Keeping a journal is essential for remembering outdoor experience, but also for processing what happened. It is a vehicle for meditating on what experience means. Veteran outdoor writers also keep journals: Stephen Trimble in his introduction to Words from the Land, writes that natural history writers work in the field and then work at their computer. Without a journal, a writer soon loses the details and impressions of the outdoor experience.
However, novice writers may not know how to use a journal without practice. They may think that they should record in a journal what they would record in a notebook in class—what the teacher wants them to remember and regurgitate on a test. If students have had trouble with school, they may even see a journal as another assignment to rebel against. The most common problem for beginners is that they simply don’t know how to get started. A good writing leader or coach can help students by listing what can go in a journal: meditations, natural description, writing notes, lists of principles, sketches and fragments, manifestoes, ramblings, testimonies, and exercises. Most of these come from the head and experience of the student, but exercises can be performed as a group to help beginning writers get into the habit of journaling.
The best exercises are not pre-fabricated but arise from the immediate experience of the group. For example if participants in the outdoor experience are facing some challenge—say rappelling from an arch—the prompt might be to ask students to detail their emotion concerning the activity. Prompts can deal with very specific situations and can positively affect group dynamics. Suppose some girls in the group have not been drinking enough water because they are concerned about the difficulty of urinating in the wilderness. It may be that boys in the group are unsympathetic to the girls’ plight. Depending on the group, a leader could give one of the following prompts: “write for ten minutes on the importance of hydration,” “describe your first experience peeing in the wild,” or even “suppose that you woke this morning as a member of the opposite gender; describe how your life would be different.” My point isn’t that these are perfect prompts, but that a canny writing coach can mine immediate experience for good prompts. It is good, though, to have ready to hand some exercises that generally work well in many different circumstances. For a list of those, go to the “Exercises” page in this web site.
Generally exercises work best when integrated with the experience and with discussion. A good format for a successful journal write is to 1) discuss immediate experience (the feeling after a good morning of hiking), 2) give the prompt (“What was one of your favorite parts of the hike?”), 3) get members of the group to talk briefly about the prompt (“I loved it when we helped each other across the stream,” or “I hated it when we had to wait all the time for the slow people”), 4) give them a specific amount of time to write (five or ten minutes for beginners, longer times for more advanced writers), 5) ask for volunteers to read out loud from the journals, and 6) encourage the group to comment on the entry. Not all of these steps must be used every time, but leaving out the discussion will eventually make writing only a private act performed by those who already love writing.
Reading out loud is essential. We are more practiced at talking than at writing, so the writing coach MUST privilege the written word. Many student will start talking about the experience; the coach stops them and asks them to read what they wrote. Insisting on this from the beginning will do more to make students eager to write and share than any other technique. It may be that no one volunteers. Waiting in silence, patiently letting the silence stretch out, is one option. Calling on a specific participant to read is another. But students need to be free to at any time say, “No, I’d rather not read.” Without this freedom, participants will simply never write about anything private. Another tactic to get participation is for the leader to read what she wrote. This breaks down the illusion that the leader is better at writing than the participants.
Encouraging comments on the journal entry that was read out loud is an important final step. The leader can ask: “What do you think about Mary’s suggestion?” “What did you learn about Mary from what she wrote?” “What is your response to Mary’s emotion as she read?” “What did you like about what Mary read?” “What are you curious to know about Mary after hearing what she read?” In this kind of discussion we are absolutely not interested in correcting grammar or suggesting other kinds of writing or personal improvement.
Using these principles can transform a group’s outdoor experience. A good journal experience can facilitate individual growth, affect group dynamics and cohesiveness, gather information for later personal essays or narratives, and be an essential part of group assessment. For more information on journaling look at the “Resources” page of this web site.