Journaling?

[FlightlessBird]

So, very lately, I've been trying journaling--the handwritten kind.

I always like to read about whatever I'm doing--not to tell me how to do it, just because...I enjoy it. So I've been looking for books or blogs or forums or videos about journaling, and there are zillions of them, but...meh.

So, anybody interested in discussing journaling? (And am I missing a thread where this post should be?)

I'm going to babble on, just in case the answer is yes.

Part of the motivation for my journaling is to record my present so that in the future I can remember my past. Forever, I've been a bit sad about the countless things I don't remember, and I've thought I should keep a diary.

Part of it seems to be an unexplained craving to process things in handwriting on paper. I've always kept a notebooks, where when that craving came up I wrote random lists of thoughts and ideas (grocery lists, meal plans, packing lists, gardening ideas, decluttering ideas, blah blah blah) but I always tore out the pages and threw them away. Lately I've had the hand-writing craving far more often, and I've gone through notebooks much faster, so it seemed logical to tie that to the desire to keep a diary by using a bound notebook and not throwing anything away.

Also, I'd like to hand-write fiction more often; it does seem to involve an at least slightly different brain process, and that could be useful when I'm stuck--and also when I just don't have my computer.

Oh, and I want a more permanent record of my gardening, and paper seems to be the only way I permanently keep anything.

And...oh, there are several reasons. I'm also moving a non-trivial part of my calendar and to-do planning to paper.

So. I wildly overspent at Stationery Site That Shall Not Be Named and now have a dated notebook for daily journaling as well as calendar planning, one for gardening records, one for work, and another one that I bought by accident and may use for decluttering. And an undated notebook for overflow. And...well, anyway, I have to stop shopping.

So what am I actually writing? Nothing terribly interesting. But I have kept up a daily habit for more than a month. I keep hoping it will suddenly shift to being more interesting. When I increasingly felt that nothing I was writing was likely to trigger memory, I did declare my own Journaling Prompt, even though Journaling Prompts for some reason annoy me: Look around the room and write about three things that characterize the day.

So. Anyway. Journaling? Discuss?

 

[Tocotin]

Oh yes!

I love pen and paper and am writing anything and everything I can by hand, and recently I started keeping a journal in earnest. Even though my life is largely uneventful, there is always something to write about. I have two planners to journal in, one small and usable on the go, and one big, to look back on the day or days. Both journals have a lot of stuff about writing, because that’s what I think about the most, and I also keep a separate journal for every story I write (not to be confused with notebooks in which I write the stories themselves).

Also, I'd like to hand-write fiction more often; it does seem to involve an at least slightly different brain process, and that could be useful when I'm stuck--and also when I just don't have my computer.

It’s a different experience than writing on a computer for sure. I used to write on my computer and I always had the urge to go back and edit on the spot, because whenever I looked at the page, all the flaws and mistakes were instantly visible. It can be a good thing – I’m not against editing at the same time as writing – but I didn’t like to be able to see everything so clearly at once. Does it make sense?

So. I wildly overspent at Stationery Site That Shall Not Be Named and now have a dated notebook for daily journaling as well as calendar planning, one for gardening records, one for work, and another one that I bought by accident and may use for decluttering. And an undated notebook for overflow. And...well, anyway, I have to stop shopping.

I’m keeping a record of how much I spend on stationery. Doesn’t help. Well, maybe a little.

 

[Simon Gant]

So, very lately, I've been trying journaling--the handwritten kind.

I always like to read about whatever I'm doing--not to tell me how to do it, just because...I enjoy it. So I've been looking for books or blogs or forums or videos about journaling, and there are zillions of them, but...meh.

So, anybody interested in discussing journaling? (And am I missing a thread where this post should be?)

I'm going to babble on, just in case the answer is yes.

Part of the motivation for my journaling is to record my present so that in the future I can remember my past. Forever, I've been a bit sad about the countless things I don't remember, and I've thought I should keep a diary.

Part of it seems to be an unexplained craving to process things in handwriting on paper. I've always kept a notebooks, where when that craving came up I wrote random lists of thoughts and ideas (grocery lists, meal plans, packing lists, gardening ideas, decluttering ideas, blah blah blah) but I always tore out the pages and threw them away. Lately I've had the hand-writing craving far more often, and I've gone through notebooks much faster, so it seemed logical to tie that to the desire to keep a diary by using a bound notebook and not throwing anything away.

Also, I'd like to hand-write fiction more often; it does seem to involve an at least slightly different brain process, and that could be useful when I'm stuck--and also when I just don't have my computer.

