It seems obvious, but it isn’t. I often find myself suggesting to emerging writers that they keep their eyes open as they go about their day, not spend it bent over their phones. Frankly, I think that’s important for everyone, if we’re going to live our best lives. Later, I think it’s just as important to reflect on what we’ve seen, and to write it down in a journal.

For me, the first step in this process is make notes about incidents I observe, or lovely natural moments; moments of beauty. I carry a notebook for that, although I sometimes use my phone’s note function–preferably in a way that doesn’t draw attention, say, from people whose argument I’m transcribing. Then I think it’s valuable to write up the notes as soon as possible in a journal, thinking about those arresting and potentially useful moments. You can fire up a search engine and find plenty of research on how we both process and retain information better when we use a pen and paper. And if people are going to use them in their writing, the observations need to sink down deep in the subconscious before they’re of any use.

“Journalling” has become a form of self-help. But writing fiction isn’t self-help, and I don’t think it’s useful for writers to use their journals for a series of entries starting, “I feel, I felt, I want.”

Frankly, I don’t think it’s useful for anyone. How much better to describe that incident you jotted down yesterday. What do you remember? The exact shimmer the sun gave a leaf? Two people in a bar on what was obviously a first date? Maybe one looked more engaged than the other? In what way? What precisely did you overhear? (Read: shamelessly eavesdrop on.) I call it being alive to the world, and surely we all need to do that to enjoy our one precious life.

I sometimes post downloads from my notebooks just because I find them interesting, portraits of the current world. But they also serve as examples of what I’m talking about–like the one I posted here, and another here. This sort of note-taking is what works for me. Maybe a different kind works for you, but this is my model and a small offering.

As to keeping a journal….

Today I thought I’d offer up a couple of things. One is the opening of a short story from my collection Hard Travel. Called “Guatemala,” it’s about a professional photographer taking pictures of a town in central Guatemala for a glossy magazine at a chancy time. Afterward, I’m going to give you the journal entries I used when I wrote it.

What did I re-use from the journal? (Another word is steal.) What did I condense, what did I leave out? Just a couple of questions to ask yourself as you read the excerpts, whether you’re a writer or not.

The story begins:

The lake was shaped like an anchor thrown between the volcanoes. Lake Atitlan: blue-black, flat and shimmering. On the shaft of the anchor, where water lapped against the east side of the San Pedro volcano, it grew golden from reflecting back the winter cornfields on the mountainside; cornfields planted so far up that the slope seemed nearly vertical, and the desiccated, honey-coloured stalks seemed to have been left there to hold down the soil. 

Monroe saw he had a picture. Villagers were fishing in the golden reflection from rough canoes hollowed out of logs. Behind them were some green reeds. The gold dimmed out to blue-black at the water’s shifting margins. He got out a long lens, then remembered what the art director at the magazine had said and wondered if he should screw on the sparkle filter too. He could make it pretty-pretty. Pretty-pretty fishermen holding big nets, wearing straw hats, their canoes lost in glitter like the floor of a disco. 

But they were probably from Santiago Atitlan, where Monroe’s ferry was headed. A twenty-year-old schoolteacher had recently been disappeared from a place nearby, presumably by the army, then found dead with signs of torture on her body. Monroe took the picture straight. Then he swore and screwed on the filter for a few more shots. If it turned out he wasn’t good enough to give them the pictures he hoped for, he was going to have to give them the ones that they wanted.

Monroe’s assignment was to photograph the beauties of Guatemala.

“I agree it’s superficial,” the art director had said. “Or at least, I did at first. But then I thought, the killing’s pretty well over, the death squads have been disbanded, the people probably want to just put it behind them. And one thing that’s gonna help is the tourism dollar.”

She was new at the job, but Monroe gathered that her predecessor had left some crib notes about the freelance photographers. Bypass Monroe’s lug head, his apparently said, and go straight for the bleeding heart.

“Leave us not be sentimental,” the art director told him. “When my Dad, died the insurance money made all the difference in the world to my Mom.”

***

And here’s what I wrote while actually visiting Lake Atitlan:

9 January.

On one hillside we turned a corner of just such houses exactly across from us, and the low silver roof lines made it look like a town of slate. All around it were the golden brown cornfields further up the mountain than I would have thought possible on near-vertical slopes. The fields reached almost to the cliff tops, and corn even grew under the long-needled pine trees.

Panajachel itself is a hippie town. Key West South, Goa North, central Kathmandu transported. The Guatemalans here wear mainly traditional dress, including the men in their bright trousers. Then there are the resident Westerners. I’ve been trying to decide what I think of them. Paul’s instinctive reaction is scorn at their self-righteousness, a dismissiveness which wasn’t helped by one Westerner panhandling us as soon as we arrived. Many of the foreigners seem to get their money by providing tourists access to the local sites and culture and people, who maybe didn’t ask them to. I talked to one girl working in a shop, a Mexican, and she said foreigners own all the local businesses. Germans, mostly. Granola capitalists who combine the exploitative part of capitalism with the smugness of its opponents in a particularly unappetizing combination.

