No. 4 - September 2016
Just a Scribbling Fool
by David Graham
Twenty-three years ago I set forth to write something new in my journal daily. I had always done so fairly frequently, but in 1993, newly promoted in my job as a writing teacher, I grew a bit overwhelmed by my duties. Sometimes a week or a month would elapse between journal entries. Yet there I was demanding that my students write for every class. It didn’t add up. I thus vowed to write something, however brief or trivial, each day. I’ve been at it ever since. Then about nine years ago, blessed with a year off from teaching, I decided to shift into a higher gear. I determined not just to scribble daily in my journal, but to draft an entire poem—not necessarily good, lord knows, nor even finished—just a whole one, with beginning, middle, and end.
At the close of that year I counted up, and to my surprise discovered I’d written far more than one a day. I’d written about 800. Most of them were terrible, naturally. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was having a good and productive time doing it. So much so that I just kept on, and now, going on a decade later, I see no reason to quit.
Looking back now what strikes me most forcefully is how much my daily practice has changed, and changed me, over the years. What began mostly as a practical and professional matter—keeping myself limber for writing; generating raw material; practicing techniques and exploring various themes—has evolved, almost without conscious effort. Now it’s something much deeper and more crucial. I need to write. I hesitate to use religious language, but that’s what it feels like to me: like a vocation and a discipline. I know that sounds corny and no doubt stuffy, but so be it. Here I would mostly like to reflect a bit on what I’ve learned so far while carrying this crazy project forward.
To start with, all my original reasons for daily scribbling still hold true. It sounds blindingly obvious to mention this, but since many folks, especially the young, seem attached to the theory of spontaneous genius, I will risk the obvious. As I have remarked often to students, writing may involve mystery, but it is also a skilled activity, and people tend to improve with mindful practice. In that it’s akin to any skill, whether knitting or playing chess. “Luck favors the prepared mind,” as scientist Louis Pasteur once remarked. Or, as golfer Jack Nicklaus is reported to have replied to a bystander who called one of his shots “lucky,” “Yes. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get.” Both parts of Nicklaus’s comment strike me as true. There is something lucky or magical about it when a decent poem suddenly catches fire and becomes excellent. I don’t know how to make that happen on demand, but I do know that it happens more often the more I write.
It’s also true that, since I hope to keep growing as a poet, frequent scribbling helps. “All poetry is experimental poetry,” Wallace Stevens wrote. Robert Frost said the same thing in his more folksy style, remarking that he kept writing poems to see if he could “make them sound different from each other.” Under the self-induced pressure to write a poem every day, I reach for many themes and techniques that I might otherwise not dare or think of. In these attitudes I have the great example of the late William Stafford before me, who wrote every morning without planning or fretting about outcome. I learned from Stafford that because we all have chattery minds, and because there’s always something happening, inside or outside my house, I don't typically need to think up a topic. It's more a matter of grabbing a cupful from an always-flowing river. The interest and the surprise come from seeing what happens with that initial topic.
Sometimes--well, actually almost always--nothing of much “value” happens. Oh, well. There's always tomorrow. But sometimes I feel the current grab me, and I'm off to destinations unknown. Almost feels like I'm a passenger in my own poem as it's being drafted. What happens if a poem is a dud? Well, it happens all the time, but so what? I repeat: so what? There’s always tomorrow. In the immortal phrase Thelonious Monk used as a song title, “Worry Later.” I agree with Stafford that writers talk themselves into so-called “writer’s block,” by worrying instead of writing. His famous advice for what to do when a poem draft isn’t any good was “lower your standards until you meet them.”
Most of all, I keep scribbling daily because it has become my most reliable way of reflecting on what’s important to me. I ponder big questions; work out frustrations; articulate problems; stretch my imagination; and explore the world. And—yes, I’ll say it—I seek to become not just a better poet but a better person—more self-aware, generous, curious, tolerant, and so forth. I trust it’s not necessary to belabor the point that these are goals, not achievements. Even so I firmly believe that writing daily—my vocation, as it were—nudges me along the path, even though it obviously doesn’t make me anything close to perfect.
The dirty little secret is that it’s enormous fun. Yes, I get frustrated regularly when a given poem refuses to snap into shape. That’s not a rare thing. As my wife will attest, I whine and moan a lot when a long time goes by without what I call a “keeper.” But the truth is that I write daily for the same reason I take hikes in the woods: it nourishes something deep within, and I know this because I feel worse if I don’t do it. And no need to waste time lamenting failures, both because they’re so common and also because even they often teach me something.
Other writers sometimes don’t like it when I talk about my daily practice, I’ve noticed. They think I’m bragging, or they feel jealous, or they suspect I’m trying to make them feel inadequate. Or worse, that I think everyone should follow my example. It’s true that in my teaching career I tried mightily to infect my students with the attitudes I inherited from Stafford—both because I know they work, and because I know they can feed your soul. But I am well aware that there are many routes to the top of most mountains. If you’re happy with your route, good for you. (I may reserve the right not to listen closely to your whining about writer’s block, even so.)
