Category: writers notebook (Page 1 of 5)

A New Spirit

February 25, 2025 / / 0 Comments

It feels like spring here in Michigan. For two days, at least, we’ve had a thaw: snow melting into great running rivulets along the sides of roads, puddles everywhere, blue sky and birdsong. I’ve also started a new notebook, having finished my previous one this past weekend.

Upon starting a new notebook (spiral-bound, flimsy cardboard cover, the kind you can get at any CVS or Kroger), I like to enliven it with a “guardian spirit” on the first page (hat tip: Austin Kleon for the “guardian spirit” concept).

For this new notebook — as February ends and spring begins (eventually) — I want someone who embodies the kind of disposition I’m hoping to cultivate this season. Ice is cracking, snow is melting.

I’ve decided on C.S. Lewis, but not merely because of the obvious allusion to his most famous children’s book about the end of winter.

My children and I just recently finished the audiobook of The Silver Chair (topnotch performance by Jeremy Northam, by the way).

I often can’t decide which Narnia book is my favorite — it’s a three-way tie between Chair, Dawn Treader, and Magician’s Nephew — but since The Silver Chair is freshest in my memory, it’s my favorite for now. It’s the perfect “knightly quest” narrative. Jill and Eustace are sent on a great mission to rescue the king’s son, they have signs and directions to follow that they often bungle, but nevertheless, they continue to seek the fulfillment of the charge placed before them, and in the course of their journey, they face giants, and strange magic, and monsters, and wondrous creatures. Also, there are talking owls. I am a sucker for talking owls.

And Puddleglum. Puddleglum and Reepicheep. Best Narnians by a country mile. Northam’s voice for Puddleglum is perfection.

I also finished John Hendrix’s fantastic graphic novel about Lewis and Tolkien called The Mythmakers (another Kleon recommendation and also utterly topnotch).

At some point in the future I’d like to write a bit more about The Mythmakers because it was completely wonderful, but for now I’ll say that the portrait Hendrix paints of both men made me fall in love with their lives and their journey all over again.

(I say “all over again” because I was already a huge Lewis and Tolkien nerd, but Hendrix’s comic has reinvigorated and reoriented that passion… I’m even thinking of choosing new books for my British Lit class next year due to the ideas Hendrix’s graphic novel ignited.)

Lewis, myths, stories, adventure, the creative process: all of it hits where I’m at right now. I’m not exactly an Oxford don, but as a high school English teacher, I have some affinity for professors like Lewis and Tolkien: teachers who also cared deeply about their work as writers. I’m much more Tolkien-esque in my procrastination and slow production, but I aspire to be more Lewis-ish. I admire prolific artists, and Lewis was decidedly prolific.

He also was a voracious reader and loved many books and genres. I’d like to think that I read a lot, but I also want inspiration to keep reading more (and more widely). I want to reclaim myself as a Reader, capital-R, and even more particularly as a BOOK reader. There are many wonderful blog posts, articles, essays, and sundry on the internet, but I want books. Books to read. Books to spend hours upon hours lost inside. I want to read books the way Bilbo wants to see mountains.

Tolkien was famously (infamously?) critical of Lewis’s habit of throwing everything-and-the-kitchen-sink into his Narnia stories, but I’m much more a Lewis than a Tolkien when it comes to my own storytelling and world-building. Lewis’s fantasy stories are very “Arthurian” in that sense. Everything is up for grabs. The mythos can contain multitudes.

(Anyone familiar with the breadth of Arthurian stories from the Middle Ages and beyond will know that there’s nothing the Arthurian mythos can’t contain, or practically nothing. Lewis, as a medievalist and lover of Arthuriana, was always much more comfortable weaving different traditions and legends together; whereas Tolkien, though also a medievalist, was less enamored of the King Arthur legends and less inclined to the hodgepodgey quality of those stories.)

I can already feel the pull of my library books, and already the desire to take solitary long walks through the countryside, and at last the desire for tea (or beer), good conversation, and the sharing of stories.

Typing Offline

January 16, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I really want to get a classroom set of word processing machines for my students to type up their drafts after working in their notebooks. Many of them struggle with writing legibly, and they like the comfort of the spell-check function (I know I do too!).

But I don’t want them accessing the internet, partly because it is distracting and takes them out of flow, but also, more immediately, because some (many?) students have decided to use ChatGPT (and equivalent) to “help” them do their work.

I’m so adamantly opposed to LLM (and other forms of generative “AI”) that I want to remove all temptation and access. If they want to use it in their non-school lives or as adults, I can’t stop them, and whatever, God speed, I guess. But in my classroom, where I value human work and the connection that comes from sharing our written thoughts and stories with others, I want an “AI”-free zone.

