Working On Me

This idea is inspired by an exchange in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Total Recall" (which started life as a much better short story by Phillip K Dick called "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale".) In the film, our hero, Douglas Quaid, visits the HQ of a company called Rekall Inc. At Rekall, they offer a service which implants false memories of a holiday. Rather than the expense and inconvenience of actually going to a place, you can simply remember the experience.

Doug meets Bob McClane there and explains he wants to have memories of a holiday on Mars implanted. Bob outlines a new optional extra:

Bob McClane: What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken?

Douglas Quaid: I give up.

Bob McClane: You! You're the same. No matter where you go, there you are. It's always the same old you. Let me suggest that you take a vacation from yourself. I know it sounds wild. It is the latest thing in travel. We call it the Ego Trip.

Doug decides to be a secret agent on his holiday, and the film then gets rather weird. But the point is this: you can use a similar trick in your journal. You can write in the persona of a secret agent, or a visiting alien, or a TV reporter, or whatever your imagination can conceive.

When writing, think about what your persona would notice or find interesting, and write about that. Set yourself the task of staying in this persona in your journal for a week or two and just see what emerges. You will undoubtedly write about things that would ordinarily never have made it to your journal, and at the end of the 'Ego Trip' you can evaluate the exercise and decide what you'd like to keep writing about even after you drop the persona.