My dialectical notebook: Lamott, King, Diaz

Hopefully, by looking at what I am doing here, you will get an idea of how to do your own dialectical notebook.  You get to pick what you are responding to.  In the process, you will have hopefully had a fuller experience reading and have connected with the text better.

Anne Lamott, "Shitty First Drafts"
I like this section because Lamott comes across as truthful.  She is saying what Allen tried so hard to say:  that everyone works at writing (except for her).  And she is managing to be funny about it.	"I have known some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident.  Not one of them writes elegant first drafts.  All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much" (301).
Process.  The final product is often worth the work.  Lamott is telling her reader that writers are not what Allen would call the Inspired Writer.	"We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid.  The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time" (301).
I agree.  I have never found writing rapturous.  And as I get older and have a better idea of what I am doing, my first drafts get worse and more painful in the making.	"For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous.  In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts" (302).
This is a first part of the writing process.  This is where words first meet paper.  This is where we find direction.  Mine don't look like this, but I have had quite a few students who find what they are looking for at the end of their writing and not at the beginning.	Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means.  There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go—but there was not way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages" (302).
Should I admit to this one?  I have never had dogs, but I understand and identify with the metaphor.  I know how hard some writing pushes to get on paper and never wanted to know the consequences of keeping it in.  This may be why some writers carry notebooks/daybooks/journals around like Steven King carries books.  I do both.	And there are also the dogs:  let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keep those crazy ravenous dogs contained" (303).
Stephen King, "What Writing Is"
They are transporting.  I like this phrase because there is no other thing that can transport a person to another world and be so engaging that pain and the rest of the "real" world is tuned out.	"books are a uniquely portable magic" (305).
I do this.  I carry books to read at any given moment.  Having a smart phone has only made carrying the books easier.  I currently have five of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books on my phone for when I have the moments to read them. I agree with the purgatory comment.  And it is funny.	"You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch:  mile-long lines at tollbooth plazas, the fifteen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor (who's got some yank-off in there threatening to commit suicide because he/she is flunking Custom Kurmfurling 101) to come out so you can get his signature on a drop-card, airport lounges, laundromats on rainy afternoons, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy is running late and you have to wait half and hour in order to have something sensitive mauled.  At such times a book is vital.  If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or another, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve)" (305-06).
The magic of books allows a reader to enter the conceived world of the author.	"We're having a meeting of the minds" (307).
Writing is serious business.  Some writers do have the weight of worlds upon them.  A beginning writer, or any who is starting a new page, should revere the process and how daunting that blank page can be.	"Come to it any way but lightly.  Let me say it again:  you must not come lightly to the blank page" (307).
Junot Diaz, "Becoming a Writer"
I know this place.  It is transitional.  I like this section because it gives form to a place that many writers have been.	"All the other novels I tried sucked worse than the stalled one, and even more disturbing, I seemed to have lost the ability to write short stories.  It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn't find an exit" (319).
I agree.  It is like anything.  If you give up, despair, scare away, not work at it, you won't be accomplished at it.  It won't be worth the doing.	"You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden.  In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway" (320).