Writers and Their Notebooks

Part 1

THE JOURNAL AS TOOL

A writer uses a journal to try out the new step in front of the mirror.

Mary Gordon, The Country Husband,

New York Times, October 6, 1991

JOURNALING—A STEPPING STONE

James Brown

For me the journal is a tool—a stepping stone to a larger, more refined work that could be a memoir, a novel, a short story, the personal essay, or a script.

I don’t keep a journal for the sake of recording random thoughts or feelings or simply the day’s events, as you might in a diary, though I don’t for a second discount the value of others doing so. The sheer act of writing, regardless of the form or its aim, is in and of itself a worthwhile endeavor.

I believe you discover what it is you want to say during the writing process. In fact, what you originally thought you wanted to say, and what you actually end up writing, aren’t always the same things. I used to think that it was a shortcoming, not being able to stick with what I initially imagined myself writing, but now I see it as a strength.

I’m capable of changing for the better. I’m able to recognize previously unforeseen opportunities and capitalize on them. The work is malleable—an evolving, living thing in a constant state of flux. Getting to the good stuff is sometimes a process of elimination of the bad stuff in order to be able to see it for what it is. Then you discard it and take another shot—same material, same characters—only you do it from a different angle.

Maybe you hit pay dirt.

Maybe you sink again.

The point is you’re at least one step closer to knowing what belongs in your story by knowing what does not.

The Irish writer Frank O’Connor reworked some of his stories seven or eight times even after they were published. That might seem a little obsessive, but then again I don’t know any good writers who aren’t. It seems to be the nature of the profession. Alcoholism runs a close second, and I occasionally wonder if it isn’t because of all the frustration involved in finding the right story and telling it well.

This is where journaling comes in handy.

It can be a simple act of brainstorming, no boundaries or constraints. Fifties Beat writer Jack Kerouac used to put a roll of butcher paper into his typewriter and go at it like a wild man, more or less just writing whatever came into his head. The difference here is that Kerouac sometimes considered this material finished work; he didn’t always go back and revise, so some of his published writing is pretty messy and difficult to read. It did not help matters that he was also frequently under the influence of amphetamines, in particular, Benzedrine. In any case, brainstorming helps take the pressure off you, the kind of pressure that comes from trying to imagine too much of your story at once, the kind of pressure that makes you freeze up and give up.

By journaling without constraint, writer’s block ceases to exist. Even if it turns out you can’t use much or anything you’ve written in your current work, it’s gotten you writing. It’s helped loosen you up.

Though I don’t consider myself a screenwriter, I’ve written several screenplays based on novels of mine that were optioned for movies, and once I wrote a TV script for 21 Jump Street, an old cop show. This was back in the early nineties, ancient history but still timely in terms of the subject and how I used journaling techniques to help me put the script together. I was a freelancer who lucked into the job on a producer friend’s recommendation.

What he basically did, besides get me there, was give me the premise of a story: A teenager fresh out of juvie for stealing cars and hawking the parts, what’s called chopping, returns to his old neighborhood where he attempts to go straight instead of succumbing to his old criminal ways.

It’s your standard good versus evil setup. Temptation is around every corner, and it was up to me, as the writer, to come up with the different characters and scenarios that best showed the boy struggling to do the right thing.

For me it’s all about character. You can have the best plot in the world, but if the characters are stiff, clichéd, and one-dimensional, the story falls apart. If no one cares about the people in your story, certainly no one will care about what happens to them; if they don’t care about what happens to them, it means they can’t possibly care about the plot. The two elements are inescapably intertwined. Story, or plot, is a natural outgrowth of character. And because character defines action and action defines character (I’d like to take credit for this, but Aristotle said it first.), the brainstorming for me begins with character.

So who is this kid who steals cars and parts them out? What’s his background? Where does he live? How does he live? How does he dress? What’re his weaknesses? His strengths? What, in short, makes him tick?

