Ivan Turgenev, the famous Russian novelist, short story writer
and playwright gave his followers invaluable advice on how to get the job
done: “ . . . without painstaking work,”
he wrote, “any writer or artist
definitely remains a dilettante; there is no point in waiting for so called
blissful moments, inspiration; if it comes, so much the better; but you keep on
working anyway.”
This is the tough love for writers. We’re inspired; we pick up our journals; we
write what’s in our hearts. If we’re
brave, we write some of those letters Harry Truman knew would be best left in a
drawer. But the thoughts are no longer
running loose: they are captured. We can return to them, like voyeurs into our
own lives. And writers are Narcissists:
we enjoy looking at ourselves—reading and re-reading our journals. Admit it.
The original journalists—journal writers, that is—documented
what happened during the day, which is where the word comes from. The weather, the comings and goings of family
and friends, minor and major illnesses, births and deaths of most everyone who
made up our lives, including dogs and cats, cows, pigs and chickens. When diarists reflect on their records,
surmising how or why anything had come to be—Why did the neighbor’s daughter
return from her trip so early? Why did
the child fall ill? What do we do now?—they
are writing stories. We wonder, we challenge, we try to re-create the emotions
we felt when we were writing. We tell
stories and “We are the stories we tell.” Our present-day journals shape us as
much as we shape them.
I don’t know of any writer who doesn’t keep an idea file or journal
or diary. Keeping a journal can be a healing process as we get distance from
ourselves; journals help us make sense out of Life; they put events and
emotions in order. And, after all, if we
can’t talk convincingly to ourselves, whom can
we talk to? In some ways, journals are
inspired, sacrosanct conversations with ourselves.
For some of us, these journals are enough. We are rewinding our lives, re-living what we
did and how we felt: our journals
address an audience so intimate that our reader needs no context, no backstory,
no narrative arc (although it’s nearly impossible to write a story without
one). We use words as we choose (we know what we mean, right?), we craft
sentences as they pop into our heads (we know what we mean, right?); we don’t concern ourselves with point of view or
punctuation (we know what we mean).
Challenges come, though, when we mine our journals for stories
we want to share with others. That’s
when the hard work begins. Now that we
know how we think and feel, how are we going to communicate that to
others? Do we want to bother? For some, this is a clear “No.” For others, this is the beginning of writers’
block, various forms of angst, grammar books, dictionaries and thesauruses (is
it thesauri?), Internet research (could that have been a Buick, and could it
have had three headlights?), and narrative plotting (how would my sister have
known then what was going to happen?). We
are inspired to share our opinions and stories but soon discover the
consequences of a wider-than-us audience.
Inspiration is a necessary first stage, but as artist Chuck
Close wrote (was it over a hundred years after Turgenev, or less than that?) “Inspiration
is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
Winona Wendth
Winona Wendth