Big generalization. I don’t know anyone here and wonder what future historians might say about Panajachel now versus Cuernavaca in the Thirties or maybe Taos at the same time, which we think of as such romantic and vibrant centres for expat culture. Malcolm Lowry and D.H. Lawrence lived there, and who might be here? Some of the people wandering around seem to be artists. In one shop, where the local weaving is made into lovely Westernized clothes, there is a very beautiful young German woman behind the counter who wears the clothes probably better than anyone, and appears in some pretty good paintings behind her on the wall. 

But it’s time to stop writing. Leave the hotel, get some lunch, have another look around. Later on, I’ll write about the boat trip this morning to Santiago Atitlan.

14 January, Mexico City.

I never did write much about our trip to Guatemala, and now I seem to be on the verge of going somewhere else. What can I say? (At 10 o’clock at night when I am very tired.) Well…

(My son) Gabriel and I took a morning launch from Panajachel to Santiago Atitlan. The distances are deceptive. The other shore of the lake seemed near but it was an hour and a half trip across glassy blue water. Ahead of us were the Cerro de Oro and the volcanoes Tolimán and Atitlan. On the other was the San Pedro volcano rising in a perfect cone with golden milpas—corn fields—far up one side. One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen was the reflection of that golden volcano in the glassy lake and men fishing in the reflection from wooden barques, each fisherman wearing a straw-coloured hat. 

Santiago Atitlan lies behind a gap between two sets of volcanoes that is invisible from the opposite shore of the lake. I had expected another Panajachel, but we arrived instead in northern Thailand. The boat docked at a ramp of planks on a grassy bank that leads to a path, the path to a dirt road, the road past straw-roofed houses. One woman sat weaving bright fabric on the swept dirt floor of her yard with a back loom hooked from her waist to a tree. (Another time, driving along the highway, we saw a woman with her loom hooked around a telephone pole.) 

There were huipiles—blouses—hung out on lines to dry. Broad beans drying on the roofs, corn cobs drying on a porch. And everywhere the red-brown dust. Once I stopped to take a picture of some cloth drying on a stone wall, held in place by another stone. Some kids giggled and one of them called, “Look, she’s taking a picture of Jorge’s shorts.” I walked uphill looking for the town plaza. Turned a corner (of course with Gabriel) and found it was market day, and all the people had come to town wearing their traditional outfits. Trajes. It sounds better in Spanish. The women seemed to favour rebozos with gold thread woven into them the way it’s woven into saris. 

Gabriel was thirsty, so I bought him a gaseosa (not refresco here) and stood in the doorway of the shop shielded somewhat in the shadows and took pictures of the people passing by. Once I was surprised to see a soldier in camouflage fatigues appear in the frame, although I took the picture anyway. 

In fact, the place was crawling with soldiers. I had read an Americas Watch report before coming over. In the past few months, the body of a twenty-year-old school teacher who had been raped and tortured was found outside town. A union leader disappeared. The army occupied the town one day with tanks and troops on every corner. It had made me feel creepy about going there to essentially look at people who were facing such terror, but there I went. Material. The chip of ice in the heart of a writer. Graham Greene.

And in fact I will write a story about a photographer on assignment in Guatemala taking pictures for a shopping feature in a glossy magazine, plus a companion piece about his wife at home. The first might circle around the idea of taking, the second around absence.

In any event, the army is still there with guns pointed,al though not at me. I posed Gabriel for a picture up some steps near a cross in the churchyard with a volcano behind him and some soldiers marched in a line behind us. They stopped. I was slightly nervous. Then they broke ranks and started calling to Gabriel, “Smile at the birdie.” Cracking up. Kids themselves. Some of whom had maybe raped a school teacher.

The soldiers were the only ones in town aside from one young woman who weren’t in traditional dress. There must have been some priests in town, too. Alongside the church was a Swiss-looking residence. Inside it was a plaque honouring “the priest and martyr” Robert Francis “Francisco” Rohter who had been assassinated in July, 1981. It didn’t say assassinated by whom. Paul said later, Maybe they didn’t know. Around the plaque hung a belt of local weaving. A bearded man in profile. (“From Pennsylvania, aged 38.”) The church had been badly damaged in the 1978 earthquake and the roof beams had been replaced by rust-coloured girders while the very primitive statues of saints were ranged along one wall. Women prayed toward the front of the church. Children played noisily in the rear.

We had to catch the boat back across the lake not long after leaving the church. As we headed for the dock, we saw several women sitting on the steps outside the market selling little lake fish. Apparently the U.S. Peace Corps had stocked Lake Atitlan with bass. The native fish disappeared and the bass got so big they settled to the bottom of the lake where the fishermen couldn’t get them. Now the Americans were paying to restock the lake with native fish at enormous cost, spending so much money on the project that they could feed everyone living on the lake for the rest of their lives. 

So, women selling lake fish. Women selling chicks from baskets. Another woman buying several chicks and putting them in a basket carried inside her rebozo. Lake Atitlan itself in the background, shaped like an anchor cast down among the mountains.

We left Panajachel the next morning and drove to Antigua Guatemala, where I took pictures of women vendors for a magazine article. The women wanted money to have their pictures taken. One had a wall eye and posed with her other cheek turned toward me. Afterward we drove back to Guatemala City, where Gabriel played on some mechanical rides, then he and I flew home.

(My husband) Paul comes home tomorrow. Friday we go to Merida.