Writers and Their Notebooks

Baker, Nicholson. U and I: A True Story. New York: Random House, 1991.

Didion, Joan. “On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching toward Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.

Dunlap, Louise. Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing. Oakland: New Village Press, 2007.

Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Boston: Shambala, 1996.

Junker, Howard, ed.

For me, the trick works; the words that pour onto my journal’s pages seem as separate from me as water from air. I didn’t become a regular journal keeper, nor a writer, until I was taught the technique of free-writing. From the time I was eight years old until I turned twentyeight, my journaling followed more or less the same pattern. I would keep a journal for a few weeks or months, then set it aside. When I returned to it, my words embarrassed me so much that I would bury them deep in the detritus of my closet, or shred them into silent confetti. Then, in a workshop I took on a whim, a teacher introduced me to the concept of automatic writing. I no longer felt that I had to take responsibility for whatever spilled onto the page. My not-quite-conscious mind seemed a person distinct from the self I knew.

The purpose of this journal is to record parts of my life I might otherwise forget

Writing a journal means that facing your ocean, you are afraid to swim across it,” wrote George Sand, “so you attempt to drink it drop by drop

The fact that I still write daily may only mean that I continue to delude myself that I am important, my existence worthy of print

In addition to the yin/yang of the bicameral brain, the process of writing is a constant struggle between the Ego and the Shadow, to borrow Jungian terms. Ego, as implied, is the public aspect of our personality, the carefully constructed persona, or mask, we present to the world as the “truth” about us. The Shadow is our Unconscious, the Dark Side—the dangerous, largely unacknowledged cauldron of “unacceptable” feelings and reactions that we’d prefer not to look at in ourselves and certainly hope to keep hidden from others. We spend the bulk of our lives perfecting our public image, trying to deny or eradicate the perceived evil in our nature.

One of my theories about writing is that the process involves an ongoing interchange between Left Brain and Right. The journal provides a testing ground where the two can engage. Left Brain is analytical, linear, the timekeeper, the bean counter, the critic and editor, a valuable ally in the shaping of the mystery novel or any piece of writing for that matter. Right Brain is creative, spatial, playful, disorganized, dazzling, nonlinear, the source of the Aha! or imaginative leap. Without Right Brain, there would be no material for the Left Brain to refine. Without Left Brain, the jumbled brilliance of Right Brain would never coalesce into a satisfactory whole.

And there are the lingering uncertainties: should the notebook be spiral or bound? A book or computer file? Written in every day or only when the mood strikes? Performed in private or in public, at home or at a library or cafe? Is a writer’s journal a separate literary genre, to be parsed by scholars, or