The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad: How Journaling Awakens Creativity and Helps Us Understand Ourselves
Can journaling help us understand our own thoughts better, awaken our creativity and bring us closer to parts of ourselves we don’t yet know? In The Book of Alchemy, Suleika Jaouad gathers personal stories and creative writing prompts that show creativity is not reserved for artists. The book that opened the third season of Materia BookClub is about writing as an everyday practice, about the power of words, and about everything we can discover once we finally put our thoughts on paper.
When we talk about writing, we still often connect it with talent, a profession, or at least the ambition that one day someone will read what we have written. I have been writing for years, and at the same time I am anxious, even a little ashamed, to say that I write. Because writers write, journalists write, people who have a story they want to tell, while the everyday act of writing down our own thoughts can easily seem like something that belongs to teenage diaries or to short-lived attempts at introducing yet another good habit.
In The Book of Alchemy, which opened the third season of our Materia Book Club, Suleika Jaouad approaches writing from an entirely different perspective. For her, it is not an end product, but a practice through which we try to understand our own lives, especially the parts that are still unclear, uncomfortable or unfinished.
Jaouad discovered the power of this kind of writing in circumstances in which very little was voluntary. After she was diagnosed with leukaemia at the age of 22, years of treatment, isolation and uncertainty turned writing from a creative interest into the way she tried to stay connected with herself and with a world that kept moving while her own life stood still. It was from this experience that the idea running through The Book of Alchemy was born: we cannot always choose what happens to us, but we can try to find the language through which we come to understand that experience.
We have written about journaling before, so with this book I was less interested in arguments about why we should all keep a journal than in the way Jaouad explains what actually happens when we begin to write down our thoughts regularly. Her comparison of the journal to a chrysalis stayed with me in particular: a space that holds the version of us that has not yet taken shape, one that is messy, contradictory and full of possibility. Today, when we have all grown used to editing almost everything we show others, from photographs and opinions to the way we speak about our own successes and failures, the journal remains one of the few places where the need to edit simply does not exist.
In a journal, we can write something we will no longer agree with tomorrow, be unfair, exaggerate, change our minds or circle around the same thing for ten pages. We set down the “raw material” of our lives on paper before we try to make a meaningful story out of it, and only with time do we begin to recognise patterns, questions that keep returning, and answers we may have been trying to get from others all along.
Words carry weight
What is certain is that our relationship with our own experience changes when we try to name it. A thought we have been turning over in our heads for days is not quite the same once we see it written on paper. Sometimes it becomes more serious, sometimes far more banal than it seemed, and sometimes only then do we realise what actually hurt us in a situation, or why we keep returning to it so persistently.
Words carry weight precisely because they force a certain precision on us. “I feel bad” can mean ten different things, just as “I’m not satisfied” says very little until we try to explain with what, why and for how long. Writing does not necessarily resolve what troubles us, but between the feeling and the sentence a small shift takes place: something that was undefined until then takes on a shape we can actually work with.
Written with such honesty and full of different energies and emotions, this book shapes creativity into something healing, something not reserved only for people who make art. Creativity is just like breath, it lives in each of us, and we should not be ashamed to try to awaken it, even in those parts of ourselves we may have forgotten exist.
The book brings together a large number of writers, artists, musicians, poets and other authors who offer their own writing prompts, but their aim is not to teach us how to write a good story. The questions and exercises serve more as a way of reaching parts of ourselves we might otherwise never approach. Some will suit us and some probably won’t, but that is exactly the point of a book like this: there is no need to follow it obediently from the first page to the last.
The positive pressure we draw from one another
The Book of Alchemy also opened the third season of Materia BookClub, which is why one of Jaouad’s sentences stayed with me in particular while I was reading:
“I love that kind of positive pressure, the way we draw energy from one another.”
When Materia BookClub first began, the idea was to bring together women who love reading and to create a space where we could talk about books a little longer and a little more deeply than we usually manage. After two seasons, it became fairly clear that the book is very often only a starting point. The conversation moves on to our own experiences, relationships, work, motherhood, fears, decisions we have made or are still putting off, and it often happens that someone says something that suddenly makes us see the book we have all read in an entirely different way.
I think this is exactly where some of the “positive pressure” Jaouad speaks of lies. Creativity and change do not necessarily happen in isolation, even when their beginning is as intimate as writing down our own thoughts. The people around us can draw out something we might not notice on our own, ask a question we have not asked ourselves, or offer a perspective that was not available to us. Sharing experiences with others often allows us to see our own more clearly.
Today we often underestimate the power of the energy of the people around us, and yet it is sometimes in meeting them that the greatest shifts happen. When we make room to react, listen, agree and disagree, change our minds or be vulnerable without needing to turn that vulnerability straight into some great life lesson, we often leave such conversations with something we did not have before. Sometimes it is a new idea, sometimes an entirely different view of something that has troubled us for a long time, and sometimes simply the realisation that an experience we considered ours alone is not so lonely after all.
The Book of Alchemy is not only about creativity; a large part of the book is really concerned with the conditions in which creativity arises: curiosity, openness, a willingness to stay for a while with what we do not yet understand, and the people who help us see our own thoughts from another angle.
When I took the book into my hands, I lingered for quite a while on the word alchemy. To me, it has always signified something slightly mystical, miraculous, a kind of inner transformation that is not entirely easy to explain. Reading these stories and creative prompts, I realised that perhaps this is exactly where the alchemy of the title lies: in the moment when we manage to turn something we carry inside us into words. We do not always need to know what we will do with them next. To begin with, we only need to write them down, and they often have a healing effect.
On everything we don’t yet understand
Creative work almost always involves a certain amount of uncertainty, because when we begin, we do not yet know where we will arrive. The same is true of many other things in life that we try to analyse thoroughly in advance, in order to remove any possibility of error.
Jaouad does not try to turn writing into yet another self-improvement practice to add to the list of things we do every morning to become more productive, calmer or more successful. For her, writing makes sense not because it will necessarily lead us to some better version of ourselves, but because it allows us to see the version that exists now, including everything in it that is not yet clear.
If a journal is the place where we can keep that messy, unfamiliar version of ourselves long enough to see what will grow from it, then perhaps its greatest value lies not in the answers we find there, but in everything we will dare to come closer to. Fears we cannot yet explain, thoughts that have not fully taken shape, and parts of ourselves we are only beginning to understand. We do not have to make a meaningful story out of everything right away, nor know where it will take us. Sometimes it is enough to start writing and leave enough room for what is unclear to slowly begin to fall into place.
