Cue the I-Character

Might the notebook be where our personas gather, waiting for their entrance?

I began journal writing in the fall of 1970, jotting down deep thoughts and bad poems. It was my first year of college, a few months after Kent State and not long after the SDS chapter at my college set off explosives in the science building to protest the war. All of this passed my notice, at least in my journals. There I was writing poems about my high school girlfriend.

I have 27 journals stored in a cardboard box under a desk. I’m rarely inspired to look at them. I find my encounters with my younger self often unbearable. The essayist Robin Hemley writes that his early notebooks were “simply examples of role-playing,” trying out his identity as a “Writer.” I can see role-playing in my journals, often the most difficult passages to re-read. For some reason, I have little patience for that younger self and his sad poems.

However, I recently revisited this uncharitable view of my younger self when I considered that all of that bad writing was not just me trying out being a writer. I was also clumsily trying to find a persona that would help me get writing done. I wonder if the success of any journal depends on this. We want to find a self in our writing that we like spending time with, whose silly ruminations and bad poems are just part of the slow process of discovering ourselves in language. We used to call this finding one’s voice.

This has practical implications. Vivian Gornick, writing about a stalled memoir, says that what finally broke it loose was the realization she needed to find the “truth speaker” who could tell her story and “serve” her insights. “Get the narrator, and you’ve got the piece,” she said. In literary nonfiction finding this narrator seems straightforward. It is the author speaking. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that. The essayist Scott Russell Sanders reminds us that the essay is too small of a passage for the whole self to fit through, so we must make choices. That’s why I’m so drawn to the idea of an “I-character.”

Phillip Lopate has much to say about how we create “I-characters” in our work, urging essayists to start with one’s “quirks,” including “idiosyncrasies, stubborn tics, antisocial mannerisms.” No one wants to read the work of a “regular Joe” (sic), he writes. This seems like good advice but I’ve never understood how to apply it. I have no shortage of quirks but in an essay, say, about my alcoholic father I’m not quite sure how my odd obsession with collecting old, often broken typewriters fits in. The construction of a persona seems more subtle somehow, focused on who we are or have been and what we sound like.

This is the magic and mystery of voice. It’s magical because it’s often unconscious. We begin with an often vague emotional relationship to the subject we’re writing about, and these feelings find a register in the sound of the prose. What’s mysterious is how this happens, which brings me back to journals, where we have the freedom to talk to ourselves with less pressure to perform. This talk is often stripped of context (no need to explain things to ourselves that we already know) and this makes the writing a little closer to speech. Peter Elbow, who has written more on voice than anyone, notes that “our paradigm for speech is casual conversation among trusted friends; our paradigm for writing is more formal discourse to a little-known audience or an audience that is likely to judge us on our utterance.” Is it possible that in our journals we combine the two, the casual discourse of speech and the more rhetorical discourse of writing?

If so, journals might be promising spaces to explore persona. Might our I-characters gather there, warming their hands around the fire, discussing the meanings of life, and patiently waiting for their cue to enter our prose and narrate our experience to others? I like to imagine that, along with the bad writing, those 27 journals contain a chorus of possible selves trying to find a way to help out with the work. Even the early ones that I often find unbearable to read are simply clearing their throats, awkwardly trying to negotiate that complex space between speech and writing. Seen this way, those bad poems about Janice and the spring blooming of buds on the campus cherry trees was the necessary work of a young, inexperienced writer. I simply wasn’t listening. But I am listening now.