Take Note

Hi There,

I’ve been struggling to write this year. With the world feeling like it’s burning all around, coming to an empty page is daunting. It’s also probably the best time to write, taking the thoughts, ideas, and feelings swirling around and giving them a space to exist.

For me, the practice of keeping a technique journal helps to keep my work alive, puts my focus on curiosity and discovery, and helps me clarify whatever feels muddy.

This issue of The Dialogue is about the power of taking notes in order to reveal your own technique.

JC

That changed during a self-tape session with a client in 2018.

The scene we were coaching wasn’t quite working, and it was a big audition for the actor I was working with. Suddenly, I had an idea to try something. It was a simple insight that had occurred to me earlier that day while reading a book about sense memory.

That exercise ended up working so well that after the session I opened the notes app on my phone and jotted down what we had tried. Just taking a moment to write down a simple phrase somehow gave that experience heft. It felt like something tangible.

Right around that time I was reading Philippe Petit’s Creativity: The Perfect Crime. In it, he talked about his technique notebook, where he’d record what he worked on, and what he was working toward. The way he described that notebook, and how important it was to his process, aligned perfectly with the experience I had while coaching.

Driven by my newfound curiosity in recording these fleeting thoughts, I found a notebook intended for Bullet Journaling and began to write. Over time, what initially started as keeping note of spontaneous ideas morphed into much more.

Recording these thoughts wasn’t just about documenting ideas; It was about exploring them and sorting them out. My notebook wasn’t a passive holder of half-baked ideas; it was an active dialogue with my current set of abilities and where I was trying to go. Here I could see what skills needed to be improved, and, more important, a real-time journey towards figuring out how to improve them.

The great side effect of keeping a notebook that’s dedicated to your technique is what it does to your focus. Through the journal, you’re training yourself to pay attention to details, by deciding exactly what goes on the page, and your reactions and relationships to what’s there.

It’s my daily dialogue with myself and the work I love.

There’s no right way to write things down in a technique journal. Just the act of putting it on paper helps to clarify what you’re working through or working toward. A space to honestly face where you might be coming up short, and ways to improve.

Giving yourself space to write down your ideas gives them the value they deserve, and page by page, your own technique and voice start to come alive.

Creating your own approach to the work is much more thrilling than just learning the lines and spitting them out. Write down your journey, so page by page, your process is revealed to you. And in the process, you yourself will be revealed.

Here are some of my favorite takeaways, emphasis my own:

• “What’s the worst that can happen?” is a very real and helpful question when you go looking for the answers rather than leaving it rhetorical. The worst is almost never that bad.
• I’m suggesting we’re addicted to getting answers because it’s easy and we’ve been trained to do so. And the problem with answers is we stop asking questions once we find them. “What should I do?” when applied to the novel you are writing or the dance you are choreographing will find an answer. It will. You’re a creative person; you’ll solve the problem. But it could also be that the first answer to that question, though it seems the right one, isn’t as strong as it might have become if you had kept asking better questions. “What should I do?” isn’t remotely as powerful a question in uncovering possibilities as “What can I do?”
• If we want to get to flow with any consistency, our vision must always outpace our craft. But our craft must always be growing, keeping up, if only always a step behind. It’s in that space where we flow and do our best work.
• You do not need to know where you’re going; that will be revealed to you as flow happens…For now, consider a change in your thinking and a shift in focus from, “How do I get there?” (because not being able to answer that will prevent you from starting) to, “Let’s see where this leads!”
• Perhaps the most helpful thing we can all do is stop talking about ideas in binary terms at all. Instead of “good” or “bad” ideas, what if we thought and spoke of ideas on a spectrum from incomplete to refined, or from young to mature? From raw material to finished concept? What if the worst of our ideas were valued, kept somewhere safe, and revisited often enough that they had a chance to become more than they first appeared to be?

Purchase on Amazon:
http://jamiecarroll.me/Start-Ugly-AMZ

Purchase on Barnes & Noble:
https://jamiecarroll.me/Start-Ugly-BN

Purchase from an Independent Bookseller:
https://jamiecarroll.me/Start-Ugly-Indy

Or, check the stacks of your local Public Library.