Also, I cannot believe more people aren’t talking about the environmental and energy-related issues that come from these AI companies. It’s staggering! All so we can have ChatGPT write fan letters for us? It’s insane. Talk about a solution in need of a problem.

If I was given a fan letter written by some LLM, I would not only be uninterested in it, I would be deeply saddened that someone even thought I would want to read what some language-predictor machine burbled up from its store of (copyright-protected, by the way, and nobody gave it permission to use those) words.

It’s all so meaningless. That’s what saddens me about students turning in “AI”-generated essays and creative writing. It’s a waste of my time. I don’t care about “perfect” grammar or sentences that “sound” good but are devoid of any real meaning or human feeling. I want to know what my students THINK — what THEY think — about their own ideas and experiences.

Of course, what hampers all of this and drives students to use ChatGPT is grading. Once a grade is involved, the pressure is on to get that A, so they will do whatever they need to in order to achieve it. When you try to de-center grading in the classroom, they don’t see the point in trying and don’t do any work. It’s the conundrum of modern schooling. The grade is all that matters; it’s the currency that allows students to get into college, and then once in college, it’s the currency that allows them to graduate and get a job.

Writing, for instance, often has little-to-no importance for students. They don’t see the point other than it’s another hoop to jump through. Sadly, I’ve seen students not even care when the writing piece is something personal or something they’ve chosen to write about. They still don’t see the value.

This is not every student, mind, not by a long shot, but it’s enough to be discouraging. And it’s also enough that it makes me want to get a classroom set of THESE so that students can still type their words, but they must type THEIR words and not the words of some machine.

Anyway, I need about $7000 for a classroom set of twenty. Not sure how to get a grant or donation to pay for that (I’m not even sure the company who makes the word processors has twenty of them waiting around for some random teacher to buy), but it’s a goal for me this year.

I want to emphasize the process of writing, the tactile quality of writing by hand, of communicating through words and pictures, comics, collage, letters written in one’s own hand, doodles, and yes, even typed stuff, but typed stuff that is typed on a keyboard and generated by a human mind and heart.

I want to center our humanity in the classroom this year. Learning is about more — so much more — that getting a grade, getting into college, getting a job. I want to help my students NOT surrender their humanity to a machine.

And I want to hear the clickety-clack of keys typing without any interference from the internet or the corporations who want us all to “embrace” a technology we didn’t ask for. That’s my rant for the new year. Now how can I find seven grand?

“Pick a notebook, any notebook”

January 8, 2025 / / 0 Comments

“Pick a notebook, any notebook. If you compose well in it, you will become attached. Choose a pen that feels right. It could be a beautiful, expensive fountain pen, or any old BIC. Whatever feels good in your hand. Okay — this is your notebook, and this is your pen. Balance the notebook on your lap or set it on a table. And wherever you are in your work, start there. If you listen closely, you’ll hear the sound the pen makes as it moves across the page. Now, doodle something. Write a few sentences. Scratch them out. Write a few more.”

Dani Shapiro, from Still Writing, “Composing” chapter

Ten Years Zine

January 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The way I got to this little project was via reading old newsletters from my inbox. I have a problem with not deleting emails, and also with not always reading things that I want to read. The never-ending stream of emails continues apace, and then the ones I want to read get lost in the cascade until eventually it’s been five years and I still have dozens upon dozens of unread newsletters that I really want to read.

So, the other day, I scrolled back half a decade and started catching up on old mail.

This one, from Austin Kleon, struck me as a fun challenge, so when I needed a break from grading papers, I decided to give it a go. I most definitely took more than 20 minutes to do it.

Turns out #1. I have a pretty terrible memory. I should have spent some time rereading old notebooks or at least looking at a calendar or something, because I really could not remember what happened circa 2015 or between 2018-2019. I remembered 2016 and 2017 only because I had my sons in those years.

And, of course, #2. The Year 2020.

I didn’t bother adding everything that happened that year. “COVID” and a few random words like, “Masks!” were enough to convey the memory. Because it’s all too much, and also too numb to be captured on a tiny zine page. Even now, five years later. It’s not that I particularly suffered all that much from the virus we know as “Covid-19,” (thank God, my family was lucky), but the world suffered, and since I live in the world, my world tilted as a result. I can’t even say exactly when it started tilting — maybe it was also in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 — but 2020 was when it tipped over. I fell over and flipped back up again, somehow different. Honestly, world-views were shattered. They’re still shattering. I went full-Idler.

