When I was about nine or ten years old I found a diary from my mother's teenage years. It was a small five year diary with a black leather cover and a lock; it looked like a diary--the kind of diary that, at nine, I would like to own. There were maybe twenty entries in it, all of them very factual, chronicling daily events and visits with relatives. At the time she lived on a dairy farm in the north country of upstate New York.
Soon after that discovery I began my own diary in a notebook. I would write everyday for a week, and then not again for a month or more, when I would "restart" my diary. But, unfortunately, each time I began my diary anew, my perfectionist nature prompted me to rip-out all of my old entries, so even though I wrote in a diary during much of my childhood and teen years, I never got anywhere. I didn't truly "keep" any of my diaries, instead I developed an unhappy pattern of write and destroy.
I carried this pattern into my adult journaling projects, too. Over the years I've written thousands of pages and filled scores of notebooks with words,clippings, and sketches. A few of these notebooks remain, but most of them ended up in the trash. I couldn't risk anyone finding and reading them. I remember lying awake one night and thinking, "If I die tonight, I don't want my husband and children to read my notebooks! Those words are not how I want to be remembered."
No matter how positively I begin a new journal, it soon devolves into a whining, complaining mess where I vent all of my unhappy thoughts and feelings--which would be fine if that was helpful, but I have not found it to be. I long to write a different kind of journal. A journal that my children and husband would be happy to stumble upon, and that I would be happy to re-read myself someday.
How to get started on such a journal? I went to the library to search the shelves for help, and stumbled upon Alexandra Johnson's book, Leaving A Trace: On Keeping A Journal. This book is an engaging read filled with excerpts from famous diarists, as well as practical writing prompts and tips, and information about keeping different types of journals: gratitude journals, observation journals, travel journals, dream journals, &c. Johnson provides encouragement and real help for writing a journal that can become a springboard of creativity and a workbook for your life.
Let me ask you:
- Do you keep a journal?
- What is your purpose for keeping a journal/diary? What do you call it: journal, diary, commonplace book, &c ?
- In what do you keep it? Notebook? Bound book? Moleskine? Computer? Something else? (Of course, a blog is a journal, too, but its shared, public nature is a severely limiting factor which casts it in an entirely different category from the personal journals I am concerned with here.)
- How often do you write in it?
- What kinds of things do you record?
- Do you use a particular method?
- What are your favorite writing tools? Pen? Pencils? Watercolor?
- Do you include photos, clippings, &c?
