On writing in notebooks
Diaries, essays, and dialogue
Writing in notebooks is one of my biggest joys in life. It’s probably the time when I feel most completely free.
This is writing that is entirely unbounded, with no goal beyond the simple pleasure of putting words together. What a delight that is!
Notebook writing is a way to think things through to one's own satisfaction, without needing to worry about anyone else. In notebook writing there is no need to shape one’s sentences around the needs of another. One can be boring; one can come at a problem from five different directions without considering that the writing is repetitive, or confusing, or that it makes references that might be obscure.
One can recount a thing that one saw, an idea that one is thinking about, a pile of complicated sentiments, without wondering whether anyone else finds any of that interesting.
Five pages can go to the attempt to get some kids on a train to look up from their screens and notice a rainbow, when you don’t speak their actual language (and to their delight and awe when they do in fact look up and see it). Four pages can argue against an article that one just read. Ten pages can set out emotions that no one else would care about.
Almost any other context of putting words together on a page is a form of dialogue between the writer and reader in which, it seems to me, the duty of care flows mostly in one direction.
The writer is responsible for creating the world that he or she is giving to the reader; the writer polices the boundaries of the text to make sure that it offers everything it ought to offer, not less and not more; the writer hears what the reader is hearing and understands the reader as a person for whom the writing is meant to add something, one way or another.
This is true even, or maybe even especially, of what might seem like the driest sorts of writing: academic writing, for instance, or formal reports. If the writing does not think of the reader, then it usually fails at its purpose.
When one encounters writing — academic writing to fiction to personal writing — that is not in dialogue with the reader, one feels it instantly.
That is writing where the writer is in a sealed but transparent space, a bubble of their own making, where the goal is to be seen, to be heard, but not to see.
Oddly enough, though, unbounded notebook writing — people’s diaries — is actually very often in fact as spacious as writing meant for a reader. That is, it does not feel like see-me-only bubble writing.
Perhaps that is because notebook writing is so often a dialogue of the writer with his or her own mind. One reads published diaries and feels that one has been let in on an unconstrained, unbounded, conversation.
When I reached a birthday that seemed to me to unequivocally represent an age of maturity, and was filled with doubts about myself, I didn’t look for essays or memoirs or novels about being that age. Instead, I sought out as many published journals as I could find that included that time in the writers’ lives.
I wanted to know what other people were like at that age, in the unbordered spaces of these written conversations with themselves. I wanted to know how selfish or not they were, how petty or not, how generous or not. I suppose that I wanted to know how grown-up they were, in these moments with themselves where they were not consciously fulfilling duties towards other people.
I won’t recount the contents of the diaries that I found, and I don’t even remember all of them now. It was a somewhat incoherent group, a mixture of what I had on my shelves, despite most of my books being in storage, what I could find in the libraries, and what was available to read online.
The names I remember now are the writers John Cheever, Virginia Woolf, May Sarton, Joseph Joubert and John Fowles; the literary critic Alfred Kazin; the actor Richard Burton; a few more.
The first time I read other people’s published diaries I was still in grade school. It must have begun with Anne Frank: I stayed in bed for three days after reading that, with its dreadful coda at the end, the three or four pages recounting what had happened to her and the others after the writing ends.
A little later someone gave me the childhood diaries of the writer Anaïs Nin, which had recently been published; then I read all of the volumes of her adult diaries that had come out by that point. (Note to parents: these not suitable for children.)
I read Samual Pepys’s Elizabethan diaries around then, too, and a collection someone gave me called “Diaries of Women” that included excerpts from several centuries’ of diaries, often by non-famous girls or women whose private writing just happened to have been found and transcribed for one reason or another.
I remember the shock of realising that I didn’t like some of the people I was meeting in their diaries: their selfishness, the ways they thought about other people. And deciding — I was still in grade school — that that was okay, that people were allowed not to be perfect. I think that it had a large impact.
So reading notebooks or diaries is interesting, but it’s interesting at one end of a spectrum: all of the freedom of no duties, but none of the craft of writing that is intended for others.
My own father wrote every day of his long life, but never published; and much of what he wrote is, to me, unreadable.
The trouble, I think, is that he never found that path between dialogue with oneself that is the notebook, and dialogue with the reader that is every other kind of writing. Instead he mostly wrote outwards from inside that bubble, towards readers by whom he wanted to be seen but from whom he did not want to hear. When he was very, very old, and ill, he sometimes refused to talk on the phone or in person, but only wanted to communicate by email or text message, literally removing the possibility of listening to the voice of someone he wanted to be heard by.
And yet there was great pleasure for him in the intellectual acts of writing, of sorting out his thoughts to his own satisfaction. I don’t consider his time writing to have been wasted, now, though for a time I did.
After his death, a relative found texts of his that worked well enough for readers to be quoted in the relative’s own work, and that moved me more than I can say; he had been brought out of the bubble, or rather someone had found a way to reach him inside of it, and to pull him out.
The classic essay form is interesting almost as a metaphor. It’s that middle ground that ensures the absence of the bubble. It’s not the duty-less pleasure of unfettered notebook writing, but it captures some of the wildness of it, the openness of it, intentionally crafted so as to make it inviting to a reader, to welcome the reader in. As a metaphor it might represent what we all want from each other just now: to be seen and heard, but also to see and hear, to inhabit the world together.
I didn’t know Anais Nin had childhood diaries. How interesting. And amazing that you read her adult ones as a child. Must have made quite an impressing. :)
This inspires me both to read and write more diaries. Thank you.