3 Lessons on Writing from Joan Didion's Notes
"It gets me past the blank terror."
This is how Didion defines a writer: “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.”1 Anyone who has read Didion’s writing will not be surprised by this definition—her prose could only have been written by a person who passionately arranged words, hour after hour, day after day.
Before I went to see Joan Didion’s papers at the New York Public Library, I read all the reports claiming the archive gives us new insight into Didion’s writing process. Of course, I wanted more information—I wanted to know more of the nitty-gritty details regarding Didion’s process. So, I made an appointment and read through her papers. As I did so, I kept my attention trained on her process so that I could write the report I wanted to read. And now here it is!
1) Collect Fragments
Some images shimmered for Didion. She saw pictures in her mind and some stood out. This, of course, makes sense considering how visual her writing can be. She tells us,
Look hard enough, and you can't miss the shimmer. It's there. You can't think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don't talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.2
As Didion prepared to write, she collected what she called “fragments.” Many of them record images. Here is a fragment she recorded in preparation for “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”:
Sitting around on the bleachers one early evening at the warehouse. Paul is there, and the girl with the fox-fur hat, Lynley, and a girl that Paul doesn’t seem to much want around. She is looking for her boyfriend. She found a note on his car for her to meet him at a motel near Paul’s, and she thought that might mean in code to meet him at the Warehouse…3
Didion’s “fragments” also include bits of dialogue she salvages from her reporter’s notebook.
Michael Laton: “A happening depends on the happeners.”
Among the “fragments,” Didion lists the signs she saw on Haight Street in San Francisco:
Didion’s lists (like “Signs on Haight Street”) along with her fragments strike me as a particular kind of noticing appropriate for a reporter—noticing details that will enhance a story—and Didion noticed so much that she had quite a lot to pick from when it came to writing her essay.
She’s still doing something similar decades later when, preparing to write The Year of Magical Thinking, she notes:
THINGS PEOPLE SAID TO ME AT UCLA:
This leads to the second lesson, which is moving information among different writing formats.
2) Transfer Notes to Different Formats
Didion’s handwriting is among the worst I’ve seen, so I was grateful that she typed many of her notes. This, it seems, was part of her process—moving words from her reporter’s notebook to fuller typed paragraphs describing the same material.
As Nathaniel Rich tells us in his introduction to South and West: From a Notebook, Didion’s note-taking often fell into stages. First, she would take rough notes by hand, then she would type them up at the end of the day. Rich explains,
These notes represent an intermediate stage of writing, between shorthand and first draft, composed in an uncharacteristically casual, immediate style.4
From these notes, Didion would start crafting her essays. Here is a sample of a quickly written note she took while researching Huey Newton (founder of the Black Panthers) for a section of her essay, “The White Album.”
To be black in America is to be in a constant state of rage”—Huey P. Newton, quoting James Baldwin
Later, Didion would type up other quotes she heard from Newton. For example, she would use the following quote to end the section on Newton in “The White Album.”
Didion’s writing process is one of expansion and then constriction. She expands her hasty hand-written notes into longer typed paragraphs. And then, she selects small bits from the typed notes to include in her essays.
3) The Work is Never Perfect
When a young writer asked Didion what advice she’d give to a writer just starting out, Didion said:
Rewrite. Don’t be afraid to rewrite.5
After spending time with Didion’s archive, this answer did not surprise me. In an interview with Hilton Als, she explained that when she is working on a book,
I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have…At the end of the day, I mark up the pages that I’ve done….I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past the blank terror.6
The rhythms and repetitions of Didion’s writing process show up all over her writing—especially in her later memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights—with their multiple refrains.
Didion once described how she learned how to type by typing Hemingway’s short stories. It seems fitting then, that she would hone her prose by retyping her own words.
So this is perhaps the most surprising thing I saw in Didion’s archive: her personal copy of The Year of Magical Thinking, which she seems to have edited post-publication. Why did she do this? I’m not sure. I searched to see if her edits correspond with other editions of her work—they don’t. Then I checked the play version of The Year of Magical Thinking, but many of the lines she crossed out appear in the script.
She begins on the first page with some small cross-outs.
But Didion’s edits get more significant.
For now, I’m interpreting these edits as a sign of a writer—“a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper”—even after those words are published and acclaimed.
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Yours in note-taking,
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Didion, Joan. “Why I Write.” The New York Times, 5 Dec. 1976. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/05/archives/why-i-write-why-i-write.html.
“Why I Write”
NYPL, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne papers, 60.13.
Rich, Nathaniel, “Forward,” Didion, Joan. South and West: From a Notebook. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017.
Parker, Scott F. Conversations with Joan Didion. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2018, p. 156.
Parker, Scott F. Conversations with Joan Didion. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2018, p. 109.
Love this! Joan Didion's "fragments" remind me of the lists I keep on the Notes app in my phone: Overheard, Things I believe, Big list of things to write about, and Walks.
Fascinating to hear how Didion edited own book AFTER publication. Magical Thinking and Blue Nights two of my favourites of hers.