Journal Guidelines, 2060

You’ll be expected to keep a journal throughout the semester—not a diary, but a writer’s journal. Here’s what fiction writer Rebecca Curtis has to say about why this is so important:

But the best stuff I've done is the stuff I didn't really intend to be anything 'important'. John Gardner, I think, in the Art of Fiction, or something, has a suggestion to write nonsense, or top-of-the-head stuff, in a journal for twenty minutes every day. This was the best suggestion I ever got. It's like how athletes need to stretch, or musicians to practice scales, maybe. The writer is just writing whatever comes to their head, a list of things they're angry about, a dream they had, a ridiculous poem, for twenty minutes without stopping, and without the expectation that anything 'worthwhile' will come out of it, and nothing usually does; but this process helps the writer immensely, or at least it helps me. It frees me up.

                      (http://www.sunspinner.org/issue-spring06/feature-curtis-01.html)

You won’t have to write every day, although you certainly may; but I would like to see at least 2 twenty-minute entries a week. Acquire a notebook or nice blank book that you will use exclusively for this purpose (separate from your class notebook) and bring it with you everywhere. Date your entries: I’ll collect these once around mid-semester to check your progress, and again at the end of the semester. They will be evaluated on the basis of regularity and obvious effort. In other words, although what you write in your journal may very well be playful—and maybe it should be, in order to have the liberating effect Curtis describes—it is, nevertheless, something you should take quite seriously. Serious play. This might include bits of poetry or fiction, ideas for poems or stories you might write, observations about people or the world around you, scraps of overheard conversation that strike you as suggestive….In other words, the purpose of the journal is to encourage you to pay more attention to the world around you and its latent literary potential—and to capture those impressions before they have a chance to drift away again.

If you ever have questions about whether something is appropriate for your journal, just ask.

Try to write steadily for 20 minutes, rather than allowing yourself to get lost in thought or fixated on the perfect word.