By Dan Collins
I write for ten minutes at the end of each day. For this purpose, I keep a spiral notebook by my bed or within easy reach at all times. I don't write anything in particular, any more than pianists have a special tune in mind when they play scales, but the exercise keeps my writing muscles in shape.
More than anything else, this habit keeps me writing. I have heard that Sam Beckett realized he was a writer while standing one night on a Dublin pier, staring out at the sea, but such an approach to authorhood is useless to me. Of course, grandiose scenes have inspired me, teachers and friends have encouraged me, occasionally a thunderbolt of unsought poetry has spewed out and "forced" me to write, as though I were the lead in some Greenwich Village melodramaÑbut none of these are so reliable as a notebook. None of them follow wherever I go, patiently hearing the bland along with the flashy, the stupid along with the clever, the ugly and the graceful; only a notebook does this. Only a notebook makes itself so humble, so dull as to listen when I lack grace, or even grammar; Beckett's Irish Sea couldn't do this, it has too much personality.
I think most people who keep extended journals live in places where writing is either encouraged or tolerated, but this was not the case in my parents' house. Heaven spared me the more common torments a writing child may faceÑphilistine parents, journal-snatching siblingsÑreplacing these with more relaxing threats. Comfort, in fact, surrounded me, in soft couches built for napping, in four cats and a dog milling about and scratching, in plenty to eat or drink within ten second's walk. Such pitfallsÑrarely noticed, and thus dangerousÑfilled the house. Growing up there, I never needed go further than the next room to meet my needs, and so rarely did. Human society, of course, would not fit in the house, but even here we had the next best thingÑon the living room floor, beside the stereo and the couch, in twenty-six inch color.
Things revolved around the television in my parents' house; the screen was hardly ever dark. For my mother, the tube was no great problem, and so she never thought to turn it off. For my father, the tube was information, fuel for his flaming citizenship (I have never met anyone who loved news so much). For myself, the tube was Star Trek, MTV, or Doctor WhoÑ somewhere to go besides Sixteen Acres, something to do besides homework.
If anyone had a problem, want or need, let them spread out in the opiate waves of sound and forget the pain. And they would forget, for if the tube could not untangle the thoughts or sweeten the feelings, let the sufferer spread out for twenty minutes more and thought itself would vanish, feeling itself fade. And we would spread out in my house and rest, and forget, and fade until, more often than not, either my father or myself would fall sleep before the set, and dad would wake up snarling if you turned it off.
The machine, like so much else in my parents' house, numbed most potently when least noticed. It thus posed a second, more slippery threat, one that still touches me when I write at home. The house was smallÑfive roomsÑand when the television spoke, the sound filled every room, every corner, every closetÑnot the words so much as the narcotic whir that spewed from the machine no matter what the speaker said. Eventually, when my ears were trained to hear it, the sound would slip through the house to find me, catch me, pull my mind from the room, from my books, to the brilliant, undifficult screen. Here, the situation directly opposed my writing, for ten minutes concentration was a novelty in that house. I still cannot pass an active television without feeling dullÑor rather without ceasing to feel dullness, or numbness, or anything elseÑand it amazes me that I ever escaped.
Just after my junior year of high school, I spent three summery weeks at a writing program in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Myself and about seventy-five other childrenÑtoo young to study, too wealthy to workÑhad come together on a tiny campus where the one television had no antenna and the one radio station played classical music, jazz, and news reports. I had signed up the previous spring, thinking the program looked neat, not knowing about the television, not suspecting that those three weeks would somehow serve as de-tox to a habit I didn't know I had. I signed up, not suspecting how many thoughts would clang for how many hours against the inside of my skull, not knowing how I would restart my life there in a way probably more important than any other change of my late teens. I sometimes wonder if I would have signed up had I suspected how different things would look to me when I left, but in any case, I did sign up and suddenly there I was.
The campus hid itself up in the Berkshires, several miles out of town, and maybe a quarter mile off the narrow, badly-lit road that wandered north to a string of villages even smaller than Great Barrington. At the end of the shaded drive a clutch of classrooms, two dormitories, a dining hall and a faculty house made up most of the human architecture to be seen in the area. To the north stood a wall of pines taller than most buildings back home; to the east and south the trees grew just as tall and had the help of a mountain to keep out the barbarians. To the west things lay almost unprotectedÑonly a small hill and a vast unmowed field nicknamed "Siberia" hid the campus from the road.
But we were hidden. At that range, the traffic roared no more than a gust of wind. The nights were truly nights, starlit and silent, especially in Siberia. The dawn had a unique beauty in it, moving luminously through the defensive masonry of tree and hill and field, bringing all to life. We had not walled out the sun, and the two or three dawns I saw there were all strangely memorable.
It was in this scene, after a weekend of wandering about and sleeping late, that I took my first notes in a "notebook," and that I had the concept of a "freewriting notebook" explained to me. The term "freewriting" is too technical to take seriouslyÑrather like clinging to your teddy bear and calling it "tactile stress release." It speaks around the point.
