I have owned notebooks over the years—just for notes about
various fiction projects I’m working on and for random to-do lists, etc. I
haven’t kept one for a couple of years—since I’ve been working on a novel—and I
have not felt anything is missing. Of course, this could be different from you.
These days I tend to write into the page and assemble my notes and thoughts
there, deleting and adding as my work develops. Don’s daybook seems quite ominous
to me, like there’s a lot of time planning a project, scheduling writing times,
etc. without getting down to the hard work of actually writing a novel. I don’t
know. Maybe this helps Don. I don’t know who he is or if he got his novels
published or even written. But then, when I Google Don Murray, I see he wrote a
dozen books, won the Pulitzer Prize, etc. That he writes out of his notebook,
seems to fit his writing process. Writers I’ve talked to or in interviews seem
to have different processes and strategies in order to get the work done.
Didion’s essay about keeping a notebook is a beautiful
mediation on the purposes and psychologies of keeping a written record of notes,
thoughts, and observations. It elicited several questions in me: For a
nonfiction writer, what is it you want to remember? Impressions? Details? Is
the notebook utilitarian? Or expressive? Is about others or selves?
I’m still finding it hard getting back into notebook mode?
How about all of you? What do you think of the daybook? Or Didion’s ideas about
why she keeps one? Do her speculations resonate with you?
One of my big regrets is not writing in my journal when I spent three months in Italy a little over a year ago. I have thought about that a lot, and actually speculated about it a little in an article I wrote about my trip, and ascribed the motive to just wanting to get away from most things cognitive and trying to move more to just "being". In retrospect, I think it was a mistake and I can't really explain it. Perhaps it was just a place where I was in my life. Perhaps I was just being lazy or not thinking about writing at all when I was there. Chi lo sa? Who knows?
ReplyDeleteI've kept journals off and on for years, but just w/in the last few months have I started being more thoughtful about how they can help my writing - so they are becoming less the diary and more a writing and reflecting tool. So far it's made a positive difference, and I continue to think about how to do it more effectively. Murray's piece was instructive that way, gave me some different perspective and potential ways of doing it, and both his and the Didion articles were liberating, allowing me to think more creatively about what these can be used for. Very helpful.
The whole business of whether to keep a notebook, and if so, how it should be used is utterly fascinating. This semester I'm teaching an undergraduate class called "Field Writing" that is, perhaps more than anything, a course on note taking. Writing is such an idiosyncratic activity that I don't make prescriptions about journals, but I would say that at the very least, especially for those of us who don't have great memories, a notebook is a place to document and archive what you've seen or heard. This seems especially important for nonfiction writers, who are under some obligation to try to get the dialogue right, or note exactly what the sign said, and so on. As my previous post implies, my journal is so much more than that. Lately I've added manual typewriters to my process of note taking and drafting, and I love these because they're somewhere in between the messiness of my journal and the orderliness of the computer. What about the rest of you? Where do you stand on the notebook?
ReplyDeleteI wrote a bit about this subject (& Didion) on my personal blog a few weeks ago (http://findingmetanoia.blogspot.com/2015/01/once-thrown-you-will-arrive.html) (shameless self-promotion), and I've continued to journal SO MUCH lately. I have bits and pieces all over the place: Word documents, in Google Drive, in my hand-written journal, I even have found myself jotting things down on napkins or in the Memo app on my phone. For me, this writing helps me process stuff, allows me to save some of my random thoughts that seem important for whatever reason, and it creates a sort of organized chaos that inexplicably becomes useful as I'm drafting. What I've found is that the more I do it, and the more I let go of my own preconceived notions of what my journals and notes should *look* like, the easier it is to write. Now I just write, all the time, every day. Most of it is shit, but some of it is/will be good for something.
ReplyDeleteI keep two notebooks for fiction projects and other creative works. They're filled with all sorts of random lines. Any time I hear an interesting bit of dialog, I jot it down. A quirky thought enters my mind, it goes in the book. A unique way of phrasing something and I make sure to record it. Initially, I intended the books to be neat and tidy. They're neither. They're a complete mess. In the sixth grade I won the "Best Penmanship Award" but you would never guess that flipping through the pages of each book.
ReplyDeleteSome of the notes in these books are helpful and others aren't so much. The more helpful notes include a context or purpose for what I was recording, whereas other, less helpful notes have neither and are often so poorly written or lacking any semblance of sane thinking that I often wonder why it was included in the book in the first place. But I'm no respecter of thoughts that go into the notebooks. I put them there so I stop thinking about them, so they're out of my mind. Because once they're out of my mind, I can fill my head with other thoughts and ideas and plot points and stories. And hopefully, one day, they will find their way into better books.
Joan Didion is my spirit animal. Could she be any more eloquent, magnetic, fascinating? I rave. I read this essay last year when I'd first read Slouching Toward Bethlehem and it felt as if someone had cracked an ancient code in my life. I felt this way too, when I learned that for years I'd been writing creative nonfiction, that it was even a thing. I have been keeping a notebook since junior high. It has morphed into a variety of things over the years, but it has always been separate, other than everything else. I gave up keeping a diary in my early twenties for much of the same reason everyone speaks of– relaying how I made lunch or who I was sleeping with and when was both tiresome and pointless. But this Didion essay, it makes sense of the notebook in a way I could never put my finger on before, because the fragments of life collected there always still read like fragments. But this idea, of the getting into the mode of who you were at this time, that this is the treasure it leads to is both a relief and and a revelation. The essay written by Don, was new for me. And it had a similar mind blowing affect but for very different reasons be he seemed to have ways or methods, that I will try, to make sense of the madness that is a notebook. I also love his word and reasoning for calling it a daybook. I am particularly fond of the idea of making key words into a the margins to signal a change of course or topic. Though most of what I have are such brief observations, perhaps it could turn my prattle into useful work. I have nothing very insightful to add onto their ideas or comments on writing a notebook because their conversation on the topic just that. I have been discussing this habit with my fiction class I teach, suggesting they do this. I think I will give them these essays and see what they think on the subject as well. best. erin.
ReplyDeleteEvery morning my father would write out his day on the back side of a Valu-pak coupon. Everything made the list: shower, breakfast, Coumadin, brush teeth…
ReplyDeleteI would tell him he would starve if it wasn’t for that list. He would smile. I wouldn’t tease him now even if I could. I have come to appreciate first-hand how temperamental thoughts and ideas can be.
I feel for Virginia Woolf as she hurried across the lawns of Oxford, rushing to get her airy idea down on paper, only to forever lose its grasp upon be scolded by the Beadle for straying from the path designated for women. Thoughts are fragile, and they have a short shelf-life.
I’ve been keeping an idea or random thoughts notebook for about four years now. When I was younger I kept a diary, but like Didion, it didn’t take long for me to realize how boring it was. I now just use an old school notebook of my son’s. White eraser scars are the only remains of the word MATH that was once scribbled across the front. Initially I used it because I couldn’t bare to waste the pristine paper it still held. (I guess my son feels the same way about math as I do about diaries.) I continue to use it because it is comfortable and it doesn’t pressure me.
If someone were to pick up and read my notebook, they would probably think it leans on the side of schizophrenic. It’s running and random—a jumble of bits and pieces of thoughts, memories, descriptions, and words that remain just this side of useful. Some are scribbled on receipts, others on lips of envelopes. Didion’s description of “bits of the mind’s string too short to use” is fitting. Most of my scribbles are just phrases or images that catch my mind or touch me for good or bad. I write them down with the promise that I’ll return to them someday when I have the time to dwell on them and figure out their attraction.
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