For My Eyes Only

There is a file on my computer titled "Journal." It is over 500 pages long. The first entry is from March 6, 2012. Before that, I had never kept a journal for more than a few days, giving up in frustration and shoving the incriminating notebook out of sight. This journal started as a class assignment. But after the class was over, I stopped writing in it regularly. Most of the 500 pages are from when I finally succeeded in keeping a travel journal, on two separate trips to Amsterdam and Paris. Otherwise, there might be six months between entries. For a long time, this embarrassed me. Writers keep diaries and journals, right? They sit for hours, muse on the day, fill notebook after notebook with beautifully eloquent or, at the very least, profound prose. 

Sarah Manguso published an entire book about the experience of keeping a diary for the past twenty-five years. Read it. It's a beautiful meditation about the reasons we write, and how writers exist in time. 

And speaking of time, Kafka kept a diary. Louisa May Alcott did. Virginia Woolf. F. Scott Fitzgerald. George Eliot. Allen Ginsberg. Matsuo Basho. Sylvia Plath. Throughout time, writers have kept diaries. Or diaries have kept writers. Or both. 

What is a diary anyway? A record of the day's happenings, plus some scattered musings? Often, yes. Then what's a journal? Less record and more mental snapshot? Perhaps. And what about a notebook? The physical object which contains a diary or journal? Or a scattered catalog of lists, phone numbers, addresses, thoughts and other things from the periphery of daily life?

Recently, a professor used the term "private writing," and I like that. It removes the whole diary/journal pressure of having to write, and write profoundly, every day. It removes the messiness of notebook-writing (I was paging through an old notebook which contained packing lists, freewrites, notes from lectures, the occasional story that I started and abandoned, a poem or two and several doodles). It describes, rather than prescribes. 

That lack of prescription is important for a diary/journal/notebook, or any piece of private writing. The fact that it's private often means that it's freeing. It's a place to experiment wildly, write badly, confess deeply, muse profoundly, or just word-vomit when you need to. But you need to be ready to have one. If you aren't, don't worry. If you don't want to write everyday, don't. If you want to have six months between entries, go right ahead. 

If you want to write something today, though, here's the prompt that started my journal on March 6, 2012. It's simple. Find an object on your desk, in your living room, near your bed or wherever you sit to write. Look at it, really look, for a minute. Then write. You could describe the object. You could write about the memory that object holds. You could write about the experience of looking at it. But you're not going to share this with anyone, so just write.