James Brown

Check Out Writers & Their Notebooks

January 21, 2010

Diana Raab has just come out with a collection of essays on writers and journaling, and how some of us use the journaling process as a way into writing stories and poems. She's assembled an excellent line-up of writers, with a great foreword from Philip Lopate. Check it out if you have time.

Comments

January 24, 2010 3:33 PM EST

For me it's strangely funny that this topic comes up now because I would like some advice or perhaps at least a pointer or two on writing in a journal. It sounds so simple. However, I have always stared at those blank pages with serious intentions of filling them with deeply personal thoughts, experiences and emotions but the blank page has the effect of slamming a door in my face. I'm stuck between believing nothing personal is worth writing about or it's so emotional I freeze and can't make the pen move. You wrote about "committing secrets to paper"...a delicious thought that I want to be able to achieve for myself.

However, in lieu of personal stuff I would write down general story concepts, fragments of visions, inspiring words, fictional characterizations and descriptions of places. Over the years I have filled hundreds of spiral notebooks. Thoughts were written randomly so at a later point in time I am rarely be able to go back and find that certain something I recall writing somewhere. Utter disorganization, and if I do find something and re-read it, the realization of the emotional disconnect becomes visible. Even though I'm currently taking a college course on writing fiction, I haven't yet been able to let my inner self out.

I guess my dilemma is two fold; how do you wrestle with some of the fear of writing excruciatingly personal emotions, and is there a way to keep this stuff organized when you end up with volumes of it?

I read a little about Raab's "Writer's and Their Notebooks" and "freedom" is a big topic...and I think that's what I seek. I need to let myself believe I have the right to that kind of freedom...and then learn some way of organizing it at the same time. I am looking forward to this book...and I see you are a contributor as well. That's so cool!

- Valerie
January 24, 2010 10:36 PM EST

Hey Valerie,
I wish there was an easy answer to your question, but to paraphrase Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried (a great book, by the way), we have this memory traffic running through our heads, especially when we think of our past, and we just have to pick a path and follow it and see where it takes us. Maybe this college course in fiction writing will help with focusing. That's one of the hardest parts. Writing the personal stuff, well, as Hemingway said, (again a paraphrase when asked how he went about writing): It's easy. You just sit down with a blank piece of paper and bleed.

Good luck with your own writing. Judging by your letters, and knowing you're a huge reader, you should do very well at it.

Jim

- James Brown
January 28, 2010 3:35 PM EST

Hi Jim,

I can get hold of a copy over here, so I am interested to check it out and if you contributed it will be worth reading. I am now interested in Diana Raab's other works now. Thanks, Fiona

- Fiona
January 29, 2010 2:43 PM EST

Hey Fi,

Diana's a terrific writer, and I think you'll like her work.
For all your help past and present,
Jim

- James Brown

Selected Works

A New Memoir

This River
"...When you put this book down, trust me, you will think about it for a long time.” - Robert Olmstead, author of the national bestseller Coal Black Horse

Memoir

The Los Angeles Diaries
“A grimly exquisite memoir that reads like a noir novel…”

–Publishers Weekly (Best Books of the Year)