Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. -William Wordsworth
Individual experience matters; all is not one, one is not all. You are important and worthy of introspection, of inspiration.
A good writer can elicit emotion from day to day life; can dramatize each and every second of eternity. What better scenes are there than from one's own life?
Instead of blocking out these scenes of yours and mine from our memories, from our consciousness, shriveling away from them in horror, let us drag them out, write them down, examine them.
Let us take a look back in time, into the journal of Samuel Pepys:
15 October 1663
Up; I bless God, being now in pretty good condition, but cannot come to make natural stools yet; and going to enjoy my wife this morning, I had a very great pain in the end of my yard when my yard was stiff, as if I strained some nerve or vein, which was great pain to me.
Poor Mr. Pepys couldn't enjoy his wife that day, but thanks to his keeping a journal, we may forever enjoy that day, and come, through reading him, to become him, and become each other—this is why we read and write. I want you to get yourself a journal. Right now. Then come back here for your exercise (which I promise will not be the documentation of evacuations, attempted or successful).
BEING
Depending on if you are a completionist or not, this journal exercise may take a while. Write down your earliest memories, the environment in which you grew up; think from the perspectives of your parents, write down the stages of your life. Come to where you are, where you want to be. Should this journal be found a thousand years from now, it should be an honest representation of you. This is to be the basis for your lifelong friend—your journal. I suggest making a special section just for dreams.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's advice to a beginning writer was that you only have your emotions to sell. Remember this.
Next in your journal, relive a childhood memory in which you experienced strong emotion: Joy, Trust, Fear, Surprise, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, Anticipation. Write this experience out in story form, and make your readers identify with your emotions, experiencing them just as you did.
I have lost too much by losing, or rather by not having acquired, the note-taking habit. It might be of great profit to me; and now that I am older, that I have more time, that the labour of writing is less onerous to me, and I can work more at my leisure, I ought to endeavor to keep, to a certain extent, a record of passing impressions, of all that comes, that goes, that I see, and feel, and observe. To catch and keep something of life—that's what I mean. -Henry James, Notebooks, Nov. 25, 1881
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. -Oscar Wilde
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