Oh, and I want a more permanent record of my gardening, and paper seems to be the only way I permanently keep anything.

And...oh, there are several reasons. I'm also moving a non-trivial part of my calendar and to-do planning to paper.

So. I wildly overspent at Stationery Site That Shall Not Be Named and now have a dated notebook for daily journaling as well as calendar planning, one for gardening records, one for work, and another one that I bought by accident and may use for decluttering. And an undated notebook for overflow. And...well, anyway, I have to stop shopping.

So what am I actually writing? Nothing terribly interesting. But I have kept up a daily habit for more than a month. I keep hoping it will suddenly shift to being more interesting. When I increasingly felt that nothing I was writing was likely to trigger memory, I did declare my own Journaling Prompt, even though Journaling Prompts for some reason annoy me: Look around the room and write about three things that characterize the day.

So. Anyway. Journaling? Discuss?

Keep going, keep going. The smallest observation can trigger a story. In the words of Nora Ephron's mother, "Everything is copy." I journaled about dropping off cookies at Xmas for our postal workers and it burgeoned into an enjoyable piece of social satire.

 

[Simon Gant]

As far as materials of conquest, the old Mead composition books have always suited me fine.

 

[Paul Lamb]

I've been keeping an handwritten journal for 40+ years. I use spiral notebooks like we used in college (before laptops and tablets). I'm currently filling journal #39 31.

To me their usefulness is in the present moment. There is something intangible yet valuable to writing my thoughts. I guess I puzzle my way through them better that way. They say that writing your thoughts slows down your thinking so that you can understand your thoughts more deeply. Maybe that's true. I seem to be impatient to get the pencil across the page so I can get to my next thought.

I used to use my journals to record/develop story ideas, but I could never find them when I wanted to go back and see what I had written. (I think I've been wading through 39,000 3,900 pages at this point.) Plus, if I had a fresh idea for a story that I'd already begun documenting, it would likely not be proximate to the earlier notes, so I'd have to cross reference dates/times in my entries, which just got too clumsy. Now I keep story ideas in Word files with some control using file names/subdirectories.

It seems to me that every writer should keep a journal (or at least make a genuine effort to explore journaling as a prewriting tool).

 

[JudiH]

I've been keeping an handwritten journal for 40+ years. I use spiral notebooks like we used in college (before laptops and tablets). I'm currently filling journal #39.

I wish I'd kept one for 40 years. Those long-term ongoing journals can be such a treasure-trove of information to those who come after us. I love reading diaries and journals, both ones like Gilbert White's, who recorded daily weather measurements and reported on which plants were blooming/fruiting when, and the kind where the writer records and explores daily events, thoughts, and emotions.

One of my favorite people in the entire world, Irving Finkle of the British Museum, has started something he calls The Great Diary Project, dedicated to rescuing diaries and journals that would otherwise be discarded or destroyed. How I would love to go spend a couple of weeks in his stacks!

My grandfather kept one for, gosh, I don't know, 60 years? He bought big green ledger books--something like this--he had to special order them because no Amazon back then. Had a special fountain pen he used to write in his diary every night. My mother hated them. She said her life was her life and nobody else's business, and if she'd had her way she'd have incinerated them after he died. Fortunately he was no longer living with us when he died, but I have no idea what became of them. Maybe they did wind up in some California landfill.

I journaled off and on in my teens and 20s, and as soon as my new paper shredder arrives those pages are confetti.

 

[FlightlessBird]

Yay, discussion! Thanks for discussing, folks!

I find that as I start (my first page of intentional journaling was...February 1? and I think I've kept up an unbroken streak since then) a fair amount of my journaling is...about journaling. I seem to need to figure out a specific set of guidelines for a practice before I can settle into actually doing the thing.

I've decided on using a Hobonichi A5 Cousin (a journal with multiple forms of a calendar, plus a page for each day of the year), using the left-hand part of the page for a modified bullet journaling, the right-hand side for narrative journaling, writing single spaced, no indents, a line between paragraphs, using the January pages that I didn't use because I started in February as overflow pages when I write more than a page a day, bought a Hobonichi plain grid notebook ready for when I use up all those pages and have more overflow, abandoned ink for a .3mm mechanical pencil...MASSIVE OVER PROCEDURIZING! And that's ignoring the separate gardening, decluttering, and work journals. Oh, and I just ordered a journal to use specifically for travel, because I want to feel free to write things in my main journal that I'm not willing for strangers to read if I lose the thing while traveling. So the travel journal will be more self-censored. Also, I think I just wanted another pretty notebook.

