Welcome to Own Your Own Tale from Shannon Muir’s Infinite House of Books!
OWN YOUR OWN TALE focuses on crafting a person’s own unique stories through the art of journal writing. This installment offers reflection on the temptation to self-edit a journal.
The strength of writing journals is in capturing thoughts and feelings as they happen. Sometimes, it is easy not to be comfortable with the first things written from our minds and want to make it better later. However, this takes away from painting the fullest and pure sense of the original thoughts or feelings as experienced, and could potentially only serve one worse in the long run.
However, sometimes you can’t help but self-edit, such as if you do your entries electronically and it somehow doesn’t manage to save without you knowing it. In which case, reconstruct it as best you can to preserve what you can of the memories and feelings you wanted to convey. In a sense, you have self-edited just by no longer being as touch with the memories as you were before.
This is partially why I personally advocate handwritten journals, because sometimes electronic glitches happen. However, ultimately since it is your tale… choose what works for YOU.
Please remember that the contents of OWN YOUR OWN TALE are solely the opinions of administrator Shannon Muir and are intended for general advice and reflection. Each person’s unique writing situation is different.