• As you read: Take notes! Underline what interests or surprises you, or anything you may have questions about. Write in the margins of the page. If you say something while you read, you won't fall asleep, and I guarantee you will remember what is most important to you about what you have read.

Premature Focusing

For the last two years of high school my English teacher marched back and forth at the front of the room commanding us to focus. She kept repeating, "Know what you want to say before you say it" but when I put pencil to paper I wrote what I did not intend--and that is how I have lived my life. How boring it would be if I did know what I wanted to say; how exciting that the act of writing and rewriting produces surprise. Her focus could not be mine--and of course I could not state the focus in advance of writing. The focus must arise from the draft.

Of course the page and my head are not completely blank. I come to the page with the life I have lived, all that I have seen and imagined, thought and wondered about, learned and unlearned. I have answers without questions, questions without answers, fears and hopes and concerns. Images. Fragments of ideas. Phrases. Memories.

I grab one and put it down. It is something that has bothered me but not enough to research it or think it through. It is sort of an unscratched itch. As I sit with my sketchbook open, the page empty, a scene comes to mind from the Durham Town Landing. In my mind, I see it ahead of me with a point of land marked by a tall pine jutting out from the right.

I begin to draw and my hand follows the line on the paper to see where it will take me. In drawing and writing, the act of making and creating reveals the true subject and the approach to the subject. But now the tree I see in my mind is no longer on the left, but it is on the right and it is not the tree at Durham Town Landing, but the tree at Half Mile Point in the lake at summer camp half a century ago. As I continue to draw, the tree now becomes a wind-bent pine that has survived many a storm and remains a landmark for every boat coming down Great Bay where the tidal water comes up to our town. I have brought that tree into focus the way I would if I were using a camera or if I were writing. I began thinking of one memory--one significant tree--and by allowing my mind and hand to wander, I discovered that I really wanted to explore the tree at Great Bay.

Writing and drawing are ways of paying attention and when we pay attention we learn. I discovered that pine in my drawing and in the writing above that reported the drawing. Sometimes I come to the writing (or drawing) without intent but many times I have an intent--to begin this chapter; to write a column questioning the teachers who assign homework to prove they are demanding, not to help their students learn; to celebrate Memorial Day; to recall a scene from my war; to explore the experience of seeing a woman you have loved for 50 years grow old.

My high school English teacher and many others wanted me to write from meaning, to know the context before I began to write, to have the big picture in mind. Teacher after teacher demanded a thesis statement before I began to write. They commanded that I report of the end of the mental journey before it began. What they were asking me to do was to have a significant thought before I did the thinking. Writing is not reported thought. Writing is more important than that. It is thinking itself.