As artists have sketchbooks, writers have notebooks. Whether they choose to call them notebooks, journals, or daybooks, their motives are the same—to capture and document thoughts, sentiments, observations, ideas, ruminations, and reflections before these vanish.
The notebook may be thought of as a parking spot for the writer’s ideas. It’s the writer’s studio and workshop—a place to collect and make discoveries about language, passions, obsessions, and curiosities. It’s a place to scribble. There is no formula for keeping a notebook. The concept is that it should contain free-writing and memory triggers that will serve as vehicles to inspire future work. The notebook is akin to the author’s other brain, the brain that has the freedom to think and muse freely with total recall. Writer Francine du Plessix Gray says this about journaling: “Our emotions, and the power of their expression, are kept at a maximum by the daily routine of being inserted into the journal’s sharpening edge.” She says that keeping a journal is like sharpening a pencil.
For the most part, the words on the pages of a journal are the music and voice of one’s true emotions. The pages of the journal make no judgments and should be free of editors, critics, and teachers. Whether the writer is expressing deeply held beliefs, recording snippets of overheard dialogue, making observations, listing ideas for future projects, or copying a favorite poem, the notebook should be a vital part of the creative tool kit.
The art of journal writing dates back to when our ancestors wrote on cave walls. The first published journals were those kept by Samuel Pepys in the seventeenth century. Between 1660 and 1669 he wrote an elevenvolume diary that was published after his death in 1825. The journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition appeared in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Then came James Swan, a Native American, who wrote extensively about whaling practices in the mid-1800s.
Walt Whitman wrote in his journal in the mid-1860s, and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about activities and friends of special interest to him, including about the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau. In 1885, when Susy Clemens, the daughter of Mark Twain, was thirteen years old, she began to write a memoir of her experiences with her celebrated father. Virginia Woolf, one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers, said that she wrote in her diary to bring order to the chaos in her life.
Some private diaries, such as those of Woolf, John Cheever, André Gide, May Sarton, Anaïs Nin, and Anne Frank have become published literary masterpieces. A more comprehensive list may be found in “Sources and Further Readings.”
My inspiration for creating this book originates from my own experience and the joy that journaling has brought into my own life. For more than forty years, journaling has helped ground me during good and bad times. When I was ten, my mother gave me my first journal to help me cope with the loss of my beloved grandmother. My mother’s very thoughtful gesture resulted in a lifetime passion for writing and served as the foundation and platform for my writing career. Today my library has a shelf completely devoted to my completed journals, which can be found in every shape and color, with pages both lined and unlined.
My first journal still remains quite vivid in my mind. It was a maroon, hardcover volume with the prophet Kahlil Gibran’s wise sayings inscribed at the top of each page. For months after losing my grandmother, I poured my grief onto its pages. As an only child of working parents, I saw my journal as my best friend and confidant. Initially my musings were a form of catharsis in an effort to ease the pain of losing my grandmother, but subsequent entries became a pastime and a way to document the sentiments inherent in growing up, including the angst associated with adolescence and young adulthood.
My first book, Getting Pregnant and Staying Pregnant: Overcoming Infertility and High-Risk Pregnancy, began as a journal of my bed rest experience. Eventually I condensed the journal into an introduction for a self-help book for women also dealing with difficult pregnancies. In fact, in 2009 the book was revised and updated under the new title Your High Risk Pregnanacy: A Practical and Supportive Guide.
In 2001, when my children began university and just after the Trade Centers tumbled to the ground, I enrolled in the charter class of Spalding University’s M.F.A. in Writing program. While majoring in creative nonfiction, I read the four published volumes of Anaïs Nin’s journals and became even more inspired to continue my journal-keeping practices. Nin’s first journal entry began as a letter to her deranged father, who left the family when she was twelve. I was very drawn to her writing style and sensibilities, and these books are still perched on the shelves of my writing studio. I often return to her volumes when my own muse takes a welldeserved break. I have found that Nin’s words awaken the Muse inside of me.
The essays in this collection are a celebration of writers who use their notebooks to inspire, record, and document anything and everything which may nurture or spark their creative energy. These writers represent a broad spectrum of genres, including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. They are male, female, young, old, and live from coast to coast. All of these authors have been widely published, and many are professors at major colleges and universities.
The confessional nature of their essays makes each one compelling in its own right. Many authors in this collection write so automatically in their notebooks that they were honestly stumped when asked to write an essay describing their actual practice. After minimal contemplation, they agreed, and by the time they reached the end of writing their essays, nearly all of them experienced an enormous sense of satisfaction. In fact, many thanked me for the exercise and the opportunity to share their sentiments about journaling. Many admitted to have learned more about themselves and their writing practices.
The motives for keeping a notebook vary. Some of the contributors use their journals while concurrently working on a literary project while others store their completed notebooks away for future use. For example, mystery writer Sue Grafton uses her journal as a companion to her work-in-progress. Poet Kim Stafford uses his entries as seeds for future poems. To illustrate how their notebooks have been used in future works, some of the contributors have actually shared journal entries to show how they evolved into published works.
Writers and nonwriters alike who have made journaling a vibrant part of their lives will agree to its benefits. The writers in this collection all concur in regard to the huge rewards of keeping a notebook. Even if life has gotten in the way of their own regular record-keeping, they advocate the practice to their students and colleagues.
This collection offers an extraordinary diversity of perspectives held together by one common thread—all contributors have a deep passion for keeping a notebook. Some choose to use it as a tool for survival or travel, some see it as a muse, and for others it’s simply a habit that they have carried with them since childhood.
I now invite you, the reader, to take a peek inside the heads of these writers and what drives them—not only to the blank manuscript page, but also to the pages of their notebooks. It is my hope that their voices will inspire you to follow suit.