I first began keeping a journal when I was ten years old. My older sister had given me her old battered notebook that she had used for her math problems, and I had decided to take it and jot down my thoughts in the remaining blank pages. I was not a good speller and I found myself illustrating my point — in the most literal sense of the word — more often than actually writing it out. I had an ache to write about what was happening around me — perhaps I was a bit of a busybody when I was ten, but I found the actions and conversations of other people most entertaining, and I enjoyed the surreptitious delight of recording them in secret and with my own perspective on the subject. As I matured, I became a better speller and less of a busybody. When I was fourteen, my family started calling me the “Family Chronicler” because I recorded so many details on current local events that you could ask me what Mrs. Blackburn served for dessert three years ago at her son’s friend’s high school graduation party, and I could tell you that it was dairy free chocolate mousse cake. Perhaps one would ask why on earth I cared — but I loved to journal about everything. Not only did I love journaling, but I loved trying to convince other people to join in on the fun. There is really not very much to the journaling process — in fact, I could think of only three major steps — and it is so variable that I believe very few people could say that they are just “not the journaling type.”
The first step in beginning to journal is to purchase a sturdy notebook of reasonable size and a very nice ink pen. The paper in the notebook should not be the kind which allows ink to bleed through one page to another, nor the kind which lets the ink lay on top of the paper and smear all over it without absorbing. The pen itself should have a supple, clean point as it writes — not too thick of a stroke or your words will be blotchy, and not too thin or they will look like chicken scratch. Never use a pencil when journaling because it will rub completely away over time, and what is journaling if it is not to retain something of the present into the future?
The second step is to find your voice. I remember taking for granted the fact that one must journal in a “Dear Diary” sort of tone, although some of the greatest journals throughout history were kept as notes from study or personal letters. When I was a college student in Canada during my first year away from home, the short novel Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster inspired me to keep a blog of my daily activities at school in the form of letters home to my parents, when really it was nothing short of a journal. The voice with which one journals determines whether or not it is the sort of journal in which there are grocery lists, or prayers, or quotations, or long recorded dialogues from a conversation that afternoon, or whether one’s overall mood is reflective, humorous, sardonic, or practical. Every journal marks a season or time period and so naturally each journal will have a different voice, but it is important to have an idea of what that voice is when one begins to write. I have completed over thirty-six journals, and the most common voice seems to be a sort of humorous reflecting on situations that were ordinary, and therefore quite worth taking the time in finding the extraordinary in them.
The third step in journaling is to lose all inhibitions and write in every mood and moment that comes, and to continue doing so even when one cannot think of anything brilliant to say. It is often in the moments when one is least concerned about sounding brilliant that the rare gems of human insight spring forth in the most surprising places. Journaling has two extremes: either one is excessively personal and writes exclusively about matters of the heart, or one records the weather and results of the latest political debate. I have always told my family and others who have asked me about journaling that honesty is the lack of inhibition, not every minute detail of one’s love life.
In
summary, the three steps to begin journaling are simply these: purchase
a notebook and pen, find the voice in the writing, and write honestly
about whatever and everything that is most interesting to the w
riter.
Whoever may one day read the journal, hundreds of years after we are in
our graves, is of no consequence whatsoever. The writer must write what
he or she sees and hears, not what they may think someone would like to
read if they were ever to find their notebook — even if it was an old
and stained hand-me-down with algebra equations in the front flap.
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