But now that all those Vitally Important Decisions are done, I'm getting closer to writing things that feel less "I'm wasting paper on this?!"

I'm also pasting in things that I want to remember, with no systematic rules. A "picture of the day"--but not every day. A recipe that I make a lot and keep having to dig around for. A scene that I forced myself to write; I'm trying to drag myself out of a writing slump. I want to add a lot of things that help me remember this time when I look back. In fact, that's a large part of the reason for putting bullet journaling in the journal--it may be that the bullet journal task "hang chicken tiles in greenhouse" will spark more memories than whatever I wrote about today.

OK. I stop babbling now.

 

[Katiebee]

So, very lately, I've been trying journaling--the handwritten kind.

I always like to read about whatever I'm doing--not to tell me how to do it, just because...I enjoy it. So I've been looking for books or blogs or forums or videos about journaling, and there are zillions of them, but...meh.

The Artist’s Way might interest you. It’s about doing Morning Pages as a way to get unblocked, but also just a lot of thoughts on the benefits of journaling and the writing process and processing your own life and past. I enjoyed it and need to start up on my morning pages again….

 

[FlightlessBird]

The Artist’s Way might interest you. It’s about doing Morning Pages as a way to get unblocked, but also just a lot of thoughts on the benefits of journaling and the writing process and processing your own life and past. I enjoyed it and need to start up on my morning pages again….

I know I have a copy of The Artist's Way (never read) but I can't find it! Since you suggested this I keep going back and forth--re-buy it? Don't re-buy it? I'm probably going to re-buy it. The obvious option of the library comes up, but I don't treat books nicely, and I have a lot of respect for library books, so the result is that I don't read them, I renew them a few times, I forget them, they end up overdue, I return them and pay fines...

Might as well pay up front and get a copy I can read in the bathtub.

Yes, that was a long and rambling response.

I'm going to ramble more now.

I'm still journaling, daily, unbroken since sometimes in February. I doubt that my entries are any more interesting, but I'm more relaxed about them. They're getting longer; I'm using the Hobonichi Cousin, but I overflow the daily page every day, into an overflow notebook. Lesson learned; no more page-a-day journals.

I've also developed an odd habit of nabbing pictures and quotes online, printing, cutting them out like I'm in kindergarten, and pasting them into journal pages. Today I have a picture of a cat glaring furiously at the camera after biting a bar of soap, and a quote from Josephine Tey about the subconscious.

Yesterday, Julia Child: "If you're afraid of butter, use cream."

The day before, a black and white photo of a very young Mary Tyler Moore, taken from behind her as she watches filming of Dick Van Dyke's (well, Robert Petrie's) desk in the Dick Van Dyke show.

And so on. Occasionally a news headline. Occasionally a sticker or shipping label or receipt. Occasionally a collage. Occasionally a recipe. Seems like I'm finding the parts of commonplacing and junk journaling that appeal to me. This does not include writing out the quotes with my own hand. Nope.

Aside from the aforementioned pictures, I'm not decorating my pages. At all. I bought a couple of pages of stickers (penguins and cats) in case I wanted to use them, but, meh. Nope. No washi tape. No markers. I am using tiny color coded dotes to mark certain topics--a green dot when I ramble on about a garden topic, because I want the ability to flip through later saying, "WHEN did the candytuft bloom last year?!"

Speaking of which, all those extra notebooks were, as expected, a waste. I don't want to switch from the main book to the garden book when my brain drifts to babbling about writing, or to the work book when it babbles about work. The apparently meaningful distinction is, instead, short term processing and long-term recordkeeping. Rhapsodizing or griping about the Candytuft is short-term. Tracking where and when I got the plants, where I planted them, how I amended their spot, how I fertilized it, and how they did, is long-term recordkeeping on the Candytuft By Garden Shed page.

I'm restraining myself from starting all over and wasting the remaining three-quarters of the Cousin, but next year the plan is:

- A medium-fat notebook for long-term recordkeeping. Chosen carefully because I'll likely be using it for a year or three.
- A smallish calendar pamphlet, probably two-pages-per-month with decent sized boxes per day. That's really as complicated as my calendar gets. If I have an ultra complicated week/month, I can put in a sticky note.
- Whatever notebook I darn well please for journaling, morning pages if I do them, brainstorming, bullet journaling, hand-writing fiction, pictures, quotes, blah de blah de blah.

That was more babbling than anybody cared about. I click the button anyway.