In her creative notebook classes, Lynda Barry requires her students to keep what she calls a “daily diary.”
The exercise involves dividing a page into four quadrants and filling them out as follows:
The top left is for a list of things you did that day.
The top right is for a list of things you saw that day.
The bottom left is for something you heard that day.
The bottom right is for a quick doodle of something you saw that day.
As Barry says in her lovely book Syllabus, “What goes into your diary are things that you noticed when you became present — that is to say when the hamster wheel of thoughts and plans and worries stopped long enough for your to notice where you were and what was going on around you.”
When I do this exercise consistently, I’m surprised at how it hones my powers of noticing. Even now, when I go back through the entries even months later, I can “see” most of the things I wrote down.
I am recommitting to this practice, the practice of noticing and paying attention and then writing it down, today.
Textual Play 