As the year 2000 approached, literary critic Frank Kermode, author of The Sense of an Ending (1966) wrote a new epilogue to his book. He returned to the idea “that within human time one can distinguish between the chronos of mere successiveness and the kairos of high days and holidays, times or seasons that stand out (red-letter days, as one used to say) as belonging to a different temporal order” (192).
The texture of every diary is woven from the warp and woof of these contrary experiences of time—the ordinary passage of minutes, hours, days, and weeks (“humanly uninteresting successiveness” [46]) on one hand, and exceptional “crises, kairoi, decisive moments” (49) on the other.
In his millennial epilogue Kermode clarifies that the root meaning of kairos is “season,” which implies that some (though not all) distinctive moments that sharply stand out from everyday routine can be predicted and anticipated: “Birthdays, anniversaries, saint’s days [are] distinguished from all other days” (192), a practice commonly followed when marking entries a diary. Even a unique, once-in-a-lifetime event or deed—whether celebratory or horrific—can be commemorated for years afterward by the diary keeper. (In a thankful spirit Samuel Pepys rarely failed to note the anniversary of the day on which he successfully underwent surgery to remove a bladder stone.)
“When we celebrate these transitional moments,” Kermode explains, we recognize how they “punctuate and measure our time and our lives. For to make sense of our lives from where we are, as it were, stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the interval between them with meaning” (190).
Though he was writing about Biblical and fictional plots, Kermode helps us view the “middleness” of the diary in a new light. Alternating between chronos and kairos, the diary makes room for recording both everyday activities and life-changing events. The cyclical nature of clock-time and calendars means that we regularly come back around to the same point in the cycle, and can seize the chance—suggested especially at the turn of a year—to reflect on what has changed since last time.
That spiral of time embedded in a journal may seem to run perpetually, with no beginning or end other than the intervals we choose to mark out and commemorate. But if we acknowledge that the form of the diary reflects a deeply human state of being, “stranded in the middle” of time, we write out of a keener sense that there was a time before our birth and the world will continue after our life’s end.
People know little about the moon. Popular astronomy and planetarium websites report that to many in their audiences, it comes as a huge surprise even to learn that the moon is visible in daylight. How can we reach adulthood so unobservant of our surroundings that never once did we look up to notice the moon out during the day?
Hollywood audiences apparently take no issue, either, with outdoor establishing shots that tell us a scene takes place at night—and in which, by some unwritten rule, the moon always appears full. I love how the smugglers in “Poldark,” who you’d think might have wanted to move their goods under cover of darkness, always work under a full moon. Then a show’s plot will advance by a week or two, until another scene takes place at night—can you guess whether the moon has changed its phase?
In earlier times, paying attention to the moon held higher stakes than it does today. It could be useful, or even affect survival, to know and predict the lunar cycle. Archaeologists have studied coastlines in Africa with intertidal zones where early humans dependent on molluscs for their food supply had to have a “sophisticated knowledge of the relationship between lunar-driven tides and intertidal foraging.”
Those “early modern humans could recognize the relationship between lunar cycles, tidal systems and [availability of molluscs] and thus design symbolic calendar systems that allowed them to time their visits to the coast so as to make productive use of the coastal zone.” Attunement to the lunar cycles mattered a lot, as foragers could risk drowning in the rising waters if they ignored or miscalculated the lunar—and therefore tidal—cycle.
Often throughout history, too, armies seeking to conduct post-sundown warfare have selected a date when the moon was full to enhance visibility for their nocturnal foray, or a new moon to ambush the enemy under maximum darkness.
Scientific studies still support the validity of relationships between animal behavior and the moon. But does the lunar cycle directly affect human behavior? Anecdotal evidence abounds, especially in places like police stations, crisis hotlines, birthing centers, and emergency rooms.
But hard evidence for the connection tends to crumble in the face of large-scale statistical analysis. Formal studies, many summarized in a Current Biology review article “Human Responses to the Geophysical Daily, Annual and Lunar Cycles,” examine claims of a monthly spike in so-called lunacy, rates of criminal behavior and traffic accidents; these claims, along with supposed correlations between lunar phase and stock-market performance, have all been soundly debunked.
Study after study has failed to support a causal connection between lunar phases and human physiology. Scientists explain that, to begin with, the gravitational force that generates the tides depend on the alignment among earth, moon, and sun, rather than specifically the moon’s phase in relation to earth, “so a full moon does not mean a specific gravitational effect on earth.” Secondly, the idea that our bodies are mostly made up of water and therefore we might host internal “tides” is contradicted by the fact that the moon’s pull is actually a very weak effect, not strong enough to stir most bodies of water (lakes, even the smaller oceans), much less to govern ebbs and flows inside a human body.
