Every day all over the world, writers station themselves at their desks and attempt to ask the hard questions. Then, for weeks, months, sometimes years afterward, they labor to shape artful texts from the difficult and unanswerable, the thing that, in the words of Samuel Butler, “refuses to go away.” As any writer knows, this is hard work. Serious work. Not only must we locate our most urgent question, our deepest confusion, “the human heart in conflict with itself” (Faulkner’s phrase), but we must also connect with our readers. Is it any wonder we become discouraged at the seemingly impossible task set before us?
This writer does, at least. If I’m lucky, sometimes the universe-in-the-form-of-the-Muse cooperates. The words click together, truth rears its ugly or beautiful head, and I find my way out. When this doesn’t happen, when discouragement sets in, when I lose perspective, when I find that—yawn and yawn again—I am boring myself to death on the page, I reach for my journal. There, within its pages, I search for the authentic voice I lost somewhere along the way. Almost always it is there, hiding in some phrase I jotted down, half-asleep, one rainy morning. Or in a map or drawing I scribbled in its margins. Or in the unsent letter I drafted to some long forgotten self. Within the pages of my journal, no one is watching, judging, or assigning. There is no one to please. I don’t have to finish what I start; I don’t have to shape the words for other eyes to see. The writing can take any form—dream, rant, dialogue, confession, joke, anecdote—or no form at all. Yes, life is deadly serious, and sometimes writing is too. But in my journal, another life is possible. Many other lives. Here are a few of the lives that, over the past forty-plus years, my journal has lived.
Compost Bin
Years ago, when a book reviewer sent an e-mail to help prepare me for an interview, his final question captured my attention: “What is your theory of composting?” Before he could discover and correct the typographical error, my mind had already left on its own journey: Composting. Isn’t it strange that only one letter separates two words, two worlds? A gardener saves everything organic—apple peelings, leaves, eggshells, coffee grounds—allows the mixture to breed a while, rot a while; turns it occasionally with a pitchfork, stirring up stored heat; and, finally, works the rich mulch into the depleted soil, where new crops sprout the following spring. Isn’t that, in effect, what I do when I write? Into my journal, a.k.a. compost heap, I toss scraps of organic matter that come my way—daily wonderings, newspaper clippings, quotations, drafts of poems and stories, sketches, dream records, song lyrics, jokes, weather reports, the mundane details of my personal life—trusting that they will be useful, that the scraps of my daily life will enrich the soil from which new poems, stories, and essays will sprout.
So, yesterday, having snagged a free ticket for a rehearsal of the New York Philharmonic’s gala opening and spending one delicious hour in the presence of a master cellist who exuded more joy than I’ve witnessed for months in my beloved city, I scribbled on the back of the program a few words that I later copied into my journal: “Yo-Yo Ma Loves Yo Ma-Ma.” I liked the way the words turned in on each other, the mirroring effect. No deep insight, I realize. As it stands now, the phrase amounts to little more than a lame bumper sticker. Still, I know from experience that the phrase may lead to something. (Say, if Yo-Yo loves yo mama, he might love my mama as well, if he could just meet her.) A seed for a short story? Who knows. The scenario just might go somewhere. So I toss it onto the compost bin that is my journal.
Witness Stand
“Never write down anything you wouldn’t want to be used in court,” a lawyer friend once told me. I understand her reasoning, but it doesn’t keep me from writing down plenty of things that might someday be used against me. I blame Great-Aunt Bessie. On my tenth birthday, she gave me a pink, vinyl-covered diary with a tiny lock and key. I’d never thought of words as secrets I could lock away, and the newfound power was exhilarating. If I had the only key, no one else could read what I’d written—not my parents, teachers, friends, or, most important, my siblings. I could write whatever I wanted and no one would know. I could scribble, misspell words right and left, even tell lies without getting caught.