In my journal, before I began the script, I tried to get a stronger conception of my central character by writing a short biography. The show originally aired in 1991 under the title Second Chances, the last episode ever filmed of 21 Jump Street, and to write the piece for this collection, it took an hour or more of sifting through dusty boxes in a dusty attic to find my old notes. They’re nearly twenty years old, the ink has faded, and in a few spots I can’t even make out the writing anymore. Those parts I omit with ellipses, and forgive the punctuation, or lack thereof, as I often throw the rules of grammar to the wind when I’m journaling:

His name is Nick Capelli, he’s of Irish and Italian descent, and his father bailed on him when he was twelve and most needed the guidance…. At heart he’s good kid, but he’s scared, too, given the rough neighborhoods he’s lived in, and so he tries to act tough … walks with a swagger. Carries a knife and sometimes likes to pull it out in front of the mirror in his bedroom like DeNiro in Taxi Driver. His mom has a drinking problem, but she’s not to blame for him screwing up, and it hurts her every time he does, but she has no real power over him anymore … he wants to go straight because he feels he’s letting his mom down, but he’s good at stealing cars, and like any kid he takes pride in his talents even if those talents are used illegally. There’s a very pretty, shy girl in school he has crush on, and she’d like to get to know him better, but his reputation precedes him, and her parents won’t let her date him…. He’s shy, too. This could be another story line. Think about it.

The biography continues for another page, but this excerpt is enough to get a sense of how I used the journal to help me learn about the main character I wanted to create. Not everything I wrote found a place in the script—that wasn’t the intention of the sketch—but one scene and an actual storyline did come from it. For the scene, I show Nick coming home from work and finding his mother drunk and in bed with her boyfriend, and if I remember correctly, to get him out of the apartment, she sends him to the store for a pack of cigarettes. The storyline involves the girl Nick likes and ultimately leads to the writing of several different scenes dramatizing their situation and the forces that keep them apart. In the end, however, the relationship angle took up too much screen time and was dropped for a less complicated version.

But that’s another story.

What matters is how journaling can help the writer come up with ideas, kind of a warm-up to a bigger process. The next step is building on those ideas, discarding some and fleshing out others, developing characters and motives, and arranging the scenes in a logical, meaningful sequence with a firm sense of a beginning, middle, and end. Whether you write your thoughts down in a journal or try to store them all in your head, which I don’t recommend, story begins when you begin to dream and brainstorm about people and their problems. Heroes without flaws, like stories without tension, offer little insight into the human condition.

We learn more from our losses and mistakes than our successes and victories. Better the protagonist changes and grows as a result of his or her trials and tribulations than languishes in ignorance, no wiser for the journey. In my own life I’ve made plenty of mistakes, too many, but I like to think I haven’t repeated them all. Regret and guilt are sometimes our wisest companions. Keeping a journal, if you’re capable of being honest with yourself, can facilitate a deeper understanding of the role you’ve played in some of life’s conflicts. The same is true for storytelling. Our characters either overcome their troubles or succumb to them, and inherent in the term succumb is defeat. Those who give up against adversity or fail to learn from their personal blunders don’t garner our respect, and after a while, if they don’t take responsibility for themselves, they lose our interest and empathy.

I’ve written a few novels, a collection of short stories, and most recently a memoir titled The Los Angeles Diaries. The jacket copy describes it as follows: Plagued by the suicides of both his siblings, heir to alcohol and drug abuse, divorce and economic ruin, James Brown lived a life clouded by addiction, broken promises and despair…. Personal failure, heartbreak, the trials for writing for Hollywood and the life-shattering events finally convince Brown that he must ‘change or die.’

It’s a cheery little book, just two hundred pages, but it took me four years to write and thirty-plus to gather the materials to write it. Going in, before I even began taking notes, I had some definite ideas about how I wanted to structure the book. I’d read too many autobiographies and memoirs that paid close attention to chronology, too close in my opinion, and it came at a cost. Often the connecting material linking one event to another simply to maintain a linear structure struck me as expendable.

