a commemorative button (you all know I love buttons) and send it out to all the participants and promoters. So if you were a promoter who included your address in your email and posted the button link to this blog on your blog by April 10 and kept it up until May 3 you'll be getting a thank-you button in the mail. If you participated by keeping your own fake journal and you posted your entries on your blog and sent me links to five such entries (pages or spreads) over the course of April you'll also be receiving a thank-you button in the mail.

The participation contest is over today but I'll do a last check of the promotion blogs on May 3 and have the drawing for the two prize books also on that date. Book winners will be posted here on May 4, but I'll hold on to the books until I also have the buttons to send out at the same time.

So that's the plan for the next few days as the organizational end of this celebration winds down. I'll thank you all at least a couple times over the next couple weeks I'm sure. However, today I would not only like to thank you all for making this an interesting and visually stimulating fake journal month, but I would also like to congratulate you!

I want to thank you all for rising up to the challenge to push yourselves creatively in April 2010. The fake journal that you hold in your hands is a testament to your creative commitment. It doesn't matter if you have a few entries or 30 or 70. It doesn't matter if you filled your book or still have lots of empty pages. What matters is that you followed your intention to stretch your creative muscle and put that intention into practice in your already full life. You carved out time for yourself. You experimented with new media. You tested new paper and books. You listened to that inner voice that says softly "I want to say something." You let that voice be heard over your internal critic.

For some of you it was excruciatingly difficult. For some of you it was easy. For others it was deceptively easy. All of you have something to think about now—your creative process. What works, what doesn't, where do you want to go, what do you want your regular journal to be, how do you want to give voice to your creativity?

There aren't easy answers to any of these questions, and the answers will change over the course of your life. But when you complete a creative project of this nature you give yourself an opportunity to examine these questions and move forward in your life and art with intention instead of impulse.

Don't get me wrong. Impulse is great. But if you give impulse a little guidance by doing a little reflection on your creative process you are able to clear out a lot of clutter and find a sustaining satisfaction in your work.

Don't worry if your friends and family look at your fake journal and mumble, "What's up with that?" (Or worse, tell you "that sucks.") You don't owe anyone else an explanation—only yourself.

Don't worry if your fake journal isn't at the artistic level you set for yourself or to which you normally work. That's your internal critic coming up behind you to whisper in your ear and cause you to doubt yourself and question your intention.

Every page of your fake journal might be complete shit. You might have just created 30 pages of the ugliest sketches and paintings and idiotic writing on the planet—it still doesn't make your internal critic right. It's a step, one that you took, despite the chattering of that internal critic. Future steps will be easier because you took one. (And this will continue to be true every day you take such a step.)

You hold in your hands a document which says "I allowed myself to create; I allowed myself to take risks." I think creative risks are like loose rocks on a hillside. We scramble over them, slipping at times, at other times finding sure footing, so that we can get to the top of the hill and have a better view.

I think having a better view (of ourselves, our creative process, our place in the world, the larger world, the people in our world) is what regular journaling is all about.

My wish for all of you who participated in this year's celebration of International Fake Journal Month is that you take what you learned about yourself and your process and use what you learned to make your regular journal practice stronger, deeper, more challenging, and integral in your life.

Thank you for sharing your journals with me, and for allowing me to share mine with you.

This is the point where if you were all here in Minneapolis we would go over to Cafe Latte and have a piece of cake and laugh and share our journals, and ooh, and ahh. One of us, I'm not saying who, would probably even cry a bit. There would be absolutely no hugging (I'm not a hugger)—OK some of you would hug on the way out to the cars. I wouldn't be annoyed at all. We would all drive home with insanely crazy smiles on our faces. But we would drive carefully because the satisfaction of successful play had grounded us all.

That's what successful play feels like. It has weight and substance. It doesn't evaporate. You have a tangible reminder on your bookshelf right now. Remember that this year as you observe your real life. You can choose to have that feeling every day.

Congratulations on pushing yourselves creatively.