GETTING RE-STARTED WRITING

JOURNAL: MAY 7, 2021 (Manila)

It has been some time (months) since I last wrote a journal entry or anything, for that matter, other than technical writing for consulting projects I am now a part of and which have taken most, if not all, of my time.  The consulting work on an education study has required me to spend many hours a day doing research, interviewing different people, running focused group discussions, leaving little, if any, time to do original or creative writing. 

A good part of that is also what I call “writer laziness”.   I have always needed some idea in my head or a brainchild to push me to get started.  No idea, no start.  And even with an idea, it takes a while to get it on paper.  I am not, you might say, a writer who sees writing as a natural thing to do; a vocation, spending every day writing based on a mindset attuned to writing as an act even if the inspiration were lacking.  For them, writing is a habit done daily, some task they would do to nudge to life a latent idea or theme they had inside that could be given life on paper. 

It was said that John Steinbeck, the American Nobel Laureate for Literature, would start each morning at his writing desk sharpening his pencils and spending time warming up by writing short descriptions of everyday objects or ordinary events that happened.  It was his way of warming up similar to what an athlete would do at the start of practice or a game.  I don’t recall where I first read this this “factoid” or even know if it were true or was some made-up fiction.  Whatever, it left an image in my mind of what a serious writer would do each day.  It is something I need to learn to do.

I’ve kept some kind of journal on and off since my college days in the late 1970s.  It has been very uneven with large gaps in between and empty spaces.  I don’t know if it will be able to tell a coherent story.  The journal was first written in longhand in different notebooks now scattered in my different storage boxes.  By the 1990s onward, I discovered computers and WordPerfect (replaced later, by a superior Word) and began doing my writing, including my occasional journal entries, on a computer and saving my text in different storage formats:  floppy discs, compact discs, and lastly in a hard drive.

The beauty of handwritten notebooks is that you could include drawings to add color and depth to the writing.  For example, in January 1980, in my senior year at St. Mary’s College, I took a one-month January term course entitled “Literature by the Sea” with an elderly professorial couple, Norman and Mary Springer.  That whole month I kept a journal in a notebook of what we read and discussed daily and the side trips we did to the Point Reyes Peninsula, the drives along Highway 1, and times we walked into the small down of Stinson Beach where we would have the chance to meet the Stinsonettes (our name for the locals) in the single local community store. 

Every morning that month when the weather was not stormy, I would walk on the beach especially at low tide to see what I could find of interest, particularly of the biological kind.  On most occasions I would see sand dollars and their cousin, the starfish.  These, I would sketch in my journal notebook as I reported on my find.  On one occasion after an evening storm that let up enough to take an exploratory walk along the beach, I chanced upon the carcass of a dead Surf Scoter, a black diving duck common along the Pacific coastline.  This I took back to the backyard table in the house where I measured it (imagining myself as an ornithologist) and drew different perspectives of it using pencil and gray water color.  The handwritten, hand-drawn journals got replaced by an electronic one; more efficient but less alive.

After having stopped writing more creatively these past few months, now is a good time as any to re-start this creative process.  A good place to start is to go back to journal writing and to use this, first, as a way to observe the world and report and describe it.  Nothing too deep.  Just use this process as a way of practicing the art of observation and the craft of writing.  If this leads stories to tell in writing or to better analytical pieces later, that would be a boon.  But for now, this will be about developing a discipline for writing, a habit of daily output, and a motivation to create something others might appreciate.