in many forms over the centuries up to the current Blog popularity. Some people date the journal writer to the English school girl in her tunic and grey socks confiding her special private thoughts in a locked book. But the Japanese have at least a thousand year national history of diary writing. Diaries of Sei Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese Imperial Court, have survived since the 10th Century and present a fascinating window on the life and times of a long gone society when women had a much stronger position in Japanese society than they have had in more recent history. Another diary of one of Japan’s greatest prose writers, Murasaki Shikibu, has also survived from the late 10th and early 11th Centuries in which she criticizes the shameless promiscuity revealed in Sei Shonagon’s diary.
The Japanese soldier was for many generations issued a diary that he was directed to keep, while the western forces, on the other hand, were forbidden to keep journals. Professor Donald Keene had the job of reading many of the Japanese journal books of captured soldiers during the Second War looking for intelligence-relevant material. He found the content to be largely boring trivia.
Sony Corporation traditionally gave their clients beautiful, tasseled, plain-lined pocket journals at the holiday season. One of my first travel journals was written in a Sony journal.
And the ancient pharaohs in the Egyptian dynasties kept journals that are still being deciphered. We join the flow.
Journals and Diaries
Barnet & Stubbs draw a distinction between a journal and a diary:
“A diary mentions things that have happened. (Concert at 8 with J. and R.’) A journal reflects on the happenings. A diary lists appointments: a journal records events, but gives some sense of why they were meaningful.”
This sounds like a useful differentiation but in practice the two terms, diary and journal, seem to be interchangeable. Charles Darwin called his volumes diaries, and the publication of the volumes written by the ultra-sophisticated Andy Warhol, as well as the former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo’s and former New York Mayor, Ed Koch’s, have all been called diaries. Leonardo da Vinci’s journals are called Notebooks.
Whatever you called the writing, all sources agree that you must feel free in the writing of them.
Brenda Ueland in If You Want to Write says it so well:
“You must disentangle all oughts, You must disconnect all shackles, weights, obligations, all duties. You can write as badly as you want to…Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are… You can never be smarter than you are. You try to be and everybody sees through it like glass, and on top of that knows you are lying and putting on airs…It will not be alive but dead.”
Franz Kafka, the Czechoslovakian novelist, occasionally wrote from the last page backward as well as the first page forward so that the entries met in the middle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist and journal writer, did the same thing in a number of his journals.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote his Notebooks in a mirror image script (reverse backwards). I have never seen any explanation for this except it may have kept people who did not own a mirror from reading his notes and lifting his inventions.
Daily Entries?
Edward Robb Ellis who wrote a column in the magazine Diarist’s Journal suggests that the writer write every day in the same place, at the same time–morning or afternoon or evening or night.
Barnet & Stubbs in their text, Practical Guide to Writing, suggest that the writer write any time, ten to fifteen minutes a day. Though they recognize that some people find it helpful to establish a regular time, we do not all live such well-regulated lives.
They further suggest that the entry be as long or as short as a few words and that the writer should write free from concerns for vocabulary, spelling, etc.
The joy of the discipline
When I started writing a journal, I had read that if I exercised the left side of my body–the wrong hand, arm, foot, etc.–this would stimulate the right (creative, intuitive) side of my brain. So I started to beat the eggs with the eggbeater in my left hand, and when I dried my hair with the blow-dryer I turned the brush with my left hand.
The next step was to try writing with my left hand This skill, I reasoned with my reasonable left mind, could come in handy if I ever hurt my hand or arm.
For many years I recorded my “Left-handed Thoughts”, and I came to like the appearance of my left hand writing much better than my right hand writing style, which consisted of at least three different unattractive writing styles. And I liked the ‘me’ that wrote left-handed better than the ‘me’ that wrote right-handed. The left hand writing is very consistent in style, rather old-fashioned looking.
The physical writing of words on paper is a calming exercise like the calm you get from doing calligraphy. The careful hand/mind exercise is a mental tranquillizer, and I often looked forward to the times I could find to sit down and practice the skill. Many times I stayed up late writing the letters in my solitude. Both the calligraphy and the left hand writing must massage some nephrons somewhere under the skullcap.
Shinichi Suzuki, the founder of the Suzuki Method of Music Instruction, was also fond of writing calligraphy. He claimed that though he was
“not a calligrapher, I nevertheless try to improve my writing… cannot tell [you] how much satisfaction I get out of this work and how wonderful the repetition feels.”
(More recently, I have been writing Both-Handed Thoughts on the computer.)
Suggested Exercises
1.Write down those things you read or hear or watch on TV that strike a resonant note, a reverberant effect in your mind.
2.Quote something from a magazine, a story or a newspaper that irritates you or makes you marvel over.
Become aware of the sources of influence and information in your life. These are the influences that help you articulate your idea-patterns. Have you noticed how they are forming your thoughts? Are you consciously or subconsciously absorbing them? And is this because you agree with them or because they are imposed on you?
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