Books
Diana Raab

Writers and Their Notebooks

Personal reflections on the vital role of the notebook in creative writing, from Dorianne Laux, Sue Grafton, John Dufresne, Kyoko Mori, and more.
This collection of essays by established professional writers explores how their notebooks serve as their studios and workshops—places to collect, to play, and to make new discoveries with language, passions, and curiosities. For these diverse writers, the journal also serves as an ideal forum to develop their writing voice, whether crafting fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.
Some include sample journal entries that have since developed into published pieces. Through their individual approaches to keeping a notebook, the contributors offer valuable advice, personal recollections, and a hearty endorsement of the value of using notebooks to document, develop, and nurture a writer’s creative spark.
271 printed pages
Original publication
2018
Publication year
2018
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Quotes

  • roey maliach-reshefhas quoted5 years ago
    Baker, Nicholson. U and I: A True Story. New York: Random House, 1991.

    Didion, Joan. “On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching toward Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.

    Dunlap, Louise. Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing. Oakland: New Village Press, 2007.

    Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

    Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Boston: Shambala, 1996.

    Junker, Howard, ed.
  • roey maliach-reshefhas quoted5 years ago
    For me, the trick works; the words that pour onto my journal’s pages seem as separate from me as water from air. I didn’t become a regular journal keeper, nor a writer, until I was taught the technique of free-writing. From the time I was eight years old until I turned twentyeight, my journaling followed more or less the same pattern. I would keep a journal for a few weeks or months, then set it aside. When I returned to it, my words embarrassed me so much that I would bury them deep in the detritus of my closet, or shred them into silent confetti. Then, in a workshop I took on a whim, a teacher introduced me to the concept of automatic writing. I no longer felt that I had to take responsibility for whatever spilled onto the page. My not-quite-conscious mind seemed a person distinct from the self I knew.
  • roey maliach-reshefhas quoted5 years ago
    The purpose of this journal is to record parts of my life I might otherwise forget
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