Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

The importance of journals
Reading and writing
You, the writer

If you’re having trouble developing ideas, and organized free writing exercises aren’t proving as productive as you’d like, carry a notebook with you everywhere and write down your ideas and observations as they come. You’ll discover you hear lines of dialogue, that may have never occurred to you, in the most unlikely of places. Moreover, a smell or something you taste could trigger a memory or observation worth pursuing at greater length. Take out your journal and jot down these observations.

DEFINITION

Dialogue is a conversation between characters in a narrative.

You can also use your journal to record relevant ideas as you read other books. The inspiration you receive from other creative writers can manifest itself unconsciously in your own work. For example, here is an excerpt from a section of a writer’s journal that consists mostly of quotations from other people:

“This country is an unknown place suffering the invasion of a people whose minds have never touched the earth.”

—Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony

“We all have to participate in some form of marriage in this life, and mine has been to farming and writing. … I have made the land wait for its harvest while I have finished a book. … To be happy on the farm the writer will need to know how to content himself in isolation.”

—Byron Herbert Reece, “I Grow Books and Potatoes” (Chattahoochee Review 27.3—4, Spring/Summer 2007: 9—12)

“The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Farming”

“If an average person was stuck out in the thick of a forest, more times than not they are probably going to perceive the area around them as dull or even irritatingly isolated, all because of the lack of human existence. Nature is simply the ’middle of nowhere’ for a lot of people. In actuality it is somewhere, and it is a very significant somewhere at that.”

—student paper

“I knew what I willed to do I could do.”

—Stonewall Jackson

What can you tell from the quotes this writer has recorded in his journal? Obviously he has a pronounced interest in nature and agriculture. His reading also is broad and varied. Ralph Waldo Emerson is a classic American writer, and Wendell Berry has won many contemporary humanities awards and advocated for agricultural sustainability and environmental protection half a century before it became popular to do so. The quotes of these two writers celebrate the person who knows the land—the farmer—and laments those who do not.

Then there are lesser-known quotation entries: ideas on farming and writing from regional writer Byron Herbert Reece published in a literary journal and a passage on the identity and importance of nature from a student paper. These quotes, while focusing on similar material, reveal that this writer reads academic literary journals and also peruses the papers of students. Likely he is a professor as well as a writer.

Lastly in this writer’s journal excerpt come what we might call a wild-card quote: a statement on the importance of willpower by the Civil War general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. This is perhaps something the writer jotted down in as an inspirational or motivational reminder to keep writing.

Following this speculation regarding the meaning of this journal excerpt, let’s have a look at the first three paragraphs of the published essay it eventually aided in forming. Here’s the first:

A Writer’s Harvest

It is often the case my farm seems to me the only sane place in this country. I take it this is because, other than my wife and some animals, no one else inhabits it. Madman, bore, or perhaps something in between, I am the primary possessor of the human agricultural perspective on a bit of earth American law recognizes as mine, but which, in reality, possesses me as one of its minor living inhabitants. I have tried to do right by it within my significant limits, but, alas, have made enough agricultural mistakes in my life to forget most of them and curse myself in remembrance of those I do recall with a silent condemnation. Since my school days, truth be told, I have not ceased to marvel each year at the fool I have been the year before. Yet, on the extreme other side of these many active mistakes there dwells an attitude of complacency reflected in the way I sometimes idly watch the fields from my rocker, contemplating them all the while—particularly if a jug is handy. The agricultural problems and attributes of the landscape are laid out before me—the solutions to which, if any ever present themselves, destined eventually, in retrospect, to be reckoned ignorant and those of a fool. The former version of me, the doer, is something of an innovator (however meager his rate of success); the latter, the muser, a leisurely pragmatist with a practical, rather than idealistic, penchant for strategizing an approach to something that may never occur. I will be the first to admit my perspicacity often is suspect and misspent, but then trial and error are part of the farmer’s (as well as the writer’s) trade.

Both in the title and first paragraph you can see how this writer’s published essay was shaped by elements of the quotes in his journal. The use of writer and harvest in the title summons the journal’s general thematic focus on writing, nature, and agriculture. Moreover, at the end of the first paragraph he comes full circle and likens the practice of trial and error to both agriculture and writing.

Now for the second paragraph:

I have chosen to write briefly on my agricultural identity for a number of reasons, not least of which is to combat ongoing negative stereotypes of farms and farmers. In popular culture farm life frequently continues to be characterized as stagnant, dull, parochial, stupid, and backward, largely on account of its hard remitting toil. As with all stereotypes, each of these qualities may prove true depending on a given farm. Yet I also find each one of them problematic with regard to my own agricultural background and observations. As one who has traveled a bit, I would take special exception to the first pejorative word—“stagnant”—by noting simply that all excursions are relative and carry with them their own inherent limitations: life remains life wherever one idealizes and experiences it, even in transit or within the space of a few square miles. Moreover, I would assert the other characterizations primarily arrive from the observations of those who either suffered tragically in their agricultural upbringings or who failed, sometimes willfully, to discern the value of a farm’s many underlying nuances.

This paragraph provides the writer’s motivation for penning his essay and again, the journal gives you clues by identifying other writers (Berry, Breece, Emerson) who strongly believed agriculture was worth defending.

WATCH OUT!

If you are drawing on quotes from your journal that come from the published writings of others, be sure to use them as inspiration—applying their value in your own words—or to give credit to the writer who came up with the quote. In the second paragraph of “A Writer’s Harvest,” the author abstracts the earlier ideas on agriculture to the twenty-first century. If he were to simply use them verbatim, without crediting the earlier writers, he would be guilty of plagiarism and subject to potential legal prosecution.

Now for paragraph three:

One simple fact is that the labor farm life demands of an individual usually is to the purpose of the betterment of the self, literal and artistic. “Work is the law,” wrote the painter da Vinci. “Like iron that lying idle degenerates into a mass of useless rust, like water that is an unruffled pool sickens into a stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of men turns to a dead thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to leave some trace of ourselves on this earth.” Work delivers people from evil, or at the least lessens the evil they would do, in most any vocation. In farming, seasonal changes, the almost imperceptible lengthening and shortening of light hours, and variable weather make its undertaking a constant and rigorous exercise in observation, planning, and critical thinking. There is always something different to do, and it may demand to be done very quickly—as during harvest—or at a more leisurely rate (the mending of fences in winter comes to mind).

Here, the essay transitions into the idea of work—or doing. (There’s that word again.) Although writing is not mentioned explicitly, it remains implicitly present in the essay because a powerful association between writing and farming already has been established.

In addition, a quote from the well-known painter Leonardo da Vinci is employed to help strengthen the writer’s perspective on personal labor. Interestingly, however, it did not appear in the writer’s journal, meaning he must have encountered it or sought it out at a later juncture. What does come from the journal, though, is the Stonewall Jackson sentiment: that possessing the gift of willing yourself to do something, whether you feel like it or not, is an enviable advantage in farming, writing, and most any pursuit.