Hot Guys Don’t Journal—Hot Writers Do
In season one of The Sex Lives of College Girls, Lila, a co-worker of the main characters, Kimberly, says, “Hot guys don’t journal. They just let their thoughts fade away. It’s what makes them hot.”
Writers don’t classify themselves as hot guys—or hot girls—for that matter. However, there is something insightful in the statement from this comedy/drama. If writers don’t journal, if writers don’t do the work, their thoughts will simply fade away.
(What to Do With Your Old Journals.)
I was reminded of this following a book presentation and talk last month. For 45 minutes, I read from my memoir, I’ll Have Some of Yours, discussed a bit of the story arc, and fielded questions from a group of readers and writers, caregivers, and health care industry professionals.
Finally, I was asked the inevitable question by an aspiring member of the audience. “What is your writing process?”
I could have answered with the quote about hot guys who don’t journal. That would have garnered a lot of laughs and few insights.
Going deeper, the intent behind this question ranged from discovering “what time do you get up every morning to write?” or “do you write every day?” to “what’s your approach to editing?” or “how do I make myself sit down and get busy?” Every author talk I’ve attended has tackled this nebulous subject matter. And every time, the writer has cringed while stumbling over an answer.
Ernest Hemingway required rum in his approach, I believe, but was known to say, “My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine.” If Ernest couldn’t get it right, choosing rum as part of his process while instead wishing it had been wine (my choice too), what chance do modern-day authors have of coming up with a suitable answer?
Zero chance. Or so I thought. Until I had a Charlie Brown, confronting Lucy Van Pelt as she stood behind her Psychiatric Help/5¢ stand, shouting “That’s it!” sort of moment in front of my audience.
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The word process was first used in the 12th century as a legal term for a contract. I’m a former computer science geek. For me, process signified a program running on a computer, hence the familiarity of processor and multi-processing. In the 90s, business jargon coopted the word for such systems as TQM, Six Sigma methodology, process reengineering, and eventually became synonymous with corporate restructuring. Oftentimes, the idea of a process recalls a series of mechanical or chemical tasks completed to produce or make something.
The word stems from the Latin processus “a going forward, advance, progress.” The idea of a process implied a forceful movement, pressing toward a goal like driving horses through a long pen toward the corral.
The idea of a process in writing, of an advancement forward, gives a slightly wrong impression because the body remains stationary. It’s the hands and mind that move. Essentially, what most writers require to know is how will I free the wild creative in me while seated still?
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In my audience, an older woman nodded her head to the process issue hovering over us. Her husband had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She amassed 180 notes she’d written regarding funny/not funny stories about her husband and his diagnosis, and how they had both thrived and failed. Why hadn’t she “done something with them?”
The woman’s question reminded me of my first book. A memoir of love and loss, the narrative contained a distillation of diaries and emails written by my husband and me to our loved ones who lived 2,000 miles away. The middle gap, the most difficult part of any book to sustain, had been filled in by content from letters I wrote for 100 days to my mother during my husband’s hospitalization.
In my forthcoming book, I documented stories about food, my mother, the family kitchen, and growing up Italian American. Each week, I sat to write these narratives and designated a specific genre in which to compose. One essay, about the Feast of Seven Fishes, was carved into a fishing report style essay. With another, based on cooking ravioli on Christmas Day, I wrote a recipe poem.
My “process” for these books existed in the subterranean recesses of my consciousness until details revealed themselves in ways that might not have happened if my course of action was simply to write the prescribed, write what I know. Or if I had set aside only early morning hours for scribbling or aimed for 1,000 words each session. All of which might have been reasonable advice given from authors to prospective writers.
In my Charlie Brown moment, the room illuminated. What if a thousand flashes of brilliance add up to and define the process? What if lists like Songs I Want Sung at My Funeral, or the names of the 50+ cookies my mother baked every Christmas is the process, or a year’s worth of Instagram posts about stuff found on the early morning streets, is the process?
As I recapped how each of my books came into being, I asked these questions of the universe and the audience, concluding, “What if, inspiration is the process? And our goal is to simply to reckon with it as it comes?”
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On How to Be a Better Human podcast, host Chris Duffy interviewed entertainer Lear deBessonet on why we should make spectacles out of our lives. Eventually, they worked their way around to the creative—here comes the word again—process.
Lear said, “The creative process functions like a U,” which begins on a high, with an idea, despite fears or trepidations. “I can imagine what it’s gonna be and how fabulous. I’m excited. And then as you go along the process, you’re essentially making a descent into whatever the lowest point of the U is, which is the point of real despair…I am completely embarrassing myself. I’m going to fail publicly…That part of the creative process, it’s important to say, is always there and you have to work through that.” For the U to trend up again.
“One of the things that’s so transformative about particularly theater and spectacle…is just how connected to others you feel when you find yourself in that pit of that despair together, and then together you climb out of it.”
I’d begun my book talk on a high. When the woman asked her question, my enthusiasm sunk into my gut. I landed in the U, dreading how I might tread toward some answer that would make this thing called writing easier. Had I said, “Do shots of rum every day, or write at 2 a.m.,” I certainly would not have left room for any sort of learning. The woman’s question could have disrupted the flow of the event. Instead, the inquiry turned enlightening, not only to those present, but for me. Together, we climbed the U.
Ernest Hemingway also said, “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” Process is indeed made up of many tiny observations or tasks that sometimes include lighting a candle to fend off dark winter mornings or needlessly emptying the nearby garbage can with the empty box of Milk Duds consumed while you were on a “writer’s block” vacation from your screen.
Writers stitch together entire novels out of grocery lists and scribble down what sounds brilliant in the brain but has been reduced to four or five words transcribed on paper. We don’t need a prescribed process, only a bunch of little somethings that work for us. I first attended creative writing classes on Monday nights. Given my current freelance and teaching work, Mondays are strictly writing days. That’s my only process on the first day of the week, to take “time off” from any other work.
Hot guys might never journal, hot girls neither. But hot writers, enthusiastic about their craft, find a way.
Check out Annette Januzzi Wick’s I’ll Have Some of Yours here:
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