I shared this article on Instagram recently, but wanted to write more about it here.
Don’t Keep a Diary. Embrace the Fragments of Real Life Instead.
The author Daniel Poppick talks about how diaries are often kept in a way that can sound a bit stilted or self-conscious:
I’ve never consistently kept a diary. On the rare occasions I’ve tried, the voice that emerges is that of a “different” person — a clunky, wooden avatar, by turns stifled and overly performative.
Poppick found that keeping a less structured notebook worked better for him:
Over time, a shift in approach loosened me up: Rather than keeping a diary, I started keeping notebooks. Where a diary constructs narrative, character and voice, a notebook is inherently fragmented, allowing for unexpected glimmers of serendipitous juxtaposition and lyric voltage. It is at once a less restricted form and one that renders perception more precisely. It has always been more generative for my writing, more comfortable, more surprising.
For me, the ideal approach is something in between– I love finding cryptic phrases and jotting in my notebooks, things that I might have overheard or observed somewhere, or that came to me in a dream. Poppick sees these random notebook entries as sometimes telling us a truer story about our lives at that moment than if we’d tried to narrate it in a diary entry. While I agree that they can be amusing and inspiring, sometimes they are just mysterious. They might trigger a memory, but in themselves, they don’t tell the full story. And when I re-read my notebooks, I want the full story!
For most of my life, I haven’t really kept a proper diary, and in retrospect, I wish I had. I would love to have more of a record of what I thought about major events in my childhood and teenage years– or at least have a record of being an oblivious, self-involved kid who didn’t think much about those things.
For the past 20 or so years, I’ve made more of an effort to at least jot a few words about historic events, even if it’s a bit delayed. After 9/11, I wrote a sentence or two about feeling unsettled and shaken up, but otherwise, I was more focused on other matters. I jotted a few snapshot memories of the aftermath, but I never recorded what happened that day. A few years later, I had more of a habit of dated diary/journal entries, and I remember realizing that I really should record my 9/11 memories before they faded, and I belatedly wrote down all the details I could remember of my experience in NYC that day. Other big events like the blackout in August 2003 went completely unmentioned– I remember quite a few things about that day but others are blurry, so I wish I had made an effort to record the details at the time. By 2008, I was in a more regular diary habit and wrote a few lines about the financial crisis and Obama being elected. But most of my writing was still about my own thoughts, feelings and activities.
When I re-read my diary entries, I don’t feel like that voice isn’t me. I’m not always happy with what I was doing and thinking, but my diaristic brain-dump voice seems to be pretty consistent over the years– I never tried to make it artful writing. (I did do some creative writing, but I kept it totally separate.) And maybe that’s what’s at the root of Poppick’s discontent with his diaries– if you are using your diary as part of a practice of creative writing, you’re more likely to be trying out styles and voices and trying to craft something literary. Maybe that makes it a less authentic representation of your actual life. For me, a combination of random notebook entries and diary/journal-style entries has worked well to capture who I was, what I did, and at least a little bit of what was happening in the world around me, even if these writings have no value as literature.
I’d love to hear from others about the voice and style of their diary-keeping vs. notebook-keeping. Please chime in with a comment!