"Just keep the pencil moving," Alan said. Alan was the shaggy, blond, bespectacled leader of the group I shared with perhaps a dozen other writers and thinkers, and I have heard his advice repeated two or three times since that summer. "It doesn't matter what you write, letters or words," he spoke in the same semimeditative tone he always used (his thick glasses increased this meditative look), calmly, deliberately continuing, "So long as you are putting something on the page, lines or dots if need be, for the next ten minutes. Let's try it."
I never received more explanation than that; I looked around the room, hoping someone else would start writing first, and when someone started, so did I. It was tougher than it sounded; by the end of six minutes I was wondering what the hell I was supposed to write next. But I kept writing, and ended up with a page of rambling notes, the first of hundreds.
That was also the summer I started reading Plato. He taught me that writers essentially seal up thought in words, in forms. Alice Walker and Mike Royko, then, are alike at least in thisÑthey shape, crush and reshape sentence after sentence, line after line, until their structure, be it novel or essay, stands meaningfully on its own.
I think it is appropriate that there, as I learned to gather words into huge, unsteady piles, I should have found this new direction, this quest to build better and better and nearly-divine models out of my new-found language. There, in the numberless closet where I slept and learned of Mozart, in the cluttered science lab where we sweated and scribbled among Victorian microscopes, bottled newts, and languid drafts (for a prodigious heat had seized the hills that month) I first found speech, and the meaning of speech, and subjects worth speaking about. And it was right.
For several years now, I have looked down at the growing stack of notebooks beneath my bed and smiled. In them, I think, I have some grip on my past. But I have taken great care not to read the notes. When I have gone through them, I have usually found something other than what I sought.
Recently, I wondered why I've held onto the notebooks at all. It was all very good to write each night, but if I didn't even read the things, what was the point of keeping them? I tried to count how many novels had sprung from those endless pages, how many poems.
The answer was "none," and this disappointed me. Mozart, after all, composed any number of pieces in his headÑshould not I have brought up at least one poem after four years of coughing ink? I persuaded myself, perhaps foolishly, to reread my notes from the start, to seek out those crucial moments, to be sure there was no stray sliver of genius there.
Starting through the notes, my hopes of a misty Avalon, recorded with omniscient clarity and spread out nobly on the page, immediately fell to the ground and scattered. The best momentsÑvisions of flying on the tire-swing, or walking with Kara or Vicki, or swimming in the stream and counting stars as they fellÑwere gone, and in their place were melancholic sighs, empty rhetoric, pages and pages of self-absorbed monologue. At best, I ranted about girls who might have liked me, had I spent less time stressing and more time smiling; more often, I was not that clear.
My memory, of course, had plenty of clear, wonderful images in it, but probably not many realistic ones. I remembered happy scenes, blissful and idyllic nights, but precious few such moments had fallen right onto the page. When the best things had happened I had not been writing.
At the end of the first three weeks' account, I found one of several very distressing passages. On July seventeenth, my last day in Great Barrington, I found a problem that, four years later, is really no less of a problem:
So, by 1:30 I'll be gone. This place has been really strange. I want to say I've loved this, the same way I wanted to say I love Cathy Braun. The same is true for both, you don't know . . .
If there was anything to be gained from these notebooks it was knowledge, but it seems I wrote the wrong knowledge down. I had enjoyed the pleasant scenes too thoroughly to preserve them, I think; in any case my notebook had only stated the obvious. The only conclusion I have drawn so far is that, while it is one thing to visit Avalon, it is quite another to bring it home with you.
I have another image in that notebook, put there at 9:01 a.m., my first entry on July sixth.
Saw a dragonfly on my way from breakfast, today. It was sitting in the road, basking in the sun and when I approached, it flew as far back as its wings were ready to take it. I took another step and it flew to the left, and then began a stream of powered jumps, finally landing behind me, where it had started.
It reminded me of a knight on a chessboard, going all that way, only to end up where he began.
I am in love with this image; so in love that I have never written about it to my satisfaction. I do not know what the pattern means, but I am quite sure that it does mean, and that its meaning is very important to me. If I have kept my notes for a reason, that reason is tied up in this passage.
About a week after I wrote it, I used the image to show how far I'd come in three weeks, only to end up where I'd started. It was a pleasant structure, a high school level simile, but it could not contain the topic. It picked up the pattern of motion, just as one is taught to do in poetry class, but it stopped with the pattern, failed to complete the image, to bring it to life. The simile held no stream of powered jumps, and so the 'fly was powerless. The 'fly was not a knight, and so he was ignoble. The image outgrew the simile, outgrew it with embarrassing speed; it is still out there, to my discredit, waiting to be drawn in its full meaning, waiting to be drawn in blasting heat, in adolescent sweat, in the thick New England breeze, and in the miraculous sunlight gleaming onto glassy wings, onto swaying walls of trees.
And that's why I keep my notebooks.