Week 1: The Voyage Out
The heart of our practice is keeping a writers’ notebook. Everything begins with notes, scraps, drafts, stray ideas. Reading other writers’ notebooks can demystify the process for us on occasion, especially when they contain jottings for things that eventually become an author’s polished works.
With this in mind, we’ll be looking at a lot of notebooks, diaries, and journals together as we go. I happen to love reading these (sometimes) more “informal” materials, especially those by writers and artists. We’ll use these as jumping off points for exploring different approaches to writing and shaking up our artistic practice.
This week, you start a new writers’ notebook. Again, this is the best and most basic tool for your practice: a place where you can collect notes, ideas, and freeform writing, make rough drafts and sketches, and pull in the raw material for your work.
Your writers’ notebook could be a three-ring notebook from the drugstore, a bound journal, or a digital notes file of some kind. I recommend that you choose something simple so that getting started at any moment is as easy as grabbing your notebook and a pen or opening a single file. (It’s like they say about musical instruments: if you keep it out in an easily accessible place, you’re more likely to practice from day to day.)
Another thing I love about reading diaries and notebooks is that they often focus on everyday scenes and details drawn from the writer’s life. Our aim this week is to get into this frame of mind: beginning to take notes about the things around us as a way of gathering grist for the creative mill. This is, at the same time, the practice of beginning (or continuing) to notice what you notice—an important part of refining your own unique voice or worldview and imbuing it with significance. Eventually, we will start to use this raw material for other experiments: transforming it into fiction, personal essays, or other forms you may be interested in.
Below, you’ll find our readings for the week followed by some reflections and writing exercises.
Readings
Charlotte Forten Grimké, from The Journals of Charlotte L. Forten (1862-1863)
Charlotte Forten’s (1838-1914) diaries record, as the subtitle on the cover of my edition states it, “a young black woman’s reactions to the white world of the Civil War era.” During the Civil War, she also “traveled to South Carolina to participate in a unique social experiment involving newly freed blacks of the Sea Islands.” The excerpt here is from that period in her life, 1862-1863. Later, we’ll read a multi-part essay she wrote about this experience for The Atlantic by drawing upon the notes in her diaries.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, excerpts from “The American Notebooks” (1835)
Hawthorne, of course, is best known for writing The Scarlet Letter. Here I offer some excerpts from notebooks in which he kept short sketches and ideas for stories and plots. As you’ll read in the editor’s introduction, which is worth reading if you have time:
“In the following brief selections from his American notebooks will be found the seeds or kernels of a dozen stories he wrote after 1835, together with a number of themes and observations that went into his first three novels. Here too are the germs of many other tales and romances that were never set down on paper, although some of them came to be fully elaborated in his mind.”
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, excerpts from Give Us Each Day (1921)
“Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s diary introduces us to a notable black woman writer and activist of the early twentieth century. Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) was the widow of America’s first nationally recognized black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar; she also had her own vigorous career as a poet, journalist, lecturer, and crusader for civil rights.”
Dunbar-Nelson began keeping a diary at the age of forty-six. Gloria T. Hull, in her introduction, gives us an interesting appraisal of its style and intentions:
“Dunbar-Nelson’s diary is not like the self-consciously and/or laboriously written documents of Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin. Kept in the ordinary way, it has the expected virtues and limitation of the prototypical—not to say classic—diary form. Dunbar-Nelson never regarded the journal as a vehicle for creative, literary expression. Yet its style has both interest and merit. Formal British diction and latinate syntax stand side by side with Black folksay and the latest street-corner slang. There is also a great deal of tonal variety—humor, hyperbole, wit, parody, and sarcasm… brief character portraiture, high-blown purple passages, and imagistic writing…”
Virginia Woolf, from A Writer’s Diary (1927)
Speaking of “the self-consciously and/or laboriously written documents of Virginia Woolf or Anais Nin,” our final reading this week is an excerpt from Woolf’s diaries. “Now I must sketch out the Eclipse,” begins this entry from her diary. Note the word “sketch,” a key word for us to bear in mind when first attempting to capture scenes or characters in our own writing. Here Woolf records details about a journey she took with friends, in 1927, to witness an eclipse.
Reflection and Exercises
One tool I’ll ask you to use a lot in your writers’ notebook is freewriting. You can read about it in more depth here, but basically:
To free write, writers give themselves a set amount of time, grab paper and a pen or pencil, and then begin writing out their ideas about their chosen topic as they come. Freewriting means a writer doesn’t stop writing and doesn’t take the time to edit or adjust the ideas on the page even if a mistake is made. The ideas are meant to be unstructured and messy in a freewriting exercise.
Doing this can help you get in the habit of just jumping in and starting, whether or not you feel prepared or like you have any ideas. Sometimes we don’t even know what ideas we do have until we begin to vamp on the page. So, try this for any of the following exercises: set a timer and freewrite in response to them. Go for rough material here.
Following the example of Hawthorne, spend some time this week jotting down some very short ideas and notions for different plots, stories, situations, etc., that you could potentially write about later. Generate possibilities.
Very few of us have likely traveled much lately, but that’s where memory comes in: let your memory wander over trips you’ve taken in the past, whether on a voyage that took you to some place quite new to you or on a more modest but still memorable excursion of some kind (like Woolf going to witness an eclipse).
If you haven’t written in a while (or maybe a long, long while), you may have a lot on your mind about the challenges of our global situation as it has affected your own life and the lives of those around you. Let loose with a “pandemic freewrite”: give yourself a longer period of timed writing (15, 20 minutes?) to rant and riff and remember the last year of your life, inviting in whatever scenes, characters, emotions, images, voices, etc. may make themselves known.
Does this entire thing (by which I mean jumping into this course, diving into your writing process) feel like a beginning, the start of a “voyage out” of some kind? Reflect on that in writing: what feels surprising or different or like you're at the start of a new adventure?
OK then, let’s see what we can do with this. Feel free to comment below with thoughts or observations about the readings, how the exercises go for you, etc.
Evan James is the author of I’ve Been Wrong Before: Essays and Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe: A Novel. Find him on Instagram or at his website.