In any case, when I sit down to write, measuring my practice against anyone else’s is the farthest thing from my mind. Have you ever watched a dog dive into a lake after a stick? That’s how I feel, not always but often enough to keep me going, when I open my journal. At least on good days, I’m not performing for anyone or asking anything of them. I’m certainly not thinking of publication. I’m hardly even aware of my surroundings. I’m just deeply enjoying myself. Honest.
At the close of that year I counted up, and to my surprise discovered I’d written far more than one a day. I’d written about 800. Most of them were terrible, naturally. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was having a good and productive time doing it. So much so that I just kept on, and now, going on a decade later, I see no reason to quit.
Looking back now what strikes me most forcefully is how much my daily practice has changed, and changed me, over the years. What began mostly as a practical and professional matter—keeping myself limber for writing; generating raw material; practicing techniques and exploring various themes—has evolved, almost without conscious effort. Now it’s something much deeper and more crucial. I need to write. I hesitate to use religious language, but that’s what it feels like to me: like a vocation and a discipline. I know that sounds corny and no doubt stuffy, but so be it. Here I would mostly like to reflect a bit on what I’ve learned so far while carrying this crazy project forward.
To start with, all my original reasons for daily scribbling still hold true. It sounds blindingly obvious to mention this, but since many folks, especially the young, seem attached to the theory of spontaneous genius, I will risk the obvious. As I have remarked often to students, writing may involve mystery, but it is also a skilled activity, and people tend to improve with mindful practice. In that it’s akin to any skill, whether knitting or playing chess. “Luck favors the prepared mind,” as scientist Louis Pasteur once remarked. Or, as golfer Jack Nicklaus is reported to have replied to a bystander who called one of his shots “lucky,” “Yes. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get.” Both parts of Nicklaus’s comment strike me as true. There is something lucky or magical about it when a decent poem suddenly catches fire and becomes excellent. I don’t know how to make that happen on demand, but I do know that it happens more often the more I write.
It’s also true that, since I hope to keep growing as a poet, frequent scribbling helps. “All poetry is experimental poetry,” Wallace Stevens wrote. Robert Frost said the same thing in his more folksy style, remarking that he kept writing poems to see if he could “make them sound different from each other.” Under the self-induced pressure to write a poem every day, I reach for many themes and techniques that I might otherwise not dare or think of. In these attitudes I have the great example of the late William Stafford before me, who wrote every morning without planning or fretting about outcome. I learned from Stafford that because we all have chattery minds, and because there’s always something happening, inside or outside my house, I don't typically need to think up a topic. It's more a matter of grabbing a cupful from an always-flowing river. The interest and the surprise come from seeing what happens with that initial topic.
Sometimes--well, actually almost always--nothing of much “value” happens. Oh, well. There's always tomorrow. But sometimes I feel the current grab me, and I'm off to destinations unknown. Almost feels like I'm a passenger in my own poem as it's being drafted. What happens if a poem is a dud? Well, it happens all the time, but so what? I repeat: so what? There’s always tomorrow. In the immortal phrase Thelonious Monk used as a song title, “Worry Later.” I agree with Stafford that writers talk themselves into so-called “writer’s block,” by worrying instead of writing. His famous advice for what to do when a poem draft isn’t any good was “lower your standards until you meet them.”
Most of all, I keep scribbling daily because it has become my most reliable way of reflecting on what’s important to me. I ponder big questions; work out frustrations; articulate problems; stretch my imagination; and explore the world. And—yes, I’ll say it—I seek to become not just a better poet but a better person—more self-aware, generous, curious, tolerant, and so forth. I trust it’s not necessary to belabor the point that these are goals, not achievements. Even so I firmly believe that writing daily—my vocation, as it were—nudges me along the path, even though it obviously doesn’t make me anything close to perfect.
The dirty little secret is that it’s enormous fun. Yes, I get frustrated regularly when a given poem refuses to snap into shape. That’s not a rare thing. As my wife will attest, I whine and moan a lot when a long time goes by without what I call a “keeper.” But the truth is that I write daily for the same reason I take hikes in the woods: it nourishes something deep within, and I know this because I feel worse if I don’t do it. And no need to waste time lamenting failures, both because they’re so common and also because even they often teach me something.
Other writers sometimes don’t like it when I talk about my daily practice, I’ve noticed. They think I’m bragging, or they feel jealous, or they suspect I’m trying to make them feel inadequate. Or worse, that I think everyone should follow my example. It’s true that in my teaching career I tried mightily to infect my students with the attitudes I inherited from Stafford—both because I know they work, and because I know they can feed your soul. But I am well aware that there are many routes to the top of most mountains. If you’re happy with your route, good for you. (I may reserve the right not to listen closely to your whining about writer’s block, even so.)
In any case, when I sit down to write, measuring my practice against anyone else’s is the farthest thing from my mind. Have you ever watched a dog dive into a lake after a stick? That’s how I feel, not always but often enough to keep me going, when I open my journal. At least on good days, I’m not performing for anyone or asking anything of them. I’m certainly not thinking of publication. I’m hardly even aware of my surroundings. I’m just deeply enjoying myself. Honest.
©2016 David Graham