#21 Why writers should keep a diary, a cross between John McPhee and Hunter S. Thompson, writing about what makes you different
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"New England Coastal Village"/Maurice Prendergast
WRITERS SPEAK
"I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing."
-Flannery O'Connor \
CRAFT LESSON: Day by Day: Why writers should keep a diary
I started the day in the usual way, dressed and took my dog for his morning walk, brewed a cup of sweet Black Irish tea, quickly scanned the news and then opened a file labeled “Diary 2020."
I wrote for about ten minutes.
Jan. 21. 44 degrees this morning. Arctic by Florida standards, Parka, watch cap, gloves to walk Leo. Didn’t blow smoke but the wind cut like a knife through butter. Strange dream last night, David. M., lanky, ginger, nasty piece of work, tricked me into going to NYC with Neal, only Neal didn’t come and it turned out we were going to help someone move. Met the mother who told their kids they could have “a doughnut and three hot dogs for breakfast.” The work was overwhelming and I tried to quit but he kept tricking me into more. Finally, he stole my shoes and that was it. I ditched him. Only problem, when I looked up, I didn't know where I was. NYC was foreign territory of high brick buildings. Wanted to go home but felt I should visit the art museum. Found myself in a maze of a mall. Fortunately, Leo’s barking woke me up. Having trouble with the novel. Still keeping to daily sessions but I’m not writing a page a day. Need to follow the advice in today’s post - answer the six questions to drive plot. For some reason, am having trouble switching from pantsing. The sky is a wintry, pale blue. The trees wave slowly, like a monarch parading through commoners in a gilded coach. Axios reports cell phones are banned during the impeachment trial. They’ll be twitching like a junkie jonesing for a fix. Today’s task: draft post about the importance of keeping a diary.
If you haven’t already guessed, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to keep a diary. It’s not the first such promise. I have at least a dozen notebooks, dated early in the year. But soon the entries peter out and the diary’s forgotten.
The other day, however, I stumbled upon a quote that made me think I needed to start anew this year. In a Paris Review interview, the late British novelist John Fowles says,
“I am a great believer in diaries, if only in the sense that bar exercises are good for ballet dancers: it’s often through personal diaries—however embarrassing they are to read now—that the novelist discovers his true bent, that he can narrate real events and distort them to please himself, describe character, observe other human beings, hypothesize, invent, all the rest. I think that is how I became a novelist, eventually.”
More than one writer agrees with Fowles, I found, thanks to Maria Popova’s excellent blog, Brain Pickings. Keeping a diary is an essential part of a writer’s life, a daily task that exercises the writing muscles, an early morning foray into the unconscious journeys of dreams and observations that can surprise and inspire further writing.
Today’s entry, for example, gives me a description of a departure from Florida’s sunny climate, a caustic take on a high school classmate I could use in the novel I’m composing.
What I would do with that bizarre breakfast I don’t know, but I have it stored for future retrieval.
A diary’s prose need not be polished. “The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice,” the English writer Virginia Woolf said. “It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles."
Looking over today’s entry, I cringe at the cliches, the gaps that make the stories within incomplete. But I like, “lanky, ginger,” as a way to describe my classmate and the addict metaphor for the U.S. Senators denied their cellphones. These are seeds that might sprout someday.
I’m comforted if this post, flawed as it is, inspires you to launch a diary. Brenda Ueland, author of the writing advice classic, “If You Want to Write,” advises writers to “Keep a slovenly, headlong, impulsive, honest diary...You will touch only what interests you.”
The act of keeping a diary, what Popova called “this private art,” is an essential discipline. Madeleine L’Engle ("A Wrinkle in Time") has three rules for aspiring writers: Read, write and keep a diary or a journal as some refer to it.
John Steinbeck kept a diary while he was writing "Grapes of Wrath." The opening was prosaic for a novel that would win the Pulitzer Prize and was cited prominently when Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
May 31, 1938: "Here is the diary of the book and it will be interesting to see how it works out," he wrote in an entry published in "Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath."
Later, when he shifted to writing "East of Eden," Steinbeck began each day by writing a letter to his editor, Pascal "Pat" Covici," a habit chronicled in "Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters." It was a warm-up exercise that the author used a baseball image to describe; "a way of getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game."
“If you want to write,” L’Engle says, "you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.”
Thanks to these writers, this year I’m sold on the idea. I hope to make it a part of morning routine, along with walking the dog and sweet tea. I urge you to consider doing the same, keeping it slovenly, headlong, impulsive and honest. Not a bad way to start a writer's day.
"Trees"/Maurice Prendergast
TIP OF THE WEEK
"Write about what makes you different."
-Sandra Cisneros
BOOKBAG
Profiles are about people, whether they're brushstrokes or detail-rich portraits of a character. But there's another profile subject that gets far too little attention: place. Add a sense of place to the five senses and you can write powerful stories that not only put readers in a setting, but help them understand what makes them matter.
Before the Iowa caucuses imploded in a cascade of failing apps and unanswered help lines, Washington Post feature writer Dan Zak did just that with "Why Iowa?" a remarkable dispatch from the Midwestern state. There are people in his story, to be sure, but from its lyrical 178-word opening, Zak's prose is what you get when you cross John McPhee with Hunter S. Thompson.
"Iowa is a fairy tale." it begins:
"Somewhere between the crumbling bridges, the meth clinics, the jackknifed tractor trailers, the zombie combines steered by satellite, the putrid purgatories for dinner-bound hogs--somewhere among the wannabe novelists and suicidal farmers and drooling cage fighters sponsored by bargain hotel chains, down rutted byways to giant wind turbines, alongside ditches drooling with nitrates and Busch Light--is a loose menagerie of utopia, where Americans are pleasant, responsible and cooperative, where they pass down their civic duty like a trust fund, where they still have one hand in the fallowing topsoil, the other locked in fellowship with their neighbor, and their eyes on the future of the republic. This frontage road of a state, this frozen slab of carpenter gothic has threshed the Democratic presidential candidates for a year now, and it will make the first winnowing of the field Monday, when about 0.1 percent of the country's registered voters--after being harassed by campaigns and spoiled with millions of dollars—could set the course for the rest of our lives."
The Post requires a subscription, but you can read three stories before the paywall rises. Save one for this fine story.
"Inlet with Sailboat, Maine"/Maurice Prendergast
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
"Diary"/Alicia Keys
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