Ras: On Keeping a Journal

“Its hopeless to ‘get life’ if you don’t keep notebooks.” Sylvia Plath, in her journal.

Listening to Garrison Keillor on his radio show “The Writer’s Almanac” a few years back, I learned that novelist Barbara Kinsolver started keeping a journal when she was eight years old. Journal writing, she says, “feels something like trying to nail a river to its banks.”

When the British Guardian newspaper recently asked 29 major-league writers for tips on writing fiction, the novelist Will Self said: “Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever.” 

After the near-universal dictum to write every day, keeping a journal, a diary, a notebook, a commonplace book, or just scraps of paper with pencil at hand is probably the most common bit of advice given to young writers.

The process of regularly writing down your reading, thoughts, sins, emotions, ideas in embryo, weather notes, descriptions of public events, grocery lists, or assignments to yourself can fulfill many psychological needs. I’m fond of Thomas Mallon’s confession in his delightful A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries that on occasion, he has refrained from a less than stellar act because he realized that he would not want to write it down in his journal that evening. In Mallon’s book there are chapters devoted to travelers, pilgrims, politicians/apologists , confessors, and prisoners – to name a few inveterate journal-keepers.

But what, specifically, does a writer get out of journal keeping?

Sylvia Plath, tortured soul that she was, used her journal as a whip to lash herself to more and better work. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s habit, according to Mallon, was to write down overheard bits of conversation in his notebooks for later use in his fiction. This line from a short story – “He wants to make a goddess out of me and I want to be Mickey Mouse” – is a direct transcription. Allen Ginsberg’s obsessively detailed notebooks often read like a first draft of his poetry.   

My own journal has served all these functions, but I see its role as even more fundamental.

First, the journal gets me in the habit of writing, just about daily. And it demystifies the process of writing. It makes getting words on paper – or bits on a computer screen – routine, something you do whether you feel like it or not, whether or not the winds of inspiration are blowing. Over time you discover that you have an itch that needs to be scratched. As a journal-keeping character of mine confides to his journal:

“Let’s face it – you have developed a psychological need to do this. You feel rotten when you don’t get a few words down in your journal every day. It’s become one of your great pleasures, not to mention a compulsion, maybe a mania.”

Second, by keeping a journal, you begin to see the world as a writer. OK, there’s this massive thing we call reality. And what is reality but fodder for a writer to use for artful selection and translation to that other sphere, the realm of words? Words become your second home, the place in the univesre where your brain hangs out much of the time.

Third, without quite realizing it, you are learning and polishing your literary techniques in your journal – such fine things as presentation of characters, physical description of action or settings, interior monologue, and, always, le mot juste. In a journal brevity is a must so you practice the writer’s virtue of succinctness every day. You’re also cultivating the contrary ability to recognize the moment when you‘ve hit a vein of gold and realize that it’s time to go with the flow.

Because my journal is for me only, the usual inhibitions that set in when one thinks of a reader are not there. You are freed up, unblocked. Journal keeping reminds me of the bliss I experienced as a kid shooting baskets – for years every day, often alone. In a kind of trance I honed my basketball skills – modest as they were – without realizing I was developing those skills. With the impossible wisdom of the old guy who longs for a life’s do-over, I sometimes wish in fact that I’d spent all that basketball time as Barbara Kinsolver did – keeping a journal.

So I do understand the British writer Geoff Dyer, who when the Guardian asked for those writing tips, said: “Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.”

Notes: The reference to Barbara Kinsolver’s journal keeping is a slightly reworked notation from my own journal, and the tidbits on Plath, Fitzgerald, and Ginsberg are lifted from my journal notes on Thomas Mallon’s A Book of One’s Own. Thanks to blogger Patsy Terrell for the nice lead shot of that stack of journals.