Not all experience is worth chronicling.

Maybe something significant happened to you as a junior in high school. Maybe that’s when you suffered your first heartbreak. If you were to follow a tight chronology you might feel obliged to begin the story in your freshman year when you first laid eyes on the person who would later break your heart and work forward from there. The next thing you know, in order to get from point A to point B, you’re filling pages with extraneous details just to pass the time, so you can get to your main story. That’s what I wanted to avoid in The Los Angeles Diaries. The fluff. The filler.

The events that serve most to shape and define us are often the most tragic and blessed ones. That’s what I was after in my memoir. I wanted to isolate the most defining moments in life and construct stories around them. The suicide of my brother. The suicide of my sister. Our mother’s arrest. And since memory itself is by no means sequential, I decided to skip around in time. In one chapter I’m forty-something, in the next I’m six, but in the end I’ve covered the central periods of life. Childhood. Adolescence. Middle age. There’s a beginning, middle, and end—just not in that order.

So how does this relate to journaling?

Where for the script I used the journal to write a character biography, in the case of the memoir I recorded specific memories. A pivotal moment in the lives of my brother, sister, and me was when sheriff’s deputies came to arrest our mother on suspicion of murder and arson. I wrote these notes mostly to help me recall the details of that ugly night, and I used them not just in the memoir but also in an earlier book, Final Performance, an autobiographical novel revolving around many of the same subjects and events I deal with in The Los Angeles Diaries:

Remember the night they came for Mom. Remember you and Barry and Marilyn stretched out on the floor. We’re watching TV. What was playing? The Blob? House of Wax? I’m not sure, but I know it was a scary movie. Mom either heard them first or saw them first or both. The tick of gravel beneath the tires of the cruiser coming into the driveway, headlights off, motor dead. She grabbed us and pulled us behind the couch. I remember she was in her nightgown and she was scared. We were all scared. The smell of her sweat. Flashlights through the living room windows, the beams crisscrossing on the ceiling. She holds you tight.

The compilation of one authentic detail after another makes for vivid, memorable prose. This particular entry recalls visceral details of smell, sight, and touch, and I later basically just lifted what I’d written in the journal and constructed a scene from it. Of course, it all needed lots of work, but from that scene I built a story.

The journal is a tool, and I’ve used it to write character biographies before beginning a story, while I’m actually writing the story, and sometimes even afterward when I have a first draft done but don’t feel I’ve fully captured my characters. In my college creative writing classes I occasionally require the students to keep a journal and use it to sketch scenes and create fictional biographies for the stories they plan to write. Sometimes I ask them to go to the local Starbucks and eavesdrop on a conversation, recording it verbatim, so that they can see the difference between real talk and the polished dialogue in the books I have them read.

As a writer of highly personal fiction and nonfiction, I extract from my journals the fragments of memory and shoot to make them whole. In that process more details inevitably reveal themselves and further enrich the work. Memory is fallible, however. The powers of recollection fade with age; mental images, sensory details, old feelings, and emotions are all too often driven beneath the surface of our consciousness. This is especially true of memories that are painful to recall, and for some maybe that’s a good thing, because in forgetting there may follow a necessary peace. Writers, however, can’t afford the same luxury. We need to hang on to our experiences, both the crushing and joyous, and through reflection, either by keeping a journal before we begin a project or during its writing, we hope to come to a better understanding of who we are, what we’ve become, and where we’re going. That’s where you’ll find your best stories, the ones that make sense out of the chaos we call our lives.

