The Art of Writing Carefully with Sara Taber

CHANCE PARTICULARS: A WRITER’S FIELD NOTEBOOK…

Why did I write Chance Particulars, a guide to keeping a field notebook?

Most of my books, I have written spurred by my own curiosity or lust, or from a need to sort something out--books about the creeds of lonely Argentine shepherds; the source of a French baker's divine and earthy loaf; the soul of my tortured spy father--but I wrote Chance Particulars for my students and for those like them with a hankering or a need to record their past and current experiences on this astonishing and perplexing planet. 

It might appear very simple, this task of putting one's daily or momentous experience into words, but to translate experience into sentences that snap that experience to sputtering and chortling life on the page is not so very simple after all. I discovered this, with dismay, myself, upon my return home from a life-changing year on the dry rangelands of Patagonia. I opened the thumbed notebook in which I'd deliberately recorded my days only to discover that, while I’d noted that I'd had a great talk with a shepherd I hadn't recorded its topic, much less the conversation itself, and though I'd referred to gale force winds, I hadn't described how they'd screamed and torn at the roof of the corrugated hut we lived in or swept the sheets off the line and deposited them in a brown lump a mile down the beach.

As for my students--every one of them talented and accomplished, young or old, and all with interesting tales to tell: they often turn up in my writing workshops with word-crammed journals and bundled notes about the days of their lives--that, well, to tell the honest truth, fall flat on the page. They simply didn't record the kinds of details or fashion the sorts of accounts that drop a reader into that shocking, poignant moment atop the Eiffel Tower, or mulling, in Grandma’s apple pie-scented kitchen, those wise, world-weary thoughts.

For to write well--sadly but also happily--involves craft. Craft that is actually, once you are acquainted and practiced with it, rather straight-forward and easy to wield. Out of dismay, and with rigor, I applied myself to learning the literary worker’s nuts and bolts upon that Patagonian return—to my pages’ eventual boon. Once absorbed, knowledge of craft allows a recorder to swiftly and expertly accomplish that marvelous feat: to make us experience a life as lived. Joseph Conrad wrote, “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see,” and this, by plying the wordsmith’s craft, you, too, will bring to pass.

So this is what Chance Particulars is designed to do: to show you, by proceeding through the ingredients of lively writing simply and clearly one step at a time, how to write so that your reader tastes your very kimchi  sandwich, and actually lives your swirling and thought-provoking day at the Louvre or that disastrous instant at your Uncle Ned’s cattle ranch. 

Unique among guides to the writer’s craft, the simple, inviting structure of Chance Particulars, along with its lovely illustrations and excerpts from classic works, makes it a wonderful resource for use by writers of every ilk and by teachers of writing, ethnography, and journalism.

Chance Particulars is an homage not only to the logs kept by Darwin, Woolf, and other greats but also to the luminous stories and wisdom cached within us all. And an invitation to indulge in the vast and delicious and free pleasures afforded by the field notebook.

Sara Mansfield Taber is the author of Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter, Dusk on the Campo: A Journey in Patagonia, Bread of Three Rivers: The Story of a French Loaf, and Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood. She has taught writing at Johns Hopkins University, the Bethesda Writer’s Center, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Maud Taber-Thomas is a classically trained, Washington, DC–based artist who specializes in oil paintings and charcoal drawings. Her portraits, interiors, and landscapes may be viewed at maudtaber-thomas.com.