Not a kept woman

            For awhile, I had an untreatable addiction to buying those how-to writing books. As writers, haven’t we all? That siren call is hard to resist.         

            One of my favorites is Stephen King’s “On Writing:  A Memoir of the Craft.” I’ve read him since I was about 10, sneaking his gruesome books into Catholic school, where they were surely contraband. In fact, I can’t remember a time when I was without a good Stephen King book. (I’m face-deep in “Under the Dome” right now, and I can’t find my way home.)

            “On Writing” is more like a memoir of King’s booze-soaked, cocaine-laced marathon writing sessions rather than a true instruction on craft. Good. That’s the way he meant it. At times hazy and at other points brutal in its clarity, the book does have some writing tips embedded along the way, but you have to skip through the primordial soup of King’s brilliant imagination to separate them.

            At the end, though, you’ve got a good little virtual toolbox. Amazing what’s in there. Even more amazing what’s not:  journaling. Uncle Stevie doesn’t recommend keeping a journal.

            Really? I don’t have to keep a journal? But I have so many lying around, because I buy them obsessively. Lined, unlined, spirals, macramé covers, sketch books, fine parchment paper, even three-by-five jotters. They’re in the car, my purse, my laptop bag, under the couch, in the bathroom, and by my bedside so that I can wake up abruptly out of an Ambien-induced coma and scribble something that I will later find frightening and incoherent.

            The entries that are scattered in these journals aren’t entries at all, but disjointed bits of lint and wrappers and such, like the bottom of a really big purse (or the floor of a 1981 Dodge Dart after a road trip with family). One-liners and pencil sketches of people with funny heads; recipes for things I’ll never cook. Dialogue with no characters attached to them. Titles of novels I may someday write. A suicide note. Things I’m positive my dog would say if he could speak.

            I use all those journals in no particular order, wherever I happen to be at the time. There are even leaves pressed in them from the grand finale of Rhode Island’s yearly fall foliage, sent to me by my 92 year-old grandmother, so that every time I crack a spine the heady smell of my childhood drifts out. (In the back of one with a pink fabric cover, I have a list of every lover I’ve ever had.)

            But no where in any of them are the clinical, cold writing exercises so revered by these how-to books; or pages of fanatical diatribe “from the heart” based on some pretentious writing prompt. Tedious obfuscation and drudgery.

            That’s the kind of thing that makes me feel like the journal is keeping me, instead of the other way around. Useless. And I refuse to be a kept woman (don’t tell my husband). Why have one more daily obligation to dread, like the gym or laundry? Where’s the inspiration in that?

            But still, I get pangs of guilt when I don’t scribble something proper in there. Like some alarm somewhere is going to sound off, and everyone will figure out that I’m an interloper.

            So to hear Stephen King, arguably THE master of the modern novel, say that it’s OK to throw the journals out the car window just bathes me with relief. Guess I can still keep filling pages with descriptions of things that may get me labeled as disturbed, the random inventories of junk in my drawers, and countdowns to meaningless events like big sales at Office Depot, none of which have any bearing on anything I write. (At least, I don’t think so, anyway.)

            Thanks, Uncle Stevie!

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