Writers and Their Notebooks

The journal is a place where you can shed the mask you wear during the course of your day.

The idea is to record your first impressions of a place as quickly as possible, avoiding the filter of self-consciousness.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward. Søren Kierkegaard, quoted in Howard V. Horg, The Essential Kierkegaard (2000)

I have long believed Keats’s assertion, and later restatements of it by other writers, that writing is selfmaking.

A journal can be a veritable treasure chest of thoughts and anecdotes. It is not only a place to collect ideas, though, but a place to practice writing and overcome writer’s block.

First, as Saroyan mentions, a journal helps jog our memories of past events, the places and people we have known. Second, a journal encourages regular appointments with the desk and provides an orderly place to store the chaotic pieces of our lives. Third, journal keeping prompts us to notice the extraordinary detail in even the most ordinary day.

They’re photographs of my mind and they help me make a kind of sense of my development as a person as well as of my development as a writer.

“Writing a journal means that facing your ocean, you are afraid to swim across it,” wrote George Sand, “so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.”

Keeping a journal, if you’re capable of being honest with yourself, can facilitate a deeper understanding of the role you’ve played in some of life’s conflicts.