Anyway, after the rupture of Covid, it’s like the years couldn’t contain everything that happened to me. The zine pages weren’t enough; I couldn’t fit myself in. Ink everywhere, everything at random, new memories popping up just as I thought I’d finished with the pages. No births, but some deaths, and even the biggest one, I couldn’t fit, or didn’t want to fit — it was beyond the format — and trying to catalog the rush of change and then reversion and then change and then–

I didn’t realize my decade could be divided so neatly between “ordinary” — ho-hum, having babies and raising them and work and whatever, to the point where I couldn’t recall the distinct days — and “momentous” — the rush and rumble of a boulder rolling downhill, of huge changes, bad changes, good changes, trials and errors (so many errors), (so many trials), and now I’m back where I seemingly started from in 2015: in the thick of teaching, raising my children, trying to write and publish, and wondering if I’ll ever get the hang of any of it.

But I’m definitely different. That much is true.

Which is good. One should probably change after ten years.

Ten Titles, Ten Characters (from my notebook, January 2024)

January 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I was flipping through my notebooks from 2024, mostly to see how many books I’d read in the past year (more than 40, by the way… so not bad, but now I’m thinking I want to set a challenge for myself to read over 60 this year), when I came across an entry from my January notebook that included two “Try Ten” lists.

One was ten titles, one was ten characters. Here are the lists:

Ten Titles

  1. Bicycle Repair
  2. Professor _________’s Guide to the Magically Perplexed
  3. Went Away Sailing
  4. Grandma’s Gnocchi
  5. I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream
  6. Brennivin. Shot. Cold.
  7. Stolen Goods
  8. The Voice in the Heating Vent
  9. Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat
  10. Whenever You Think of Criticizing

Ten Characters

  1. An old cop who serves evictions now
  2. The ghost of a young woman’s dead twin
  3. A boy who is in love with his best friend
  4. A foreign cleaning lady
  5. A tree that can communicate with a human
  6. An old man who stole a fellow soldier’s ID back in Vietnam
  7. The driver of a bus that takes devils in and out of Hell
  8. A middle-aged woman who once got to spend her afternoons with a unicorn but hasn’t seen one in decades
  9. An oracle/fortune teller who has lost her power
  10. A man who must take care of his sick wife in quarantine (he hasn’t seen her in a week?)

I’ll admit, that last character entry doesn’t quite make sense to me looking back at it now. Has he not seen her in a week but now can see her and must take care of her? Or has he been taking care of her in quarantine but she left him and hasn’t been seen in a week?

I really don’t know.

The funny thing is that I used one of those titles and wrote a short story to go along with it. “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream.” It was a writing challenge I did with my Creative Writing students where we had to write a short story in one hour. I participated and used this title.

The story turned out all wrong. I tried writing an unreliable narrator and it was an utter failure. Just didn’t live up to the title at all. And I tried an ironic twisty ending that was pretty stupid, frankly.

But I still like the title. I’m tempted, even now, to use the title again and write a different story. And why not?

In fact, it might be kind of funny to write several short stories, all with the same title, all different, and then put them together into a collection.

Or maybe that would be utterly not funny but just kind of stupid. I have a difficult time distinguishing between the cool and the stupid until I’ve done the thing. Before I’ve done the thing, it seems pretty cool. After I’ve done the thing, it feels pretty stupid. I have two choices, then: either keep doing the cool-sounding thing, hoping one day it won’t turn out stupid, or stop doing any of the cool-sounding things. Which means I’ll have done nothing.

I think I know which choice to make.

Better to write a dozen (or more) stupid stories than to write none at all.

Anyway, some of these ideas and characters and titles don’t sound particularly interesting at the moment, but I often wonder if these little seeds and sparks of ideas might turn out to be pretty great once put into action. It’s the action that matters. The telling of the tale. Because otherwise they’re just a list of words. I could write a dozen stories called “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream” and they would all be different. Who can say, just from that title, what stories may come?

This is why the ideas really don’t matter all that much. I can come up with ten more ideas right now. So can any of us.

It’s the weaving of the story that matters. The particular sequence of the tale is what counts.

I do wonder, though, what would happen if I combined a title from one list with a character from the other. Might be a fun game. What kind of challenge could I make for myself in this new month of a new year. From two lists in January 2024 to ten stories in January 2025…

To do that, I’d have to get over my trepidation. My worry that I’m not up to the task of writing ten stories in one month. Can I do that? Can I get over that hump, that lack of confidence?

My husband said that the word he would use to describe my 2024 was “confidence,” but I just don’t see it. I feel the opposite, like my confidence is slowly draining away. But maybe he can see something I can’t.

I hesitate to even set a challenge like ten stories in one month because what if I can’t do it? What if it stresses me out? What if I simply don’t have the time, on top of all the other duties and goals I’ve already set?

