Wreck This Journal
I made an order from Amazon the other day for a Christmas gift, and was $10 short of the $25 free “super saver” shipping. I’d seen a reference to Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith and it looked interesting. Since I had some Amazon credit built up anyway, I decided to order it to put me over the minimum. It arrived the other day and I have been having fun with it.
The book is self-destructive. It actively encourages the reader to destroy it over time. The purpose is to destroy the stigma of violating a book by writing it the margins, dog-ear marking favorite pages, etc. I’ve started going through it by flipping to a page that seems to meet my mood and doing whatever it says to do. After I get a few more of them done I’ll start to select some of my favorites and post photos of them.
Some of the activities include numbering the pages, breaking the spine, taking a shower with the book, and even tearing a page out, putting it through the washer, and putting it back in place. Some of the activities, such as taking a shower with the book, seem to be more destructive than others and I’ll probably save them for last. I think that one in particular could make it difficult to complete a lot of other tasks in the book.
I love writing, but one of my biggest problems is picking up a new notebook and getting the first few lines of text out. I believe it has something to do with a combination of not wanting to start out wrong, and having to correct it. Holding that brand new notebook just has a sense of perfection and I want to keep that perfection as I use it. I am hopeful that this journal will help me overcome that form of writer’s block and make it easier to write down some of the stories I want to write.