What Good Talking!
The first time I taught a seminar in keeping a writer’s journal, I was stuck with the fact that everyone around the table said they enrolled partly to develop discipline as a writer. They came to class believing that learning the discipline of keeping a journal could be a foundation for being a “real writer.” I had learned from reading many authors on the subject of keeping a writer’s journal that there is no one prescription that helps everyone. The image of my husband and his filing system came to mind after everyone introduced themselves and their struggle with discipline. I found myself telling them about my husband’s filing system before I knew exactly why I was telling them: For his method of managing materials and paper, my husband uses what some call the horizontal filing system–he keeps paper things (business cards, memos, mailers, printed pages, reply cards, etc.) in his range of vision on every available surface in his office rather than out of sight in orderly vertical folders. I usually call him messy, I confessed, because of this paper sprawl that I assume could easily invade the house, but I have also realized that he knows where his things are despite my idea that having them “straightened” up would increase his ability to find things. Relating this to my students, I realized that my husband is not disorganized as teachers and parents who didn’t like the horizontal filing system taught us to believe. Rather, his system is ungainly for others sharing his space.
It wasn’t hard to make the leap from this insight to one about writing discipline. I told my students that much of what we have learned as good discipline is a way of facilitating the use of resources such as space and time to help a group, like a school class, function well. But writing isn’t a group event. When you free yourself up from the prescriptions for order and efficiency you have been taught, and you describe your own way of doing things, you will find that you do have a discipline–it is one, however, that you have probably been judging negatively and thinking you have to eliminate, rather than one you recognize and rejoice in because it can work to facilitate a more dedicated and serious writerly you.
Why not start toward becoming that disciplined journal keeper or writer you want to be by recognizing what you are already doing or what you have thought to do but feel silly about because it doesn’t seem disciplined to you? You may have been taking notes every day on napkins at a local coffee house or been the keeper of travel journals if not daily journals. Furthering your discipline might mean finding a box to keep the napkins in or a scheduling a way to make each day a traveling day even if you stay in your own neighborhood.
I go to the dictionary when I need help understanding the impact of a word. In The American Heritage Dictionary, the meanings for discipline include words and phrases like “control,” “obedience,” “punishment,” “rules and regulations,” “branch of knowledge,” “punish or penalize,” and “impose order upon.” These words do not mix well with the secret of good journal writing: In our journals, we must be more like mad scientists who can’t be trusted not to blow up the laboratory by leaving the labels and the caps off chemicals.
Explosions and all, a journal is a place for growing your writing.
One of my students was a newly retired botany professor. He felt that now that he wasn’t writing for publication in his field, he had no discipline. I asked how he approached writing when he was working in his field. He said he always carried a breast pocket full of three by five index cards to take field notes and had a box for them in his office.
“What are you doing now that you retired?” He said he was spending a lot of time taking his wife to the mall.
“What do you do at the mall?”
“I sit and I watch people.”
“Could you fill your breast pocket with index cards and take notes while you wait for your wife?”
The next class, he had filled his shirt’s pocket with cards, and he showed us the box he would put them into when he’d filled them with notes. This would be his journal even though it wasn’t a computer file or a notebook.
I mentioned something to the class I learned a long time ago from Henriette Klauser, author of the classic writing book, Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: When you see your child take first steps, you won’t go about instructing her in the discipline of walking by pointing out how tippy she is and how much she still looks for something to hold onto. You won’t say, “What bad, bad walking.” You won’t say, “Now that you want to walk, you must discipline yourself according to my rules of how to learn to walk. I advise practicing walking only in the morning and only in this particular room, and I want you to make a strict report to me of how many steps you’ve taken each practice session.” What you say is, “Hurray for you!”
The folding chairs my students sat in around the tables in the paneled school portable creaked as they leaned back in relaxation. We all basked in the sunlight we just now felt streaming in.