Everyone knows writing is hard. The ever quotable Dorothy Parker (famous for a line I’ve always hated- “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”) said, “I hate writing. I love having written.” Having ideas, articulating them clearly, and making them interesting is very difficult work. What sounds great in our heads often falls flat on the page as we all know too well. Certainly, some people find writing a torture and journal writing regular reminder of that torture.
But most of us also manage to find some power and even pleasure in writing. Like many people, I kept journals for most of my 20’s, and when I was home with my daughter, and when I’ve lived abroad. These journals were attempts to somehow capture and understand the emotions and insights of powerful experiences. Some moments invite us to capture them in word.
Beyond recording or clarifying our thinking, writing can also create it. There’s an old rule of writing that says you need to put your seat in the chair. Authors don’t wait for inspiration, they sit and make themselves write, often on a strict schedule. Poet William Stafford went so far as to say, “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” Like most English teachers, I believe writing is a refined form of thinking, and one that’s easy to share with others.
While school journals always walk an uneasy line between personal journal and essay, one historical model has gotten lots of attention recently. In Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From he notes,
Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition
that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice
of maintaining a “commonplace” book…. In its most customary form,
‘commonplacing,’ as It was called, involved transcribing interesting or
inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized
encyclopedia of quotations (84).
Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of narrative from
beginning to end, renaissance Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped
from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them
into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their
notebooks. They they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding
more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.
They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things for the
world was full of signs if you could read your way through it, and by keeping
an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your
personality (67).
Finally, this excellent article compares Tumblr and commonplace books. As it notes, today's problem isn't too little access to information, but too much. Recording and even memorizing ideas or speeches was important at the time. Today's problem isn't too little access to information, but too much. The word curating, organizing information effectively to access it later, has become a new reason to use an old approach.
For the 16 weeks of this semester, I would like you to keep a commonplace blog that helps make sense of your reading, your world, and yourself. I will provide prompts at times, but mostly, I hope you find a form of informal ‘writing to learn’ (as English teachers call it) that works for you. I will also keep this one on the website as a model or as a place to go for ideas when you don’t know what to write about. I look forward all of us sharing discoveries, links and thoughts.
No comments:
Post a Comment