One’s journal is a sanctuary, a space wherein a writer can simply self-express.
Its unassuming blankness offers a container for philosophizing, ranting, sentimentalizing, weeping, and creating. It is a repository of one’s truth, if not always of fact. The words committed to a journal create a record of a journey, an intimate history of events, thoughts, and feelings intended for one person only: the author. Journaling frees the creative mind. It is a space for freeform play, exploration, and discovery.
I make a distinction between the journal and the diary. The journal’s contents are inspired, while a diary is a faithful record of a person’s days. Day…by day. Never was this more apparent than when, while researching a historical novel, I read the diaries kept at the Goodhue County Historical Society. I anticipated narrative first person accounts of nineteenth century rural life. Instead I found lists of chores done, weather reports, and amounts spent or earned. The diaries were collections of data farmers used to help manage their businesses. Descriptions and feelings were completely absent. Journaling, however, is anything but accounting, neither an obligation nor a routine.
I journal when I feel called to it. Something occurred worthy of memorializing on those pages. Or I am contemplating something best processed through writing, a thinking on the page. Whatever calls me to it, this writing is done purely for the self. There is no audience, not even a future version of me. Because there is no reader waiting on the other side of the page for something polished to brilliance, there is no posturing, filtering, or censoring. As soon as one begins writing for a reader, a filter drops down, the journaler is suddenly self-conscious, aware even of penmanship. To journal for another defeats the purpose.
Nobody said journaling is easy.
I journal when
I feel called to it.
Creating this record of my inner world feels like time well spent, and though I am the one-and-only for whom they exist I have never read my journals. I have boxes of them in my basement. Occasionally I think guiltily that I should put them on a bookshelf, ordered chronologically, but I have yet to make the time for that chore. It’s odd, valuing the process of filling those books so highly, then disregarding them so completely. Yet this also feels right. If journaling is done purely for the sake of self-expression with no reader in mind, not even the vain pursuit of posterity (Someday I will be such a renowned author that my papers and letters will be housed in a library collection at a great university—who amongst us hasn’t had that thought at least once?), then the journal as artifact ceases to have value once it is filled. But will I ever throw out my collection? Hell no.
My journals have varied in shape and size over the decades, but ultimately I favor spiral-bound journals, because they lay flat. I always journal with a fountain pen. It’s part of the ritual, I suppose, adding an aesthetic element that brings pleasure to the physical act. I would never keep an electronic journal; it’s too ephemeral. One could argue the benefits of cloud storage, safe from flood and fire, but part of the beauty of journaling is the tangibility. I want to hold it in my hands, feel the glide of my fountain pen’s nib across the paper. I want to be able to sit on a rock along a river bank and think, free of electronics.
Despite my long-standing, exclusive preference for book and pen, my practice has been impacted by technology.
I have a few best girlfriends, and we keep in touch between social visits by sending voice notes. By the time I’ve told my tale du jour two or three times, I’ve worn out my enthusiasm for recording it. I sit finally with space for inner reflection, and it feels like the story has been iterated and reiterated and exhausted. I know some of my life moments or deep thoughts have been left unjournaled. The voice notes eventually get deleted to free up memory on my phone. And so those moments of my life are left to the perils of organic memory.
Opening memory in oneself may be the most important service a journal provides its keeper—assuming the journal will not one day be housed in a collection at an important library. When something is recorded, it is set down and therefore set aside. When I write about something upsetting, I have not only recorded my experience and feelings, but also extracted them. It becomes safe to let go and forget; the event has been archived. Someone I knew liked to say, “Put it in a box. On a shelf.” A journal can be that box, that shelf, but unlike a mental box, the act of recording provides the opportunity for reflection, even realization. Just as throwing up is sometimes the best thing to settle a stomach, journaling can “get it out,” which makes walking away all the easier. As for happy events, memories fade. Recording the moment is a safe-keeping of that experience, again freeing the journaler to forget the details as time goes by. Besides a space for recording one’s events and feelings, journals are thought-keepers, perfect for processing ideas and exploring new concepts or working through conundrums.
As a creative person, a journal is also a place for recording and protecting ideas.
I keep two journals, one is personal, the other is creative. In the creative journal, labeled “Creativity Journal” on its front cover, I jot down story ideas, character sketches, plot elements without a home, anything that comes to mind that may prove useful one day. I confess, I seldom open the journal to read it. It seems I don’t need it to mine for ideas. But like the personal journal, its value is derived from the filling up, and not the retrieval of its contents. The last time I opened it and perused the pages, I read a story idea that I had completely forgotten and thought, “Hey, that’s a pretty good premise! Maybe I should write that.” Perhaps some day I will turn to the Creativity Journal for my next book, but for now building a repository of ideas is its own reward.
Aesthetics matter.
Necessary tools for an
introspective and
creative life.
A journal is a necessary tool for an introspective and creative life. Without it, thoughtful processing would be limited by the confines of one’s own mind, memories would fade, and ideas would be lost. My journals are keepers of my secrets and fears. Of my greatest moments and deepest joys. Of my most elaborate thoughts and revelations. If they are not lost to flood or fire in my lifetime (whether I ever get them out of my basement onto a bookshelf or not), maybe after my death my child will read them with interest, discovering a wholeness he had never imagined possible while I filled the role of mother. Or maybe they will be housed in that vainglorious library—if not at a prestigious university, then at my county’s historical society where one day far in the future a novelist will be curious about life during my era. Regardless, I cannot journal for either my child or my future novelist. To journal for any audience, whether likely or fantastic, would impose upon me an ethos, the author writing for, addressing to. It would destroy the solitude and comfort of being alone with a blank book, fountain pen, and one’s own thoughts and experiences. If one is lucky, on a rock beside a river.
Of course, my journals could very well be discarded like worthless remnants of a life now belonging to no one. I hope, if that is their fate, they are at least recycled.