Even the most obvious monthly human rhythm—our menstrual cycle—shows no clear evidence of direct influence by the position of the moon. Yet based on the coincidental similarity in the average length of these cycles, cultures around the world link femaleness with the moon in their mythologies, legends, and spiritual practices.
Some evidence does suggest that people’s sleep can be disrupted when the night sky displays more light (such as the three or four nights closest to the full moon). As certain psychological conditions are exacerbated by sleep deprivation, this effect may partly account for anecdotes about the resulting incidents. Such an effect, hugely reduced by the advent of bright artificial lighting after sundown, may have been great enough in past times and still in remote places to keep lunar-phase myths alive.
We choose which cycles to focus on, to note in our diaries, and to invest with significance. Knowing that seasonal changes and circadian (daily) rhythms deeply affect our bodies—sleep patterns, appetites, activity levels—it makes sense, as a practice of self-awareness, to keep daily cycles in mind, a connection that the original meaning of the words “diary” and “journal” already invites.
Some calendar points constructed by culture, too, like weekdays versus the weekend, record-keeping and financial deadlines pegged to the turn of the month, or recurring tasks on a work calendar, tend to fold themselves in to the account of a journal, corresponding to rhythms that matter in our lives. Diaries kept by observant Christians often punctuate their week with Sunday (First Day or Sabbath); in diaries I’ve studied, especially if the writer is a churchgoer, Sunday’s entries may provide a pause to express religious sentiments or reflections.
The question of the lunar month holds a place of quixotic tension in this calendar. Like many journal-keepers, I’ve often followed an impulse to track lunar phases and even let my awareness of the moon’s current phase (last quarter, new moon) prompt the shape or direction of a journal entry. For no rational or scientific reason, I enjoy starting a new volume on the day of a full moon or a new moon.
Paying attention to the moon, even if it doesn’t directly control our physiology, may still have value. Observing your surroundings, such as to notice the moon visible in the sky at morning or midday, and to know where we stand in the lunar cycle, connects you with something beyond yourself.
Humans who menstruate, if attuned to the unfolding sensations in our bodies, can learn to take better care of ourselves by recognizing and working with the inherent “monthliness” of hormonal/menstrual cycles rather than denying or resisting them. Discovering a pattern that may be highly individual, we learn how different points around this cycle are associated, for us, with changing emotional states and physical sensations in semi-predictable ways.
Like the similarly odd fact that our sun and moon appear to share an almost identical diameter as viewed from Earth, the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that any link between lunar phase and human physiology is nothing but coincidence. And links with other perceived connections, such as higher incidences of “lunacy” or crime, simply don’t hold up under statistical examination.
So, let’s accept that the moon exerts no effect on us, and only stirs large bodies of water like the oceans. Maybe as journal-keepers we simply observe those forces the moon exerts on Earth—the ebb and flow of tides, the fluctuation of crescent and gibbous moons, of lighter and darker night skies—as stations that usefully mark our own path through the seasons and the dozen or so full moons that make a year.
Diaries intrigue us because by looking inside one, we cross a threshold into private space, with a sense that maybe it was written solely for the writer to read.
In the middle of an entry, we might even see the writer pause to envision an older self who opens the book and reads it. At the age of 36, Virginia Woolf imagined this scene, and defined her future self as “Virginia Woolf at the age of 50, when she sits down to build her memoirs out of these books [the diaries]” Contemplating that moment, she added, “How I envy her the task I am preparing for her! There is none I should like better. Already my 37th birthday next Saturday is robbed of some of its terrors by the thought” (Diary I, 234).
As Barbara Lounsberry notes in Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path, at this moment “a new persona enters the diary, an appreciative future reader and working writer” (20). This overseeing persona lends a new sense of purpose to the diary for the next several years, as Woolf writes:
Partly for [the] benefit of this elderly lady (no subterfuge will then be possible: 50 is elderly, though, I agree, not old) partly to give the year a solid foundation I intend to spend the evenings of this week of captivity in making out an account of my friendships & their present condition, with some account of my friends characters; & to add an estimate of their work, & a forecast of their future works. The lady of fifty will be able to say how near to the truth I come” (Diary I, 325).
From her vantage point across the years, old Virginia or elderly Virginia (as Woolf calls her) encourages the diarist to keep on writing: “I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 2020 will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost; & take heed that I don’t think 50 a very great age. Several good books can be written still; & here’s the bricks for a fine one” (Diary 2: 24).
As Lounsberry explains, Woolf envisions a future self who “will not only relish but also use Woolf’s diary prose. In that, this projected older self spurs the diarist on” (Lounsberry, 35).
The concept of addressing the diary to your future self comes recommended by many journal-keeping guides. Christina Baldwin, author of One to One, acknowledges that “most of the time, I write to the self that is just ahead of me in evolution—the person I am becoming” (51). Baldwin advises calling upon this “internal [projected] self” as a “friend,” “mentor,” and “guide.”