Not that I wanted to lie. What I wanted was to tell what the witnesses on Perry Mason promised to tell: the whole truth and nothing but. The whole truth, I’d discovered, was often hard to say, especially to other people. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” my firstgrade teacher had admonished. That kept me quiet for a long time. But once I opened the diary and started writing, the truth came spilling out. This still happens to me when I open my journal, for something about a journal’s pages encourages truth telling. I write quickly, before I lose my nerve. “The truth is I envy C’s life. I’m afraid to say that I’m lonely. The truth is I’m getting old, my eyelids are drooping, my poems are….”
As I write, I don’t censor the many contradictions, dichotomies, and illogical statements, for truth always has more than one side and rarely follows the rules of logic. “I love New York and hate New York.” “The old woman’s breasts were shrunken and beautiful.” “Money is the most stupid and important thing in our lives.” “I wanted to kiss him and never see him again.” Sometimes I write about the worst things I can imagine happening—to me, to my family and friends. Terrible things. Unspeakable. Except on the journal page. On the journal page, nothing is unspeakable. I can tell the whole truth and nothing but and no one will be harmed. The worst that can happen—which usually turns out to be the best that can happen—is that for a moment my inner world splits open, shattering old notions, white lies, and misconceptions, a process which may lead to public truth-telling on the page, the kind of truthtelling I struggle to bring forth in my poems and essays, but not until I’m good and ready. Not until I’ve talked it through in the pages of my journal.
Playroom
As I said earlier, the world outside our door is, for the most part, deadly serious. Grown-ups are expected to act in a grown-up fashion. We are supposed to pay our bills, mow our lawns, go to our jobs, and balance our checkbooks. Sometimes, without intending to, I carry this nose-to-the-grindstone mentality into my writing room: I must write about important issues and not waste time on frivolity. My writing must be a tool for self-improvement; it must teach me something. No doodling in the margins, no playful Saturday afternoons making up songs about three-toed tree toads.
When I lose the joy of writing for writing’s sake, I return to my journal. Within its covers I can play like a child, record the silliest, goofiest ideas that occur to me: “(Motto for taxidermist) Forever Yours: The Look of Life Without the Trouble.” “Embroidery is crewel and unusual punishment.” “Nature isn’t the only mother who abhors a vacuum.” I can turn a page and sketch a cartoon. In one, a nursing baby is singing, “Thanks for the mammaries.” In another, a man is wearing not a checkered past but a plaid one.
I know, I know. I should definitely keep my day job. But who knows? Maybe someday I’ll write a story about a character who goes around saying goofy things. Stranger things have happened. One of my cartoons—of a dime walking disdainfully past a penny lying in the gutter—evolved into a poem about the invention of zero. You just never know. Besides, it’s fun to play, and sometimes the simple act of playing with words and phrases is enough to start the literary juices flowing. “Say it again,” my nephew begs. So I bring Lewis Carroll’s poem out of mothballs: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wake.” Then, I open my journal and begin making lists of wonderful sounding words, the kind of words that, as a young student once described it to me, “feel good to my ears”: blub, lurk, aubergine, Nefertiti.
Many writers keep word lists, or play with word combinations as they write. Roy Blount Jr.’s published journals contain fascinating sets of word pairs: lacy pants / participants; baseline / Vaseline, wrapper / reappear. Serious poets, too, attest to the power of wordplay: “I found these words and put them together,” wrote William Stafford, “by their appetites and respect for each other.” Yes, some words simply want to live together; others have strong family likenesses. These, for instance, that I recently jotted down in my journal: confetti, graffiti, cherry tree. If I keep playing long enough, the skeleton of a poem might emerge:
Sometimes I uncover words hidden within other words. I recently discovered marriage tucked inside miscarriage, which started me thinking … then comes marriage, then carriage, miscarriage, miscarriage of justice, justice of the peace. Sometimes journal play is like a game of leapfrog, the mind hopping from one image to another, one idea to another, surprising us with connections we had not known were there. And isn’t that what writing is all about—discovering something new? If we can’t surprise ourselves on the page, we will never surprise our readers.
