A Pulse Before Shelf Life: Literary Advice on Notebook-Writing as Event

Abstract

This contribution analyzes guidebooks that deal specifically with keeping a writer’s notebook, a process-document that may elude the common association of creative writing with its published literary commodities. Creative writing’s pedagogical question “can it be taught?” is complicated since this “it” is so poorly codified by the notebook. I consider three groupings of advice in the notebook-guidebooks in relation to that complexity and discuss their uselessness where writing invents part of its pedagogical needs only in the process of its own happening. Firstly, the guidebooks take on a radical process-pedagogical approach. They promote a kind of irresolute and unpredictable (“end-less”) writing that discovers its objects in the event of their coming-to-be, instead of hypothesizing them beforehand. Note-taking appears here as a self-creative event rather than a preplanned act—a means without an end. Secondly, rather than providing poietic writing recipes, the guidebooks give advice on writerly attitudes or dispositions. The elements of art are presented as existing latently in the world and the practice of note-keeping orients their drawing-out and literary becoming since its technology straddles the contextual and the textual (“creative receptivity”). Thirdly, when addressing the move from the notebook’s writing-for-writing’s sake toward an eventual literary commodity, the guidebooks resist concluding writing’s “invention phase” absolutely. Rereading and rewriting in the notebook continue to inform events that exceed and requalify the intermediate junctures of the literary work’s development (“besideness”).