Journaling to Memoir

Leaving a Trace by Alexandra Johnson is “to journal writers what Bird by Bird and The Artist’s Way are to fiction writers.” One reviewer said it “will inspire not just the diarist in us, but the reader, too—to return to works we missed, or those we thought we’d fully grasped . . . Stands proudly beside such classics on creativity as One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty.” Welty’s book needs to go on my list, as well as several more mentioned by Johnson in her book, diaries by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield among them. A journal should be just what it is meant to be – private and open—and can be transformed into longer projects or creative work. The book is full of tips and techniques and inspiring stories from famous writers and private journalists.

Words

Words. They guide us through our days, a constant barrage of reminders and self talk and hopefully positive stuff and they worry us through sleepless nights. They are the beginning of love affairs, one-liners and life confessions that connect us with other people. They tell the stories of Dickens and the plays of Shakespeare. They make us laugh and cry as we read a novel by a master like John Irving, whose love of words brings us big books even in today’s world of pared-down rhetoric. They connect us with others through letters and e-mails and social media, and they convince us to buy things we wouldn’t otherwise buy. They are in our prayers.

Writing Left

How does one do it, "write left"?  We write about what we care about and stand up for what we believe in, whether it's prison reform, the right to union representation, free speech, or equal rights.  My life has been immersed in liberal, or should I say "progressive," thought since I was a child when my father went off to march on Washington to protest the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.

Mansfield Frazier (a man for his times) is as much a believer in writing left as I am to just plain writing because you want to, and we've started a salon for writers and thinkers.  Our first gathering will be at Visible Voice books on Saturday, April 30, from 2-5.  Mansfield, who wrote a book of essays on doing time in a Federal prison called From Behind the Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race, will talk about not being afraid of saying what you mean, and I will talk about the best way to say it and get it out there for people to read. If we get some readers and thinkers who want to keep the pens moving and the conversation steady, we'll keep it going.

Hemingway

“Write when there is something that you know, and not before; and not too damned much after.”

Anne Lamott takes it Bird by Bird

Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird is one of the most admired books about writing. We will watch a film about Anne at the Word Lover’s Retreat this coming weekend. Anne’s message is that we should become one with the writing and write what needs to be written. She says, “The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.” Letting the characters do what they need to do and writing it truly are recurrent themes. “It is a little like when you have something difficult to discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will come if only you show up and make a stab at it . . . Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn’t, until finally he finds out what it is.” We are not the creator of the story, we’re just the conduits. The Truth wants to be expressed. Choose your words so someone else will read it and think they never thought of it that way before, but what is said is the truth they didn’t know they were missing. We find the truth, in our own plodding way, bird by bird.

The Sound on the Page

Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page translated his study of writers and writing to the page as inspiration. He examined what writers say about the process of writing and how the words sound on the page, saying “Just as reading is like listening, the act of writing is, or should be, linked to speaking.” On ever-elusive style, he concludes, “Like a face, a style is partly meaningless as a gauge of character, but partly very meaningful indeed. And although it may seem that one’s style is more malleable than one’s face—in writing, all you have to do is delete a word or replace it with another, as opposed to the fuss and bother of plastic surgery—it is in fact unexpectedly hard to alter.” Undeniably, we write in a style that's uniquely our own even as it's difficult to pin down. He proposes that style is made up of competence, iconoclasm, extroversion, feeling, single-mindedness, tension, and solicitousness. Then, he discusses style in the various forms of writing from persuasive writing to poetry. In the end, he gives up and says style cannot be taught but steps can be taken to develop it. He suggests that writers engage in active reading, imitation, copying, reverse imitation, active reading of own work, read aloud, rewrite, and listen to criticism. After acknowledging that “This work, the cleaning of brush to create a walkable path, is never-ending for a writer” Yagoda ends his book with: “Anyone who puts pen to paper can have a prose style. In almost every case, that style will be quiet, sometimes so quiet as to be detectable only by you, the writer. In the quiet, you can listen to your sound in various manifestations, then you can start to shape it and develop it. That project can last as long as you keep writing, and it never grows old.” That's encouraging.