Writing Workshop
The freedom to write whatever we want, in whatever form we wish, is one of the many benefits of journal writing. But absolute freedom can tyrannize as well as liberate. To invent a world where anything is possible, even the world of your own writing, requires great stores of creative energy. Sometimes, when faced with unlimited possibilities, I become overwhelmed, unable to write the first word, or, after writing for a while, I feel I’ve exhausted what I have to say. Like a child at the end of summer who longs for anything—yes, even school—that will provide structure for his days, I begin longing for writing assignments, deadlines, even periodical progress reports to keep me going. Quite often, editors or peers provide the necessary structure, but my journal is also a valuable workshop tool. Within its pages, I can be student, teacher, coach, mentor, editor, and peer. I can assign and complete writing exercises, set deadlines, and even critique my works-in-progress. A recent list of self-made assignments includes:
Stories about the cars in my life and the places they took me
A book of interrelated poems about Central Park
An essay called “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?”
Giving myself assignments helps jump-start my writing on days when my mind is stalled; it also focuses random daytime thoughts and even nighttime dreams. Recording an assignment in my journal is like addressing a postcard to myself and dropping it into the mailbox of my unconscious. Once the assignment is given, my mind starts looking for ways to complete it. Even when my conscious mind forgets I ever made the assignment, my unconscious mind remembers, the way it remembered to buy chicken broth and celery today even though I left the grocery list at home. When my mind is blank, when I can think of nothing at all to write, I borrow an assignment someone else has devised, copy the assignment into my journal, and then complete it as I would an assignment given by a teacher.
Leaping off from someone else’s thoughts is another way I discover potential assignments. My journal is filled with quotations taken from newspapers, books, radio and television, bumper stickers, lists of rules and regulations, overheard conversations—whatever strikes my interest. I sometimes find gems in unexpected places. Once, while leading a fourthgrade poetry lesson, I saw written on a child’s paper, “The truth is sticky, babe.” I jotted it in my journal, forgot about it and then rediscovered it a year or two later while I was struggling with a poem about the difficulty of escaping our personal histories. The child’s insight about the stickiness of truth helped me locate the central image in my poem, and I ended up using her quotation as the poem’s epigraph (giving her credit, of course).
Quotations can lead to all sorts of writing experiences. You can illustrate a quotation with a personal event, question the assumption beneath a quotation, argue with it, or write from the point of view of its real or imagined author. I’ve written several first-person monologues in which I imagine the thoughts and experiences of real-life people and fictional characters based on quotations I recorded in my journal: Peter Pan’s Wendy, a clay-eater, my dead grandmother, an unborn child, and others. I recently discovered the Spanish proverb “More things grow in the garden than the gardener sows,” which made me remember a Barbie doll I once found buried in my tulip bed. I had forgotten about the doll, but now I sense a story growing from the experience. How did the doll get there? Who buried it, and why?
Posing questions is another way to create writing assignments. My journal is filled with questions, from trivial to serious and everything inbetween: “Why am I so drawn to bald men?” “Why am I terrified of tunnels?” “If the cyst is malignant, will I choose chemo or surgery?” “Why do I paint my toenails red?” Any of these questions could suggest a story, poem, song, or letter I could write.
Sometimes I use my journal to assign deadlines: By Friday, I’ll finish the first draft of the sonnet; by next Tuesday, I’ll revise the story about my brother. Giving myself deadlines not only increases my chances of completing projects; it also keeps me from judging my early efforts too harshly. After all, if I have only a week to draft the essay, I can’t expect it to be a magnum opus, right? But when it comes time to test revised drafts, the stakes are higher, and I often talk to myself on the journal’s pages, providing the kind of feedback a peer or editor might provide. I check myself with questions: “Is this line too sentimental?” “Have I resisted the easy answer?” “Is there a better way to say this while still remaining true to the experience?” Sometimes I push myself to work harder; other times I comfort myself by recalling past difficulties that ended in success; sometimes I simply write through a literary problem until I reach a new understanding.
