Readers savor the collection of miscellaneous odds and ends that form the collage of the diary. We expect a diary entry to travel freely across the writer’s thoughts, without regard to logical or grammatical transitions.
If you’ve been writing long discursive entries, consider breaking it up: Do several different things on the same page, and don’t even try to connect the series. Give voice to a brief expression, leave some blank space, and move on.
A single image, a succinct comment, a quick recap of a recent incident, a rapidly sketched verbal portrait of someone you met or saw today, a check-in with your physical body, a flashback to the hour before dawn when you woke during the thunderstorm, the salient question on your mind—you can give a moment of attention to each little piece as you inscribe them, one after another, in your journal.
For this method, aim to keep each burst of writing energy brief and self-contained. The jottings may vary in length from a handful of words to a couple of sentences. Fill a page, attending with fresh attention to the vitality and sharpness of each piece.
Don’t confuse this method with an exercise in automatic writing or freewriting that requires you to keep the pen moving without lifting it from the page as you pour out an unedited stream of consciousness. Rather, while forming these scraps take all the time you want to pause and consider what the scrap will include, to think about your wording and the shape of a phrase. Sentence fragments may feel right for some of the bits and pieces, while others will tend to speak themselves in sentences.
Possibly a few of the scraps will consist of material other than words. Your exercise in miscellany may open space to sketch a small picture, set down a line of music, or tape a preserved memento like a ticket stub, pressed leaf, recipe, or news clipping, on the page.
If you go about it mindfully and clearly, setting down each scrap as it occurs to you, a fuller picture made up of these disparate pieces may later emerge, revealing connections traced by your imagination and memory as you wrote. Such patterns become visible only with time. Virginia Woolf refers to this process in the well-known passage where she describes the ideal diary as
some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time. (Diary, April 20, 1919)
When vignettes stand out separately on a diary page, we think of the most highly condensed literary forms: the haiku, aphorism, imagist poem, couplet, or epigram. Maybe your own scraps will assume one or more of these shapes—or maybe your own favorite examples will weave themselves in among your own writing as quotation and counterpoint, in the age-old tradition of the “commonplace book,” a diary that consisted entirely of other people’s words.