Might be fun though… the old cop serving evictions, entitled “Went Away Sailing,” and the old cop has to serve someone who never seems to be home, who might have gotten on a sailboat and drifted away, and the cop tries to find them, to serve the papers, yes, but also, just to see what it would be like to sail away from everything…

The old fortune teller who has lost her gift… every time she tries to tell a fortune and see the future, she sees her grandmother, bent over the kitchen table, rolling out potatoes and flour to make the gnocchi dough… Maybe she has to talk to her grandmother, and maybe she can’t break through, she’s lost her gift, after all…

The foreign cleaning lady hears a voice in the heating vent…

The driver of the Hell-bus… “Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat…”

(I could go on, but I’ll stop for now. The question I always have as I make up these stories and possibilities, is will my story end up being worthwhile? Will it have any meaning? Any emotion? Will readers enjoy it, or am I simply playing a word-association game with myself?)

To write ten stories in four weeks means roughly two or three stories every week. That seems like a lot, especially as I try to get NCL finished. Maybe the challenge isn’t to do it just in January, but to do a story every week? Or try to write ten stories in the first quarter? Or… I don’t know. Something.

I feel a pull toward this challenge. It’s not a coincidence that I opened my January 2024 notebook to this page with these two lists. I should ride it out. See where it goes.

I always was dissatisfied with that first “Ursula Le Guin” story. Time to try again. And the new year is the perfect time.

Pocket Notebook

July 27, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I keep a writer’s notebook, and since I also carry a backpack with me most places, I used to take the WNB with me everywhere.

But honestly, I hardly ever took the full-sized notebook out in public and wrote in it. Just too unwieldy.

I like the idea of having one notebook where I keep all my thoughts, but since I’ve been watching a bunch of notebook “advice” videos, I’ve warmed up to the idea that maybe I need different notebooks for different things and different situations.

I started writing my fiction in my “fiction notebook.” And then I bought a Leuchtturm 1917 notebook for my RPG notes. Then, finally, I bought a little pocket notebook to be my “on-the-go” notebook for random thoughts and ideas. Basically, a substitute for my main writer’s notebook.

I almost bought a Field Notes pocket notebook, but my kids really love these little blank comic book notebooks from the Unemployed Philosophers Guild, and they’re the right size to fit in my pants pockets, so I thought I’d go a little quirkier than Field Notes and get a notebook from the Unemployed Philosophers instead.

There are many to choose from, but I went with the Cloudspotting one to start because cloud-watching is also a hobby I’ve wanted to start for a while, so I thought I could capture my random thoughts and sketch and identify clouds at the same time.

So far, about half-way through the notebook, I’m glad that I’ve started carrying it around almost everywhere I go. First, it allows me to be unshackled from having to take my backpack everywhere in order to have my full-sized notebook with me. I can leave my backpack at home when I go for a walk around the neighborhood or to the library or wherever, and yet I can still jot down some ideas in my cloudspotting notebook if necessary.

I find that I DO jot down things more often now that I’m carrying the pocket-sized notebook. It’s not nearly as weird to take out my little notebook and write a few lines of dialogue for a story or a blogging idea or whatever. And there’s the added bonus of getting to sketch some clouds if the mood takes me. (I don’t always use the cloud-sketching areas, though, so maybe next time I’ll get a more “normal” writing notebook.)

Often, I take the ideas in the pocket notebook and transfer them to my main notebook or use them in my fiction. I end up spending a lot of time during the day thinking about my fiction, about my writing ideas, and this, in turn, keeps my momentum going for my various writing projects. I’m less “stuck” since carrying around my pocket notebook.

In theory, I like the idea of one notebook for everything, but in practice, the multiple-notebooks strategy really does allow me to do more writing throughout the day. I grab my pocket notebook instead of my phone when I’m waiting in line or watching my kids at the park. I flip through it to reread earlier ideas and ruminate on them a bit more, sometimes expanding them, sometimes challenging or changing them. I look at the clouds and try to figure out which type they are, spending a few minutes sketching and paying attention to the weather and the wind.

And yeah, I like that my pocket notebook is a little different, that it’s got a bit more character than an ordinary Field Notes or whatever. I smile when I see the Cloudspotting cover. It’s kind of silly, but the silliness actually makes me want to use it more. I don’t know why, but the whimsy of a “cloud” notebook (or a “Captain’s Log” or “Neverland Passport”) gives me a jolt of pleasure that’s just strong enough to counteract the lure of my phone. I’m trying to break the habit of looking at my phone whenever I get bored, and if it means carrying around a quirky little notebook, then that’s what I’ll do.

And I’m getting more writing done too. Which is the whole point of a notebook anyway.

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