A writer’s notebook - A writer’s apprenticeship

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

A writer’s notebook
A writer’s apprenticeship

I’ve written about the advantages of keeping a process journal. But there’s another kind of journal—Joan Didion calls it a notebook—that’s important for writers, too. Into her notebook, Didion writes descriptions of people she observes, random observations (the sign on a coat in a museum), facts she’s learned (the tons of soot that fell on New York in 1964), recipes (one, for sauerkraut). Didion doesn’t necessarily draw from this notebook in her work. But she believes it’s important for her as a writer to remember what she’s experienced, and the only way to do that is to keep a written record.

In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Didion describes what her notebook isn’t. It isn’t “an accurate factual record” because our recollection of an event might be vastly different from someone else’s. It isn’t to “dutifully record a day’s events” because that task inevitably becomes boring, and such a record conveys little or no meaning. Nor should we necessarily expect that we might one day open our notebooks and find “a forgotten account” of an event we can pluck for our work.

Instead, Didion believes the notebook’s value lies in its record of “How it felt to be me” at a particular time. This, she says, is the notebook’s truth. Although we might imagine using it to fix our impressions of others, instead, “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point” of the notebook. Part of a writer’s education is “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Reading our notebooks helps us to keep in touch with those past selves, and a record of “How it felt to be me” can be extraordinarily useful in writing memoir, creating fictional characters, or writing poetry.

I keep just such a notebook and so I have a record of a particularly difficult time in my life—the months during which my mother was in the locked psychiatric ward of a hospital and my sister killed herself. Patricia Foster, who was editing Sister to Sister (1995), invited me to contribute an essay to that volume. I suggested writing a piece called “My Sister’s Suicide” and she agreed.

I knew this would be difficult even though almost ten years had passed. In my earliest drafts, I wrote about how much I missed my sister; how hard it was not to have someone to talk to about our shared past; speculations about why she did it (an undiagnosed mental illness? drugs? a history of abuse I didn’t know about?). Any early rendering of a piece like this is bound to need much reworking, for it takes time to penetrate the more obvious layers of such an event’s meaning. I knew this. I knew I had to keep at it. But I didn’t know how to get beyond the most trite and meaningless description of my sister’s death.

I’d begun the piece without checking my notebook because I wanted the work to be about my memory of the event. Then, one day, when I was sick of rereading language I knew was insipid, I decided to go back to my notebook to read about “How it felt to be me” back then so I could authentically represent my immediate reaction to her death. And there it was: a description of sentiments I didn’t remember, and once I reread them, found it difficult to admit I’d had. But these, I knew, were necessary to explore if I were to write an authentic narrative.

“Jill killed herself at the end of January,” I’d written. “The feeling I have, of having escaped.… Sadness, certainly. But also … a sense of freedom, almost of euphoria, that I was no longer responsible for her, and that I had been responsible for her for so very, very long, as long as I can remember.”

That entry, and several others, captured something I’m not proud of, something my memory erased, but something that invited me to write “real” about my experience—my parents’ making me responsible for my sister when I was just a girl because of my mother’s mental illness. Without that record, I might have written a knee-jerk essay about the loss of a beloved sister. Instead, I was forced to write something more complex about my reaction to her death in light of our family history because my notebook made me remember who I was then. There, too, I found an image comparing myself to a hermit crab carrying too heavy a burden for its small size that related precisely how I’d felt at the time.

When I teach writing, I invite students to keep a notebook like Didion’s. They can write about whatever they choose. But I suggest that this single act will make them take themselves seriously as writers, and having a written record of their experiences will be valuable, both as they are writing a piece and in the future. For those who already keep notebooks, I suggest reading them as Didion does: to remember how it felt to be who we were at an earlier time.

Didion remarks on the fact that we change over time but that we forget the people we were: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be,” she says. Without a notebook record, these selves are lost to us. For a writer, “keeping in touch” with our past selves is helpful. Who were we when we tried to pen our first story? Who were we when we completed our first long work? How did we feel when we moved from one place to another? When we fell into or out of love? When someone we loved betrayed us? When someone we loved died? All this, we can’t possibly remember, though we imagine that we can. All this, a notebook captures for us. As Didion reminds us, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” The notebook is a kind of buried treasure that we might one day use, as I did in writing an account of my sister’s suicide, to transform what we find into scenes, commentary, descriptions, or reflections in our work.

“But isn’t writing in a notebook a waste of time?” I’ve been asked, as if it keeps us from the “real” work of writing which should proceed apace, as if there’s a cost-benefit analysis we can apply to the time we spend keeping notebooks. No writing, to me, is a waste of time and every word a writer pens is potentially useful.

When we sit at the computer, we might find, as I did, that we write safe prose. We might elide the controversial because we imagine someone reading our work. This can put a straitjacket on our prose. I once worked with a writer who was brilliant in her notebook but ordinary and safe on the page. I suggested that she use her notebook as the basis for her work and abandon the draft she wrote at the computer. Dipping into our notebooks as we write to find accounts, not of past events but of who we were when those events occurred, can help us keep it real in our work.