There are still bookstores and there are still books, mankind’s most important invention; there are still readers who prefer the bound volume to the wretched electronic imitation with its sucking dependence on electricity. There is still a body of American literature. But writing books of lasting value that illustrate people’s lives in a particular time and place is partly an inborn talent, partly a skill that takes years of development. The mature writer, however deficient in technological ability, possesses a knowledge of human behavior that is gained only through long observation and the toothmarks of sharp experience. (Annie Proulx, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, November 19, 2000)
I
When the journal-writing habit seizes you and sets you on its path, you will need certain things for the rest of your life, whether you use an oak-paneled study, your mother’s kitchen, or a rickety jungle tree house as your writing nook. You will need:
Pens for every coat and knapsack and handbag that you own.
A chauvinistic loyalty to your brand of instrument: Bic, Biro, Cross, Waterman, Scheaffer; felt-tip, roller ball, fountain, fine-point, crayon. And mechanical pencil, too, for the creative engineers among you.
Ink. Choose colors that won’t fade; this is your stab at immortality, if you can handle the thought of great-grandchildren or grad students reading your account of certain nude pool parties or that first mammogram/prostate exam.
Real paper, creamy, heavyweight, spiral—later, if you wish, you may certainly transfer journal entries to a cold and blinking screen. But the paper in your lap permits your moving hand to caress both pen and surface, a workmanship format centuries old, irreplaceably intimate. Know your own handwriting. Whose g is that? Your father’s? Or lifted from that kid you admired in youth group?
A writing place and time, a favorite nook or bench, a willingness to create writing space in chaos, solitude in crowds—the ability to write in jail, on subways, during revolutions, at rock concerts, in bed.
If you like, a tape recorder and a camera rounding out the sounds and sights, interviews and images that collectively inspire you to capture or describe your life.
Most important of all—you will need the ability to survive, as a writer, through the unforeseen and difficult times without any of the luxuries just described.
II
A secret tribe of journal keepers exists out there, people seemingly placed on this earth to describe, record, and savor, pen in hand. Yes, I am one of these watchful, scribbling folk. At forty-six, I’ve filled one hundred and forty-six 300-page journals since age twelve, and am finally ready for the conversation I long to spark with other writers. Why do we do it? How do other people ever put up with us? How many relationships have floundered because we really prefer uninterrupted writing time and the company of a spiral notebook? What nerds we journal-keepers are!
When you genuinely love and look forward to writing, it’s not enough to breathe, to believe, to breed, to earn a fine living, to round out your human lifespan with sports and food and movies; you have to write stuff down. You feel charged with strange obligations—to remember, and to create memory, to observe, but also to participate, writing yourself into the story, perhaps.
A quiet life may suddenly grow epic. Some journal entries declare, “I had no idea I’d be writing today’s diary in a lifeboat,” or “Well! We seem to have been stopped by the border police, so I think I’ll use the time to describe last night’s orgy.”
If you are female, whether a little girl or an outrageous grownup, your need to write will strike some as defiance; women are evaluated and rewarded for expressing with their bodies, not with their minds. Female literacy and scholarship remain in too many cultures as forbidden, oxymoronic. George Orwell’s everyman Winston Smith, daring to start his journal in 1984 while knowing such an act of personal agency was forbidden, was fictitious; not so the Taliban militia of Afghanistan, which closed all schools for girls in the mid-1990s and called female education “immodesty.” What is the revolutionary meaning of a girl’s journal in Kabul? One might imagine a slender notebook held tightly behind the veil of a hungry child, house windows blacked out by law so no men but the morals police may monitor women’s lives.
Too easy, though, to blame totalitarian regimes for squelching creative output. We do it to ourselves here in America; our own pals play their hand at discouraging the writing life. At fourteen, as a middle-class, white girl living in an affluent country, I listened numbly as a circle of other white girls told me I had a choice—give up my journal and be accepted into their gang or keep my private notebook and have neither friends nor protection in our hostile junior high. For two weeks, I stopped writing—the only two weeks I’ve gone without my journal since 1974. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
I write in my journal by hand, with a Sheaffer fountain pen. That organic feel of nib on paper, ink seeping into calloused fingers, collegeruled notebook flopped open on warm knees—that raw immediacy of unedited creation has been replaced, for most of my current students and academic pals, with laptops and Microsoft screens. The last decade of our beloved twentieth century saw a complete restructuring (in developed countries) of what it means to write—onscreen editing, online publishing, independent and progressive bookstores and presses driven out by giant conglomerates, freaked-out freshmen explaining that a brilliant paper has been lost, swallowed whole, cannot be retrieved, because a disk has “crashed.” E-mail is convenient, urging the most misanthropic recluses toward the dailiness of an easy correspondence without stamps; gone are the tenderly handwritten letters sending promises to lovers, parents, and friends. Gone is the ten-year-old kid lying on her belly on a shag rug, writing stories; she’s upright at her workstation, surfing the information highway, preparing for college admission, while her toddler brother works a baby keyboard rather than a sixty-four-color Crayola box. A laptop, though increasingly lightweight, isn’t a real notebook yet; it can’t be crammed into the back pocket of old Levis when one crawls under the beach pier to make out at midnight in July. The spontaneity of journal writing—“Wait, wait, I just need to write this down,”—and the ability to stick an autumn leaf or a movie stub between marked pages has been transformed by technology. For better or worse, this is our wry predicament in space age 2009, an era wherein Sony Computers airs commercials calling a new screen system … “the modern version of putting pen to paper.”
