The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life

by Suleika Jaouad

Even now, a writing prompt on its own can feel like homework. For example, if I’m told, “Write about a time you had a change of heart,” my mind goes blank. The poet Craig Morgan Teicher described this kind of prompt as the equivalent of sticking your finger in a goldfish pond: All the goldfish scatter to dark corners. But reading someone else’s words before I write always stirs something new in me. It’s such a natural way in to keeping a journal.

The physical, tactile nature of journaling by hand is important to me. I love the interaction between paper and palm, how the pen glides across the page, how the letters emerge as images—swooping up, looping back, charging forward. “There is a state of mind which is not accessible by thinking,” writes Lynda Barry in her creative workbook and graphic memoir, What It Is. “It seems to require a participation with something, something physical we move, like a pen, like a pencil, something which is in motion—ordinary motion, like writing the alphabet.” Virginia Woolf also extols the joy of writing by hand; after spending many months revising a manuscript on her typewriter, she returned to pen and paper, and in her journal, she wrote: “How I should like…to write a sentence again! How delightful to feel it form and curve under my fingers.”

But writing is how I translate my life to myself. It’s my sense-maker. So in the middle of it all, I have embraced a writing life of Ten Images. That’s it, just ten. I think of ten moments, mental pictures, scenes, objects that pop up when I recall the last twenty-four hours, and then I write them down. They range from the mundane to the exceptional—it doesn’t matter.

But among the people who matter most to us, why do we relegate such a fruitful question—How are you?—to shallow small talk? And what would happen if we didn’t? In my household, which now includes a blended family of four children and a second husband, the only f-word is “fine.” When I ask how you are, or how your day was, you can say anything…except fine. And if you ask me, I’ll trust you with the truth.

The problem, it turned out, was not alcohol—it was that I couldn’t be present for my pain. And I literally mean it when I say I couldn’t. I had no skills or tools to stay with myself, and it’s taken ten years to build that inner safety.

I believe that love is our default setting. I believe that simple affection and a stance of unguarded self-friendliness is the natural state of a human being toward herself: