TheWritersBag.com

A woman who recently lost her husband in a car accident takes pen in hand and begins writing. She writes for hours without stopping. She writes the following day and the day after that. She screams her pain and outrage onto the paper. She transubstantiates her tears into ink and weeps them onto page after page of her journal. Soon the journal becomes a refuge where she is visited by increasingly long and deep moments of peace.

A 16-year-old boy feels unloved by parents and friends. He finds a notebook and starts slashing his anger and loneliness onto its pages. He exhausts himself with the white-hot energy of his writing and from those moments of weariness he sees his life and relationships more clearly and begins to heal.

An executive at the top of his corporate game realizes he has spent his life fighting his way to the top of a pile of refuse. Deadened by the weight of what he feels is a misspent life, he carves an hour a day out of his schedule to record his thoughts and feelings into a journal. His words and phrases paint a canvas of deep disappointment and depression. But soon something more emerges in them – a road map to what could be a new and meaningful life.

Writing is therapy. Socrates claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Taking the time to honestly document your soul on paper is a powerful form of self-examination. It heals. It guides. It calms. It helps make life worth living.

I know this is true. Every day – sometimes several times a day – I take a pen and notebook and simply write. I always use a specific type of pen and a Moleskine notebook because they enhance the experience. I get in a quiet place to write, but if I can’t, I quiet my mind before I begin. This is not difficult. The act of writing forces me to slow down, concentrate, focus and center myself – whether I’m on a mountain peak or in an airport.

What do I write? Whatever I want to write. Whatever my soul tells me to write. I write thoughts and ideas. I jot down what I’ve done that day. I like that because it forces me to analyze how I spend myself and on what. Beyond that, I sometimes ask myself questions. Like what is bothering me and what I should do about it. Or what I’m grateful for. Or what I can do for the people I love. And so on.

Do I write in my journal every day? You bet. When I committed to making daily journal entries, I thought it would be difficult and require serious discipline to pull off. After doing it for a while it became as easy as breathing. I now feel I would suffocate if I didn’t do it. In short, I don’t do it because I should – I do it because I love doing it. It has become a non-negotiable part of my life.

There is power, healing and guidance in writing. Reflective writing has become my therapist and counselor of choice, and I know I am not alone in this. I believe we humans are enough alike that everyone can reap the same benefits.

Including you.

Your first job as a writer is to get the attention of your audience. Until you do that – until you make them read what you’ve written – you can’t achieve whatever objectives you’re trying to accomplish.

One of the best ways to capture readers’ interest is to make them so curious that they have to go on reading. The headline of one of the most successful print advertisements in history read something like, “Everyone Laughed When He Sat Down.” The ad was successful because the readers who saw the headline had to know why everyone laughed when the guy sat down. And they had to read the ad to get the answer.

You can use curiosity to pull your readers into your text in almost every kind of writing you do. Need to write an e-mail to tell employees to turn in their reimbursement reports by Friday? Try this subject line: “If you wait until Saturday, your money is ours.” That should grab more attention than, “Reimbursement reports due Friday.”

Magazine writers, fiction writers, poets, even journalists use this technique frequently. Give it a shot.

I was walking down a street in Istanbul near the Hagia Sophia when loudspeakers atop an army of high minarets began blaring the Muslim prayers. I stopped, pulled a small audio recorder out of my over-the-shoulder bag (a manly bag, of course), and began recording the exotic sounds of the prayers and street noises. I then took my camera out of the bag and shot a few photos to accompany the sounds. When the melodic prayers were finished, I pulled my pocket-sized journal and mini-pen out of my front pant pocket and jotted down some notes about that moment in time – what I had heard, seen and thought. I knew I would not only need these notes for the travel articles I would write about my trip to Turkey, but for my own memory bank.

Not long after returning from Turkey I was sitting in a meeting with the directors of a business who had hired me to write the text for their glossy company publication. On the boardroom table in front of me were my notebook, my audio recorder and a camera. As the company’s leaders gave me the information I would need to complete the project, I took notes in my notebook and kept my audio recorder running to make certain I wouldn’t miss anything. The camera came in handy later as we toured the manufacturing plant and I took photos of the various process I would have to write about.

For writers, information is critical. Whether you are writing an article, a business project, a book or something just for yourself, you need information. You do not want to be within 15 minutes of the deadline for a business brochure and realize you can’t remember the name of that revolutionary new manufacturing technique being used, and you don’t have anything about it in your notes, and the only person who has that information is on a fishing trip in the wilds of Alaska.

Nor do you want to have your writing come to a screeching halt because you can’t remember what the name of that big mosque you were walking by during afternoon prayers and you don’t want to dilute your article by referring to it as “some big mosque” rather than “the world-famous Hagia Sophia.”

The trick is to take good notes.

The second trick is to take more than just text notes when it can help: take audio and visual notes. When you take text, audio and visual notes, you’re covering your bases and you’ll be surprised how much fuller and more robust your information will be. And that, in turn, will give your writing an edge.

It’s about capturing information, and today we have wonderful tools to do that – more than ever before. What do I use? For a notebook, it’s the pocket-sized Moleskine notebook – a little gem that is so cool it has attracted a worldwide cult following. When I die, I want to be buried with a bunch of Moleskines … just in case.

For an audio recorder, I use the digital Olympus DS-2200. It’s small enough to slip in any pocket and captures voices and sounds with amazing clarity.

The camera I use is the Nikon D50 digital SLR with the Nikon 18-200mm lens. The D50 is certainly not the top of the Nikon line, but it produces wonderful picture quality and is smaller than the pro series cameras, making it lighter and easier to haul around. The lens is the most popular lens in Nikon’s history, because its focal range and quality make it the only lens most people will ever need. I’ve taken dozens of shots with this camera/lens combo that have been published with my travel articles. However, I’m looking for a smaller camera to use as a visual note-taker when I don’t have to turn in magazine-quality photos. I believe in traveling light, and I am, after all, a writer – not a photographer.

Obviously, you won’t want to take all these note-taking tools with you wherever you go. But I will confess that I do take my Moleskine with me virtually everywhere to capture thoughts, ideas and other mental scraps before they get away. The little black notebook is always either in my pocket, on my desk or on my nightstand when I’m in bed. Truth be told, it even accompanies me to the bathroom, because you never know when something brilliant will pop out come to mind.