Like so many writers of my generation—I was born in mid-1961—I was almost finished with graduate school before computers replaced typewriters in the halls of academe. When I began writing my Ph.D. dissertation in winter 1989, I sold my italic typewriter and logged on to user-friendly WordPerfect 4.1. How thrilling it all was: errors disappeared at a button’s touch, whole paragraphs shifting tidily like Balanchine’s ballerinas, entire manuscripts printing and self-paginating while one was elsewhere—at the store, in the bathtub. WordPerfect’s flag-blue screen—wholly blank except for the meek reminder of file name and page number—resembled unmarked paper—empty until filled.
Okay, I thought. I can do this. Okay.
Within a few years, that crossover ended. The ante went up. Word-Perfect’s fjordlike blankness was phased out at every institution where I taught, no longer supported in the tech-speak of campus. Everyone was forced to work with Microsoft: screens jammed with colored borders, prompts, icons, menus, each blinking their suggestions—an invading army of options relentlessly presented to the writer. Spell check interrupted my essays and class lessons by highlighting words it found all wrong—Latina, Kurdish, kibbutznik, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, riot grrl, not to mention my lowercase heroines k.d. lang and bell hooks. I watched as the world of “real” writing grew, like Jack’s beanstalk, into something always vertical, the screen station, the electronic path to tenure upright in one’s face. Yet, I have remained attached in the deepest way to the horizontal writing life, blank pages in my lap.
These days my students, fresh from an adolescence spent with mouse in hand, find written tests archaic. Why not assign only take-home essays they can edit on the computer? Why should I suffer needlessly through their handwriting in a blue book? They examine my fountain pen with interest, then ask why I don’t put my journal entries on disks. Cleverly, they point out that I’ll help my future biographers if I organize my memoirs in file form. This spectra of posthumous editing by some worshipful Ph.D. candidate is a morbid thought indeed. Now even immortality requires Windows.
Did we ever expect to arrive at this crossroad, the end to a millennium of handwriting? Even the Bible speaks of the scribe’s joy—“My heart overfloweth with a goodly matter; my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.” Literacy and the religious life were once inseparable—monks, nuns, and rabbis examined their souls endlessly in diaries of spiritual progress and temptation. Travelers, adventurers, explorers, and kings—mostly male, but let’s not forget Anne Frank and Gluckel of Hameln—plotted the world (and their own cultural survival) through journals. Has the tattered handwritten journal truly ended, as of our century? Will texts of American history henceforth show that handwriting and typewriters were phased out by 2001? The twenty-first century sits crowded with technology’s furniture, quadrupling the time we sit attentive to an electronic presentation. Perhaps my alarm is merely that of the sixties child ever warned by hippie parents not to sit too close to the radioactive television set.
I race to play catch-up as new students arrive each fall, always more computer-literate than the last year’s bunch. The disparity in our affection for technology is just a new spin on the old generation gap. Most professors these days agree, however, that our students’ nicely printed-out pages and Internet research do not compensate for their increasingly abysmal writing skills—grammar, punctuation, spelling, and the latterday evils of website plagiarism and online paper-buying. The escalation in affordable technology (though a laptop is still a large financial investment and theft risk) hasn’t been accompanied by an escalation in student literacy. The urge to write well for writing’s sake seems missing in a generation raised to expect an A for a C- paper.
So these are my biases, revealed up front. I am concerned about the writing sensibility in our time, and my journal is a notebook of the old kind that travels easily with me everywhere I go. I have carried a journal through thirty-eight countries with no fear of its theft, no need of fresh battery packs, though I often dream of losing it at sea. I plug it directly into my mind, sketching or writing or Scotch-taping into it the great minutiae of cultures. The only threats are elemental—fire and water, or leaving it behind. Notebook writing, I have found, invites friendly conversation in ways a laptop says—“Go Away.” For instance, I was scribbling away outside the Cairo Museum when a busload of Egyptian schoolgirls arrived and descended on me, each begging to show off her English by signing her name in my notebook. And I once passed an evening sipping tea in a Jerusalem café, painstakingly learning the Armenian alphabet from a witty chef, new word shapes stained with hummus in my journal. It is this crosscultural human contact, made possible through the universal handprint of art and naming, which I hope we will not lose, as nation after nation eagerly follows the Western model of computerized writing. A pen and journal still cost less than admission to a movie. Like Anne Frank, like Hildegard of Bingen, like Martin Luther King, Jr., awake all night in jail, we must be prepared to write our greatest testimony in nontechnical conditions, where and when we can.
