The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Process journal
A writer’s apprenticeship
From 1915 to 1965, the novelist Dawn Powell, author of A Time to Be Born (1942), kept forty-three volumes of diaries, an essential part of her process. Some entries describe the “what ifs” of her writing—what if I do this, what if I do that. Others record life events and accounts of her friendships.
Powell’s journals provide a detailed account of her writing life. They record her process. Plans for future projects (in May 1965, a possible essay rebutting Ernest Hemingway’s detractors). Drafts of potential scenes. Discussions about structure. Triumphs, disappointments, and accomplishments (in January 1942, pride in composing thirty-three hundred words of “The Auditions” in about four hours).
Powell took her journal when she ventured into New York society, the setting for her work. She recorded conversations wherever she went, descriptions of whatever she witnessed, sketches of people’s behavior, notes toward scenes she’d later elaborate.
One of the most important items in my writer’s toolbox is my process journal. I first learned about keeping one when I heard the novelist Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Milhone mysteries, speak at the University of South Carolina in 2001. Grafton keeps a separate journal for each novel; they’re about four times longer than the novel itself. She writes an entry each day before she begins work. She records her feelings—especially if she’s anxious—so they won’t interfere with her day’s work, a brief account of daily events, helpful dreams, ideas about the direction her work might take.
The journal stands as a record of the conversation she has with herself about the work in progress. She describes what’s troublesome in a scene, a puzzle she can’t resolve, lines she’s imagined but doesn’t know how to use, snippets of dialogue. Grafton maintains that every solution to her work’s challenges occurs, not when she’s composing, but in her writer’s journal. There, she steps back and reflects upon her work; there, she articulates problems and solves them.
Grafton keeps her process journal on her computer so she can transfer material into the draft of her manuscript when appropriate. She can also quickly search the journal to find all the entries about a given topic. (Searching for notes about a subject in a handwritten process journal is difficult.)
Periodically, Grafton prints her journal’s pages. She reviews them, looking for solutions to challenges and highlighting anything that’s useful. She finds she’s often “already solved the problem and it’s sitting right there.”
When she begins a new book Grafton uses her old journals to face her fear. She rereads them to remind herself she always feels inadequate at the start.
After I heard Grafton speak, I began keeping my process journal on my computer. This practice has helped my work immeasurably. I used it to plan the various voices in my memoir Crazy in the Kitchen about my family’s history in southern Italy. My greatest challenge was determining how to relate what I’d learned about the brutal living conditions in Puglia, the region in which my paternal grandparents lived. Some information came from family stories, much more from research. In the journal, after many false starts, I stumbled upon writing about what I didn’t know about my family’s history. This technique permitted me to write about what I’d learned; it underscored that my grandparents had hidden the abysmal facts about their lives.
I use my process journal to plan a project, list books I want to read, list subjects I want to write about, capture insights about my work in progress, discuss my relationship to my work (what’s working and what’s not, whether I need to make changes to my writing schedule, how I’m feeling about the work), sketch scenes, think about the work’s structure, puzzle through challenges I’m facing, and think through possible solutions. Like Grafton, I habitually reread my process journal and I reread it completely before I finish my work to ensure I’ve captured everything important.
Here are a few examples from my Crazy in the Kitchen process journal.
In a July 24, 2002, entry, I plan writing about my grandfather’s history. “I’ll … deal with my grandfather … working with his parents, or with his father, I know, on a farm … his coming to the US.… I’ll deal with the padrone system, how it was illegal, how it was a form of indentured servitude,… his cooking on the railroad, his scavenging on the railroad, and killing little animals, like squirrels, etc.”
In an August 20, 2002, entry, I think about my writing schedule. “And the upshot of taking the four days off is that I can’t figure out how to get back into the book.… I am at the stage of the book where I have to touch it every day; then I know automatically what I have to do.”
In a September 18, 2002, entry, I think about organization. “From having no bloody clue about what I was doing, I now have ideas galore, the result of following my instincts this morning and reading Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982), going on my walk, reading Luigi Barzini, The Italians (1939).” And then I describe my plan for a book in three parts.
Keeping a journal is invaluable. It records our process and it’s an important historical document. (I wrote an account of Virginia Woolf’s composition of The Voyage Out based upon her journals.) If anyone asks how we wrote a work, we don’t have to rely on faulty memory, we can turn to our process journal and describe a work’s composition. Keeping a process journal helps us understand that our writing is important work. We value it enough to plan, reflect, and evaluate our work.
A process journal is an invaluable record of our work patterns, our feelings about our work, our responses to ourselves as writers, and our strategies for dealing with difficulties and challenges. Whenever I’m stuck writing, like Grafton, I turn to an earlier journal and read about my experience at roughly the same stage. I learn that I habitually think about abandoning a project just before I see how the book should be organized; this helps me reengage with my current work more confidently. I learn that completing a prior book was hard for me and discover that a successful strategy was deciding the time had come to write a final draft. I’m surprised to learn that hard days outnumbered wonderful days, giving me courage to return to work when it’s difficult. I learn that what I remember as a sudden insight evolved gradually; I can let myself wait as I write my current work.
Our process journals are where we engage in the nonjudgmental, reflective witnessing of our work. Here, we work at defining ourselves as active, engaged, responsible, patient writers.