ALEX NOBLE - WRITING JOURNAL-2015

The New Diary - Tristine Rainer

 

 

The New Diary is about a completely modern concept of journal writing. It has little to do with the rigid daily calendar diary you may have kept as a child or the factual travelogue you wrote to recall the Grand Canyon. Instead, it is a tool for tapping the full power of your inner resources.

The New Diary is as much for those who already keep a journal as it is for those who have never kept one. It does not tell you the "right" way to keep a diary; rather, it offers numerous possibilities for using the diary to achieve your own purposes. It is a place for you to clarify goals, visualize the future, and focus your engergies; a means of freeing your intuition and imagination; a workbook for exploring your dreams, your past, and your present life.

It is for everyone seeking concrete methods for dealing with personal problems. It is for women and men interested in achieving self-reliance and inner liberation, for artists and writers seeking new techniques for overcoming blocks to creativity.

 

How to Write a Memoir - William Zinsser

 

 

Be yourself, speak freely, and think small

By William Zinsser

 

One of the saddest sentences I know is “I wish I had asked my mother about that.” Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own—and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age—do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and all its accretions of anecdote and lore. “What exactly were those stories my dad used to tell about coming to America?” “Where exactly was that farm in the Midwest where my mother grew up?”

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into. That record can take many shapes. It can be a formal memoir—a careful act of literary construction. Or it can be an informal family history, written to tell your children and your grandchildren about the family they were born into. It can be the oral history that you extract by tape recorder from a parent or a grandparent too old or too sick to do any writing. Or it can be anything else you want it to be: some hybrid mixture of history and reminiscence. Whatever it is, it’s an important kind of writing. Too often memories die with their owner, and too often time surprises us by running out.

 

Epiphanies

 

Here are two definitions of "epiphany":

1.

a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

2.

a literary work or section of a work presenting, usually symbolically, such a moment of revelation and insight.

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Assignment:  Read the excerpts below from Richard Wright's novel, "Black Boy," from an article by Chet Raymo.  Let these moments liberate your memory and imagination to create some of your own epiphanies in your journal.  These can stand on their own, or be woven into a poem or short, short story. Write Now! GO!

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"There Was..."
by Chet Raymo

"Richard Wright's classic 1945 memoir "Black Boy" recounts his childhood in the racially charged South of the 1920s. It is a heartbreaking tale of poverty, hunger, prejudice- and triumph against all odds. Several times in the book, Wright breaks the traditional narrative to list, litany-like, remembered epiphanies:

    'There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon.'

    'There was the faint, cool kiss of sensuality when dew came on to my cheeks and shins as I ran down the wet green garden paths in the early morning.'

    'There was the tantalizing melancholy in the tingling scent of burning hickory wood.'