III
Journal writing is like sex; do it in a public place and people can’t help but stare, even as their attention suggests you are behaving in a socially inappropriate way. I’ve always done much of my writing in public places—parks, coffeehouses, the National Zoo, even curbside at Gay Pride rallies—and the reactions range from accusations of FBI infiltration to genuine concerns that I’m a homeless schizophrenic. Many writers do their best work in public space. I think of screenwriter David Mamet’s book Writing in Restaurants. Who’s the voyeur—the writer taking notes or the passerby gawking at the writer? We don’t all have cozy offices at home where we can churn out our latest bestseller while listening to Bach, Barbra, or Basie. But who writes a book while waiting in a bathroom line at the movie theatre? Well, I do, of course.
When I began living in D.C. again and teaching at George Washington University, I didn’t have a desk, a view, or a computer of my own. For ten years I lived in a box-sized studio apartment at DuPont Circle with its one long window facing a brick wall. The first two computers I dragged home both died horribly in mid-sentence. Like many nontenured women’s studies professors, I shared office space with other valiant faculty; nonetheless, I managed to churn out six books in six years. The secret to my work ethic is no secret at all. I write in my journal, wherever I wish, all the time, and type up the good stuff later.
A date with my journal is the most pleasant of outings. Off we go to the movies, where so many strange childhood memories float to the surface in the twenty minutes before the lights go down. Everyone wonders if I’m a film critic. But no—I’m using that comfy, faux-velvet chair time, Junior Mints melting on my tongue, to write about last week’s insult or this year’s romance or any number of thoughts. The National Zoo is even better—certainly the animals are nice, but for people watching, the Zoo is just spectacular. What a complex laboratory of dialogue, etiquette, parent-child relations, and tourist culture! “Do you want to go home right now, Stevie?” some fed-up mother is always threatening and spanking. “Why is that monkey touching his popo, Daddy?” another kid shrieks. I bring my Mocha Blast from Baskin-Robbins and settle in for an afternoon of listening and describing—journal time that is both work and play.
It’s harder to seize one’s writing time in crowds. A veteran of countless women’s music festivals, I’ve come to use my favorite performers’ concerts as background music for the journal time I need—the ultimate writing nook being, for me, not a wood-paneled study at all, but a deranged, campfire party hosted by stage techies and sign-language interpreters. It does seem antisocial to write in that setting—but what if you dig being in it and describing it simultaneously? Nothing can surpass the conversations overheard backstage at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.
“Are you writing about me?” snarls a stagehand as, desperately blotting ink by firelight, I attempt to describe the day’s highlights, plus plan the two-hour women’s history workshop I’m to give the next day. “Say, this isn’t going in one of your books, is it?”
I once tried to assemble my personal list of the coolest writing places in the world, based on previous eco-challenge-type spots where I’d managed to steal journal time. Halfway up a Pyramid. The Wailing Wall—women’s side, of course. Near a hawk’s nest right below the “Hollywood” sign. In a jail cell after committing civil disobedience, hands still cuffed behind my back. On the beach boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California. At a remote Berber market run by tattooed women in Morocco. Backstage at an Indigo Girls concert with one of their guitar picks serving as a bookmark. Inside a dead volcano in New Zealand. In these places, I’m the one with the fountain pen dripping, “Oh, my god, guess where I am now,” my writing life charged, inspired, informed by the magic setting. But writing is work, not rejuvenation, to Orthodox Jews; in Israel or Brooklyn, on the Sabbath one may not write. I learned this on my first trip to Jerusalem at age twenty, when I was told to put my pen down by an angry Hasidic rabbi.
Laptops have made accepted public writers of us all. The scruffiest beatnik agitator looks upwardly mobile and productive, because we associate computer keyboards with work, in a way we never privileged wildhaired poets scrawling free verse on bar napkins. Because laptops are costly, class bias demands that we judge their owners to be safe. No one disturbs the laptop guy at Starbucks. But is he really writing? Creating? Is that his travel diary, his novel? Or is he just filing spreadsheets for his boss? Those who dare intrude might say, “What are you working on?”—not, “What are you writing?”
I want laptop man—or woman—to be a real writer, not a drudge. I want all of us to uphold our right to be dreamy in public with glazed-eyed journals in our laps and a grand view of the world. There is no greater partner than one’s journal—in tough times and in discrete life stages, it serves as playmate, lover, tour guide, political witness, employer, and spiritual sanctuary, as well as editor and therapist. These are the writing relationships and practices I now look to explore. This is the conversation I now intend to have.