“The notebooks of a writer have a very special function: in them he builds up, piece by piece, the identity of a writer [for] himself”

“The journal is where a writer is heroic to himself”

my prose forms class is focusing on writer’s journals. we’re reading the journals of O’Connor, Kafka, Plath, some other people who i never heard of before. the instructor, in introducing the class to us, shared these passages from Susan Sontag.

oddly, while i beat my students over the head with the importance of revision in writing (“revision is writing,” duh), i don’t feel like i practice what i preach in this respect. not that i don’t believe it wholeheartedly, but i rarely find myself going back to something i’ve written and questioning it in the way encourage my students to do. i make adjustments, and i certainly add things (my most common ‘revision’ practice is to just write a whole bunch more shit), but i rarely tear down and rebuild in the way i recommend they do. what i tell myself is that my ‘revision’ happens in my head, and it’s not untrue. my mind is always turning things around, thinking them through repeatedly, endlessly. however, keeping in mind the idea (that i’m also a fan of) that “you never know what you really think until you write it down,” i’m not sure if this is revision or just me trying to convince myself that it is.

during our first class, in the course of discussing the purpose of a writer’s journals, we discussed the role that writing plays in a writer’s life. another student gave what, i think, is a common response: “i write because i have to.” he expressed the sentiment that he couldn’t imagine not writing, every single day. as he said this, i thought about how standard this kind of response seems to be for writers, and i thought about how i’ve never had this feeling.

i mean, i like to write. i feel good when i write, because it feels like i can say things, which is a very different feeling from, you know, life. i can take time, really think about what i want to say and, more crucially, exactly how i want to say it to express it perfectly. i can make my best attempt to represent exactly what i’m thinking. however, in spite of this, i don’t feel like writing is something i have to do. i can exist without it.

i don’t feel like i’m creating myself, either. i exist already, in my head, so i don’t see my writing as ‘building myself up.’ if anything, i guess i would consider it more like hitting the brakes on my thoughts, trying to pin them down and say ‘this, right here; this is what it is’ before it becomes something else. like i’m trying to stop my mind’s constant, never-ending revision. this might help explain why i’m reluctant (?) to engage in the kind of revision i think is most necessary/useful and that i recommend to my students: if i start to go down that road, i probably won’t ever stop, because whatever it is that i wrote down, whatever it is that i was thinking at that moment, i don’t think that way no more. not like i’m the exact opposite or anything, but if i’m obsessed with communicating myself perfectly (and i am), then any little nuance matters. and we’re always creating new nuances, revising ourselves/our thoughts in our minds. (i mean, right?) if writing provides a kind of portrait of the person at that moment, then my portraits are never any less than blurry as fuck, because i’m on to the next thing so quickly and relentlessly. at least, that’s the way it feels. you know, in my mind. like i’ll never be able to make it clear, communicate perfectly, because anything i communicate won’t be accurate by the very next moment, the next slightly different me comes along. anything i’m ‘building up’ is simultaneously being knocked down. which is cool, to me, tbh. ngl.

but this idea that the writer is ‘heroic,’ even to him or herself, is some straight nonsense. heroes are dumb.