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If keeping a diary strikes you as an adolescent activity, nothing more than a weepy exercise in self-indulgence, stop calling it a diary. Instead, think of it as a log, a notebook, a journal, or a commonplace book--and consider the importance attributed to it by these 12 notable writers.
- Keep a record
I keep a journal or rather a writer's notebook, since what interests me are not the things I do so much as what I see others do or what I hear them say. I find that writing them down keeps them in my head.
(Nancy Willard, in an interview with Stan Sanvel Rubin. The Post-Confessionals, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll et al. Associated University Presses, 1989)
- Hold a conversation
[O]ne of the pleasures of reading diaries, it seems to me, is that they are . . . like conversations, even if the conversation is with oneself. Wanting to hold such a conversation is one reason for keeping a diary; another is that it slows down time.
(Alan Bennett, Writing Home. Faber and Faber, 1995) - Gather fodder
I keep a journal, like many writers do. But the journal has changed its shape. I realize now that a journal is not just a collection of random written notes. Now, thanks, to modern technology, it can also contain snippets of tape recordings, photos, video excerpts, stills from movies, poems, a myriad of images and jottings, magazine clippings, and newspaper articles. I set down those things that make me laugh or cry. These all become fodder for additional stories.
(Paul Zindel, from an interview at Scholastic.com. Paul Zindel, by Susanna Daniel. Rosen, 2004) - Capture the rapture
November 13, 1949
As of today I have decided to keep a diary again--just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. Every day is so precious, I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older. Now, now is the perfect time of my life.
(Sylvia Plath, quoted by Kathleen Connors in "Word Crafts." Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual, edited by Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley. Oxford Univ. Press, 2007)
- Achieve perspective
February 1934
I love this process by which each passing day is captured, not only its impressions, but also, at least by suggestion, its intellectual direction and content as well, less for the purpose of rereading and remembering than for taking stock, reviewing, maintaining awareness, achieving perspective.
(Thomas Mann, Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939, selected by Hermann Kesten, translated by Richard Winston. Robin Clark Ltd., 1984) - Reflect
This was "safe" writing. . . . It was for me the space for critical reflection, where I struggled to understand myself and the world around me, that crazy world of family and community, that painful world. . . . I could "talk back." Nothing had to be concealed. I could hold on to myself there.
(bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. Henry Holt, 1999) - Cut down on dithering
Prologue to the Diary of 1949
I'm not working hard enough, and I feel that a diary would be useful, as my job is mainly thinking & writing, & I need some machinery for recording everything of importance I think of. . . . I also hope it will be of some moral benefit, in passing a kind of value judgment, implicit or explicit, on whether I've wasted the day or not . . .. The feeling of meeting my own conscience at the end of the day may cut down my dithering time.
(Northrop Frye, The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955, edited by Robert D. Denham. Univ. of Toronto Press, 2001) - Loosen the ligaments
April 20, 1919
[T]he habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay my hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea.
(Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf. Harcourt, 1953) - Communicate with yourself
November 10, 1973
[T]here is another way in which I saved myself from madness, and this is the fact that all my life I have tried to communicate with myself. My diary is proof of this effort. My life has been one long monologue. I will go mad only if I am ever unable to talk to myself.
(Edward Robb Ellis, A Diary of the Century: Tales from America's Greatest Diarist. Sterling, 2008) - Keep your mind open
I keep a diary because it keeps my mind fresh and open. Once the details of being me are safely stored away every night, I can get on with what isn't just me. . . . I had to keep a diary for many years before I could begin writing fiction.
(Gail Godwin, "A Diarist on Diarists." Writers on Writing, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini. Univ. Press of New England, 1991) - Don't forget
One reason I keep a journal is for the same reason that John Cheever said he wrote: I forget things. I tend to make notes of things that I want to remember, because if I don't do that, I forget them.
(Ellen Douglas, in an interview with Treanor Wooten. Conversations with Ellen Douglas, edited by Panthea Reid. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2000) - Prove that you have endured
December 23, 1911
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer . . .. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.
(Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, edited by Max Brod. Secker and Warburg, 1948)
Regardless of your age or your ambitions, the perfect time to start a writer's diary is now.
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