Journals Help Students Explore Their Wild Minds
by
Mark Weisberg

I teach a course I call Legal(?) Ethics and Professional Responsibility? I use the punctuation to suggest that rather than take for granted a separate branch of ethics called legal ethics, and rather than take for granted a separate branch of responsibility called professional responsibility, we ought to inquire what it might mean to have legal ethics, and what it might mean to have professional responsibility.

The course invites participants to examine professionalism by exploring relationships between personal and professional lives. I ask students to record their responses to this and other questions in a course journal. I ask them to write regularly in their journals and to submit them to me at the end of the term for me to grade. Acknowledging the contradiction in this instruction, I also encourage each person to write for himself or herself, not for me.

Most students need time to adjust to the freedom a journal offers. They aren't used to setting their own educational agendas; they aren't used to getting credit for attending to their personal opinions and for wondering how to integrate them into their professional lives. Most aren't used to writing without looking over their shoulders at an (imagined) teacher. They don't trust themselves (to do it), and they don't trust me (to mean it).

It usually takes most students several weeks and at least one tutorial with me before they begin to become comfortable with their journals. Some never do adjust to the form.

I also teach writing courses -- creative and expository writing courses. I'm always looking for material for these courses. Last semester, right after I'd finished my first round of Ethics tutorials, I was reading a book about writing a friend had recommended. The book was written by Natalie Goldberg, a poet and novelist, and it was called Wild Mind.

Wild Mind is a book about locking up your editor when you write and releasing your creator. Goldberg calls the creative spirit a person's Wild Mind, and in her book offers dozens of exercises for getting in touch with your Wild Mind. These she calls writing practice.

Wild Mind is a wonderful book: clear-headed, funny, full of great stories and terrific advice for writers. Although it wasn't explicitly about journals -- in fact, Goldberg contrasts journal writing with writing practice, claiming the former asks writers to think, the latter demands they don't think -- I brought it to Ethics class the next day, intending to let students know about it, thinking it might offer a few suggestions to someone who felt stuck in her or his journal.

I like to read to people, so when I got to class, I decided to read the part at the beginning of the book that compares the rules of writing practice to sex. Here's what I read:

For fifteen years now, at the beginning of every writing workshop, I have repeated the rules for writing practice. So, I will repeat them again here. And I want to say why I repeat them: Because they are the bottom line, the beginning of all writing, the foundation of learning to trust your own mind. Trusting your own mind is essential for writing. Words come out of the mind. And I believe in these rules. Perhaps I'm a little fanatical about them. A friend, teasing me, said, "You act as if they are the rules to live by, as though they apply to everything." I smiled. "Okay, let's try it. Do they apply to sex?"

I stuck up my thumb for rule number one. "Keep your hand moving." I nodded yes.

Index finger, rule number two. "Be specific." I let out a yelp of glee. It was working.

Finger number three. "Lose control." It was clear that sex and writing were the same thing.

Then, number four. "Don't think," I said. Yes, for sex, too. I nodded.

I proved my point. My friend and I laughed.

Go ahead, try these rules for tennis, hang gliding, driving a car, making a grilled cheese sandwich, disciplining a dog or a snake. Okay. They might not always work. They work for writing. Try them.

1. Keep your hand moving. When you sit down to write, whether it's for ten minutes or an hour, once you begin, don't stop. If an atom bomb drops at your feet eight minutes after you have begun and you were going to write for ten minutes, don't budge. You'll go out writing.
   What is the purpose of this? Most of the time when we write, we mix up the editor and creator. Imagine your writing hand as the creator and the other hand as the editor. Now bring your two hands together and lock your fingers. This is what happens when we write. The writing hand wants to write about what she did Saturday night: "I drank whisky straight all night and stared at a man's back across the bar. He was wearing a red T-shirt. I imagined him to have the face of Harry Belafonte. At three A.M., he finally turned my way and I spit into the ashtray when I saw him. He had the face of a wet mongrel who had lost his teeth." The writing hand is three words into writing this first sentence -- "I drank whisky . . ." -- when the other hand clenches her fingers tighter and the writing hand can't budge. The editor says to the creator, "Now, that's not nice, the whisky and stuff. Don't let people know that. I have a better idea: 'Last night, I had a nice cup of warmed milk and then went to bed at nine o'clock.' Write that. Go ahead. I'll loosen my grip so you can."
   If you keep your creator hand moving, the editor can't catch up with it and lick it. It gets to write out what it wants. . . .
2. Lose control. Say what you want to say. Don't worry if it's correct, polite, appropriate. Just let it rip . . . (I)t is remarkable how I can tell students, "Okay, say what you want, go for it," and their writing takes a substantial turn toward authenticity.
3. Be specific. Not car, but Cadillac. Not fruit, but apple. Not bird, but wren. Not a codependent, neurotic man, but Harry, who runs to open the refrigerator for his wife, thinking she wants an apple, when she is headed to the gas stove to light her cigarette . . .
4. Don't think. We usually live in the realm of second or third thoughts, thoughts on thoughts, rather than in the realm of first thoughts, the real way we flash on something. Stay with the first flash . . . .

The next day I was walking past the secretarial office and saw one of my students sitting in a chair in the hall, waiting for another class and reading Wild Mind. When I came to class next week, I saw several more copies of the book. Since I hadn't assigned this book, and since these were law students, you can imagine my surprise.

Even more surprising and pleasing was how often Wild Mind appeared in student journals. People responded to Goldberg, took her to heart, and trusting one's mind became a theme in their journals. Several students wrote stories in their journals, some fictional, some real. All reported that they had decided to write the stories after having read Wild Mind, and that in writing those stories they discovered important information about themselves and about their ethics, information they had forgotten or repressed. They discovered what they cared about and accepted responsibility for caring about it. They connected ethical events in their personal lives with ethical problems in their professional lives. They discovered that trusting their minds left them feeling empowered, enriched, able to be responsible for their own meanings.