A Kernel on Personal Dictionaries

and trusting your magpie tendencies

Let me tell you about magpies. Magpies are very smart birds. In fact, Encyclopedia Britannica has called them “one of the most intelligent animals to exist.” They sing beautiful songs, sometimes to their own reflection (which they recognize as themselves!). And, interesting enough to inspire an opera, they collect trinkets to decorate their nests. Bianca Marais, one of the hosts of the podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, talks about writers’ magpie tendencies. I love that phrasing for discussing the instinct to gather. There are so many shiny things we can collect as writers: books, pens, words, phrases, feelings, notebooks, advice. If you were to look around my office—at my crowded bookshelves, desk, and whiteboard—you’d know I am no stranger to literary hoarding. And chiefest of my miserly collections is notebooks.

I have journals for favorite quotations, notebooks for story ideas, paper pads of to-do lists, napkins and receipts with scribbled reminders, etc. I love being surrounded by these scribbles, but unfortunately, like the jumble of a magpie’s nest, most of my papers become a blend of objectives. Eventually, a grocery list is written below a story idea, a brilliant piece of dialogue gets scrawled above a restaurant’s phone number. When it comes to my writing life, I am the kid in middle school who indiscriminately shoves all their worksheets into their book bag. It’s not because I’m a disorganized person—my day job (which I am damn good at) is database management, ensuring that information is regularly and accurately audited, collected, filed away, and purged—rather, my writing mind often moves too fast for me to keep up with.

I have tried to be more organized in my writing life, but somehow chaos is where my process always returns. For example, when I manage to draft a story in a single document (a rarity for me), it is only after several revisions that scenes are moved into sequential order and errant passages are plucked from my track notes and embedded in the text itself. At this point, I’ve given up trying to “correct” my process and accepted that it is as good as any other, as long as it ends in solid writing. As

Carly Watters

, one of Marais’s cohosts, says: the goal is not efficiency, it’s art.

So, on the whole, my writing thrives in chaos. Yet somehow, in the hellscape that exists across my bookshelves, desk, kitchen counter, and nightstand, I’ve managed to maintain two consistent journals. One is my submissions log, a journal where each page correlates to a single story or essay and lists journals, submission dates, and decisions (this is something I picked up from the wonderful Jamie Quatro. Go read her books!). The second is my personal dictionary.

Dictionary is a generous word. There isn’t any alphabetization or other form of organization in my personal dictionary, but it is dedicated to a single purpose. When I come across a word I don’t know, a word being used in a new context, or (this part is important!) a word that catches my attention, I pull out my personal dictionary and write it down. Then I immediately look up the definition and write that down too. They are words that POP! After that, I’ll occasionally have the thought, “I need a word that means X and I’ve definitely written one down!” and I’ll flip through to my heart’s delight. Usually, though, writing words down once is enough to make them live in my head until I need them. In some writerly version of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, once they’re in the dictionary, I will need them immediately and often.

This is good news for all of my other befuddled notes: That story idea that is somewhere, written down on the ripped-off corner of a paper bag, continues to percolate in my head. I’ve seen this play out time and time again with my short stories, but also in the larger works of authors. Have you ever noticed that certain themes recur across entire eras of a writer’s career? My theory is that you’ll start to write about what you’ve written about what you’ve written about… It should follow then, that you should write down the words that excite you, thus encouraging that excitement to appear in your work.

In a personal dictionary, it is words, but you can also create other inventories. Collect emotions, phrases, syntactic structures, or, as one of my workshop buddies does, you can create a “scrapyard” document where you paste in all the darlings you’ve killed to revive for some later use.

On the rare occasion that a word doesn’t immediately attempt an escape from my personal dictionary, it becomes a source of inspiration. When my creative well is running dry and I feel the need for a prompt, I flip through my dictionary until I find a good word. A story usually follows. I highly recommend you give it a try.

Here are a few words from my personal dictionary to (maybe) get you started: kludge, slurry, effluvium, raconteur, and festoon. Fellow Kernelist Sarah offers these: scree, lumined, aqueous.

My kernel of advice: collect the words that excite you.

---

Inspiration, Information, & Insight

• This week Sarah read with amusement Zadie Smith’s account of writing her newest novel, based on real events in Dickens’ England. Apparently, Smith was so embarrassed by the prospect of writing anything labeled “historical fiction”—and so daunted by the onerous research required—that she avoided the project for nearly a decade before reluctantly giving in. It’s a good thing Sarah didn’t know any of this before jumping head first into her own work of historical fiction! Nonetheless, Smith’s account of her research process makes Sarah feel that she must be on the right track, and she can’t wait to read The Fraud when it’s published in September.

• This week Natalia is still reading How to be Both and Olive Kitteridge. Her slowness is due to the methodical way she’s trying to understand the dialogue that reveals character (and also due to the holiday). She started watching Mad Men with her husband which has led to interesting discussions of desire and character believability. She’s also considering starting Infinite Jest and enjoyed the funny article she read as emotional preparation for the task: “How to read ‘Infinite Jest’.”

• The short novel has arrived—and Shelby is ready! As a self-proclaimed concise writer, Shelby loves a succinct story with remarkable language. She devoured Esquire’s homage to the “slim volume.” And she found

  Lincoln Michel
  ’s follow-up essay a delight: Is the short novel just a novella with a new name? Probably. But who cares! As Shelby is working on a short novel herself, she’s thrilled that the market is shifting in her favor (but also realizes the pendulum could swing back at any moment).

• Neidy has been floating on a lake, barbecuing, and hanging out with family all week. Her vacation was from anything that could be considered work, including writing (mini-kernel: your art is work and you should take a break when you need it). She started reading Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You purely for pleasure. She also received a very exciting flash fiction acceptance she can’t wait to tell you about in September.