THE USE OF THE JOURNAL IN WRITING THE PRIVATE EYE NOVEL

Sue Grafton

The most valuable tool I employ in the writing of a private eye novel is the working journal. The process is one I began in rudimentary form when I first started work on A Is for Alibi, though all I retain of that journal now are a few fragmentary notes. With B Is for Burglar, I began to refine the method and from C Is for Corpse on, I’ve kept a daily log of work in progress. This notebook (usually four times longer than the novel itself) is like a letter to myself, detailing every idea that occurs to me as I proceed. Some ideas I incorporate, some I modify, many I discard. The journal is a record of my imagination at work, from the first spark of inspiration to the final manuscript. Here I record my worries and concerns, my dead ends, my occasional triumphs, all the difficulties I face as the narrative unfolds. The journal contains solutions to all the problems that arise in the course of the writing. Sometimes the breakthroughs are sudden; more often the answers are painstakingly arrived at through trial and error.

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.

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.

For the writer, however—especially the mystery writer—the Shadow is crucial. The Shadow gives us access to our repressed rage, the murderous impulses that propel antisocial behavior whether we’re inclined to act out or not. Without ingress to our own Shadow, we would have no way to delineate the nature of a fictional killer, no way to penetrate and depict the inner life of the villain in the novels we write. As mystery writers, we probe this emotional black swamp again and again, dredging in the muck for plot and character. As repelled as we may be by the Dark Side of our nature, we’re drawn to its power, recognizing that the Shadow contains enormous energy if we can tap into it. The journal is the writer’s invitation to the Shadow, a means of beckoning to the Unconscious, enticing it to yield its potent magic to the creative process.

What Goes into the Journal and How Does It Work?

At the outset of each new novel, the thing I do is open a document on my word processor that I call Notes or Notes-1. By the end of a book, I have four or five such documents, averaging fifty single-spaced pages apiece.

In my first act of the writing day, I log into my journal with the date. Usually I begin with a line about what’s happening in my life. I make a note if I’m coming down with a cold, if my cat’s run away, if I’ve got company coming in from out of town. Anything that specifically characterizes the day becomes part of the journal on the theory that exterior events have the potential to affect the day’s work. If I have a bad day at work, I can sometimes track the problem to its source and try correcting it there. For instance, if I’m consistently distracted every time I’m scheduled for a speaking engagement, I can limit outside events until the book is done.

The second entry in the journal is a note about any idea that’s occurred to me in the dead of night, when Shadow and Right Brain are most active. Often, I’m wakened by a nudge from Right Brain with some suggestion about where to go next in the narrative or offering a reminder of a beat I’ve missed. Sometimes, I’m awakened by emotion-filled dreams or the horror of a nightmare, either one of which can hold clues about the story I’m working on. It’s my contention that our writing is a window to all of our internal attitudes and emotional states. If I sit down to write and I’m secretly worried about the progress I’m making, then that worry will infuse the very work itself. If I’m anxious about an upcoming scene, if I’m troubled by the pacing, if I suspect a plot is too convoluted, or the identity of the killer is too transparent, then the same anxiety will inhibit the flow of words. Until I own my worries, I run the risk of self-sabotage or writer’s block. The journal serves as a place to offload anxiety, a verbal repair shop when my internal writing machine breaks down.

Generally, the next step in the journal is to lay out for myself where I am in the book. I talk to myself about the scene I’m working on, or the trouble spots as I see them. It’s important to realize that the journal in progress is absolutely private—for my eyes only. This is not a literary oeuvre in which I preen and posture for some future biographer. This is a nuts-and-bolts format in which I think aloud, fret, whine and wring my hands. There’s nothing grand about it and it’s certainly not meant to be great writing. Once a novel is finished and out on the shelves, then the journal can be opened to public inspection if I so choose.

In the safety of the journal, I can play Suppose … and What if … creating an atmosphere of open debate where Ego and Shadow, Left Brain and Right, can all be heard. I write down all the story possibilities … all the pros and cons … and then check back a day or so later to see which prospects strike a chord. The journal is experimental. The journal functions as a playground for the mind, a haven where the imagination can cavort at will. While I’m working in the journal, I don’t have to look good. I can be as dumb or goofy as I want. The journal provides a place where I can let my proverbial hair down and dare to be stupid, as we used to say in Hollywood.

The beauty of the journal entry is that before I know it, I’m sliding right into