I’ve always wanted to be one of those people who fill pages and pages of journals with intelligent drawings and pretty pictures. However, I am hampered in this desire by the unmistakable fact that I simply cannot draw. My people have never progressed beyond stick men and my animals all look like the children’s drawings IKEA turned into soft toys a few years ago. My brother got all the artistic talent in my family.
Anyway, I decided to give Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal a go. Smith is an author, illustrator and artist who created this ‘alternative journal’ to help people “engage with the creative process”. It’s full of suggestions that invite you to mess up or destroy the journal in various ways: tearing out pages, immersing it in water, rolling it down a hill. As someone who won’t even bend the spines of her books, the thought of all this made me shudder: but perhaps it would be liberating?
Short answer: no. Some of the prompts were ones I rather enjoyed. Generally these were the ones involving less destruction and more colour: painting a page with nail varnish or lipstick or some such.
Some of the prompts require you to tear pages out of the book. It seemed a bit wasteful to me, but I duly complied.
I cringed when requested to mark a page with dirt, especially when said dirt had to come from a dusty car. Standing on a pavement next to a random car, looking carefully to make sure no one was around before surreptitiously rubbing my book on the side, was possibly my most embarrassing moment of the project.
My very favourite was the one that asks you to fill a page with one word written over and over. I found this quite enjoyable, suggesting my heart really does belong to writing.
Well, I’ve completed the book, and I’m not too sure what to do with it now. It’s far too messy to put it in a drawer with my old diaries. I’ll probably just chuck it out, to be honest.
What have I learned from wrecking my journal? Mainly it’s reinforced that destruction really isn’t for me. I’m not an artist and I don’t want to be. Give me words any day.
If you think this book sounds brilliant, you’re probably right: lots of people love it. If not, you might be like me, and that’s also okay. Honest.