Life Record
Both diary and journal are rooted in the Latin for day, and the first journals were day-by-day renderings of events and transactions. Clerks documented court proceedings, sailors updated logbooks, private citizens recorded their daily comings and goings. William Saroyan, who kept a diary for many years, noted that the journal keeper “is obsessed by the wish to know what happened, and the only way he can ever hope to know is to have the written daily account to consult at his convenience. Otherwise it is all forgotten.” Saroyan’s statement may appear old-fashioned, even stodgy, to those who view the journal primarily as a tool for expressing emotions. However, though daily accounts of what happened don’t appeal to everyone, the benefits of keeping such accounts are many. 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.
Finally, if we later choose to share our journals, or if our descendants choose to, the journals will serve as records of particular places and times. When we read the diaries of Samuel Pepys, Fanny Burney, or Sei Shonagon, we’re treated to a cultural and historical education more lively than any textbook account. Even the most casual, nonliterary record can open windows into personal and public histories.
My grandmother kept a shorthand diary by jotting notes on her kitchen calendar: “butter and cream for Sisson’s,” “three chicks pipped today,” “macaroni for Grange supper.” Her sister, Great-Aunt Bessie, kept more detailed observations of daily events—trips taken, books read, rare birds sighted, and the external and internal weather of her days. Reading her diaries, I learn from the inside out how it felt to be a teenager in the 1890s, a farmer and Red Cross volunteer during World War I, and a widow who traveled the country by Greyhound bus during the 1950s: “I’ve soaked my corns in both the Atlantic and the Pacific,” she wrote.
A diary rooted in daily detail is a double gift to its reader. When we read someone else’s journal or reread our own, we learn not only about the person who recorded these particular details but also about the outer world in which the author moved. “No man is an island,” wrote John Donne; no woman is either. We breathe and move on a continent larger than the self, and the landscape of that continent shapes us. The stories of our lives are also the stories of the towns we’ve visited, the people we’ve known, the books we’ve read, the clothes we’ve bought, the vaccinations we’ve received, the cats and dogs we’ve named and buried, the meals we’ve prepared and eaten. Keeping a record of our comings and goings reminds us that our lives are continuing sagas unfolding, in specific detail, day after particular day.
Confession Booth
“Dear Kitty,” begins Anne Frank’s diary, “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.” Even if we don’t address our diary or journal by name, when we commit personal thoughts to the page, we are in effect constructing another self with whom to share intimate confidences. The phrases associated with journal writing suggest this intimacy. When we make an entry in a diary or journal, we enter it as we might enter a secret room, a guarded conversation, or a lover’s bed; and keeping a journal is not only an act of care and guardianship but also one of personal possession. We are possessive of our innermost thoughts. We don’t want just anyone listening in. Not that we don’t have friends, spouses, lovers, therapists, priests, or pets in whom to confide. (Many cats, I’ve discovered, make excellent listeners.) But there is nothing like the intimacy that occurs within the journal’s pages. The page never yawns, interrupts, or walks away with its tail in the air. It just listens.
Sometimes we whisper secrets. The journal leans close and attends to each word. It will never betray our confidence. Its lips are sealed.
Sometimes we rant and rave, flail and pound against the journal’s pages; we curse our lives and everyone in it. The journal is our punching bag, our padded cell. It absorbs the blows.
Sometimes we confess. We enter the booth, and the journal lifts the partition. No matter if it’s been three weeks since our last confession, or three years. The journal welcomes us home.
When we whine like a spoiled brat, the journal simply leans back, folds its arms across its chest, and nods. It doesn’t tell us to stop acting like a child. And when we make no sense, when one phrase tangles in the next and we can’t untie the knot, the journal is patient. It’s not going anywhere. It’s got all the time in the world. Besides, a journal knows our history as well as we do, sometimes even better. Because it has recorded each confidence, it can recall our past and, in so doing, help us imagine the future. This too will pass, it seems to say. Like a longtime partner who knows us well enough to finish our sentences or fill in the blanks when we’re searching for a word, a journal can fill the awkward silences. When we are voiceless, it helps us find our voice again. Sometimes the voice we find is strange or otherworldly, singing in an unknown key. We dream dreams and see visions. Our daylight self tells us these dreams are crazy, impractical, impossible to achieve, so why even bother? The journal says, “Tell me more.”