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event in the journal. But do this only— only —moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions—signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity—which are therefore the best ways to express emotions. Such a journal entry will read like a passage in a novel, like the most intense moment-to-moment scene in a novel. And that's all that will be there. Fully developed in the moment.
    If you write in your journal every day in this way, and if you spend forty-five minutes or an hour at it, it will be so intensive that you might not get through the whole incident.
    That's fine. Just break it off, don't try to summarize or bring it to the end. Next day you might pick it up again. Or not. Go for some other piece of another emotional event. And don't rely so heavily on the sense reactions within your body that when you read this fifteen years from now all you get is "palpitating heart" and "sweating palms" and "blurry vision," which could be reactions to anything. This should be rendered as if it were a scene, with all the external and internal events.
    After you've got a couple of weeks' worth of these entries, the entry of two weeks ago will have had a chance to cool off. From then on, each day's journaling should have two parts to it. First, write a new entry. Then, when you've finished, go back and read the journal entry of two weeks ago, and with a marker pen slash through all the examples of abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation you see in the text, leaving only moment-to-moment sense-based events and impressions. No matter how much you intended to write "in the moment," I promise you those old habits will have come back, but the hope is that, over the course of time, the red marks will diminish.
    Even if you're doing a sense-based journal, you're going to have serious trouble between your creative projects. This is when you'll understand why the need to write every day runs so deep. When I've finished a work, and some time passes, and I'm working up to something new, I feel that I am utterly wasting my life. I do trivial, ghastly, quotidian stuff; I hate myself; I complain about myself to my wife, and that hatred daily increases. Finally she says to me, "Honey, it's OK, you've now reached total self-loathing; you're about to start writing." She's always right. Soon thereafter, the door opens up to my unconscious, to my new work, and I leap in. And then I write every day and I am scared every day and I am happy every day.
    A word about writer's block here. I think writer's block probably suggests that you have an artist's instinct. Bad writers never get blocked. Writers who write from their heads and are comfortable doing that—they always have some garbage to put down. 1 talked last week about the flow of metathink-ing, metaspeaking your mind. That stuffs always there and it's easy to put it on the page. I think most writers who get blocked do so because some important part of them knows that they've got to get to the unconscious. But they're not getting there; they're thinking too much, so there's nothing there. Except it's not quite nothing—you sit there thinking, fussing, and worrying: "Gee, I'm not writing," "I've got to write now and I'm not writing," "Oh my God, I'm not writing," "If I want to be a writer I've got to write and I'm not writing." I think writer's block of that sort is the most common kind among writers who have any talent.
    Writer's block is very similar to insomnia. What happens in insomnia? You lie down, intending to go into your dream-space, literally; into the depths of your unconscious, where you totally lose touch with the outer world. That's what sleep is. But you can't do it. Why? Because you can't turn your mind off. You lie there thinking about