The author of The New Diary, Tristine Rainer, agrees: “In most cases, the best audience is your future self. If you think of your reader as the person you will be in five, ten, or even fifty years, it will encourage you to write concretely and to include details that make the experience interesting to reread. In ten years you won’t remember the situation unless you capture all its sensual vitality now” (24).
While some diary-keepers claim that they never look back at old entries, others frequently reread their diaries or plan to do so. Frances Burney insisted to a friend in a letter that she needed him to return the diaries he had borrowed, which she wanted back because “to you they can only furnish entertainment . . . but to me, who know all the people & things mentioned, they may possibly give some pleasure, by rubbing up my memory, when I am a very Tabby, before when I shall not think of looking into them” (The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 58).
For those preparing to revisit their own diaries, authors of journal guides suggest numerous ways to “harvest” past volumes. Alexandra Johnson’s Leaving a Trace lists ten patterns to map as you go back through a set of journals. Johnson also gives examples of how writers use their diaries as sources for published work. Ron Klug, in the revised edition of How to Keep a Spiritual Journal(2012), discusses methods for indexing, “gleaning,” creating end-of-year summaries, and “bringing things forward”: “When you find some especially interesting insight while rereading a journal, copy it in your present journal and add some thoughts, showing how your thinking has been reinforced or changed” (125).
Most guides to journal harvesting describe the diary as holding scraps of insight, image, and memory that gain significance as they accrete and form thematic patterns. But the value of addressing a diary to one’s older self also connects with the special time-axis of a diary. The future reader will inevitably know more than the present writer about how current issues and situations will play out.
“Elderly Virginia,” then, will possess not just the general wisdom of experience that Woolf could just as well seek from her older friends and acquaintances, but also very specific answers about Woolf’s life, based on her later position in time and its retrospective capacity.
In 1924 Woolf described her diary as a place to “practise writing; do my scales” for her work as a novelist. She imagined that “[I] shall invent my next book here; for here I write merely in the spirit—great fun it is too, & old V. of 1940 will see something in it too. She will be a woman who can see, old V.: everything—more than I can I think” (Diary 2, 319-20).
The diary’s perpetual existence in the present that can’t see ahead helps to explain why one’s future self, “who can see,” represents an ideal reader. Cutting through a fog of uncertainty about the future, a diary writer can invoke the clarifying spirit of this reader as a balancing presence, one that hovers lightly over the page with yet-unseen wisdom—who offers (or at least will accrue) a more mature perspective.
Someday, this presiding presence implicitly assures us, more will be known about the future that preoccupies the diarist, clarifying and settling everything that matters to them.
While thousands of journal prompts ask us to launch into reflecting on something specific, this post will examine reflection itself as a tool—one that you can pull out to enhance your journal even after you’ve started writing a new entry.
Consider prescribing yourself a dose of reflection whenever you find your diary reverting to a bland factual account of daily weather and completed tasks. Conversely, reflection can also fruitfully intervene when you’ve hit a rough patch and find that these days, your diary seems to serve only to vent a geyser of negative feelings, often in unoriginal, heated language.
Reflection works differently from other journal methods because any time while writing in a journal, you can pause and reflect. Stephanie Dowrick, in The Creative Journal, comments that “the process of journal writing gives you an invaluable measure of distance between yourself and your thoughts . . . I cannot emphasize too strongly how helpful this [measure of distance] is.” She describes reflective writing as a process of “’making room’ inside my own mind so that new thoughts can arise” (15).
So, how do you go about reflecting? To reflect means to break off and make sense of what you see. You give yourself a chance to examine what was just written, identify connections, patterns, or contradictions, and relay these findings in the next few sentences, as annotations, or in a later entry.
In contrast to journal methods that ask for concrete, immediate observation or a lightning-quick sequence of unprocessed thoughts, reflection takes more time to think before writing and involves intentionally stepping back. The “stepping back” matters most—yet another spatial metaphor for that process of creating “a measure of distance” or “making room” for focused work.
That new space opens within the mind of the journal-keeper. In a way the writer splits into two selves: one that can experience while another makes sense of the experience. Two common stylistic indicators of reflection in a diary include introducing the pronoun “you” and phrasing ideas in the form of questions. Both these linguistic moves give rise to implied dialogue between two subjects.
On the surface, these moves may appear to shift power toward a person other than the writer—an implied reader who is directly addressed as “you” or presented with a question to answer. But given the tradition that a diary is private and has no reader, reflection in a journal takes place within the writing self alone. A version of talking to oneself, it allows the writer’s mind to entertain and develop more than a single perspective.
In her book Diary Poetics Anna Jackson persuasively shows how the “you” in many examples of modern journal entries make more sense if “you” is taken as referring to the diarist, rather than a hypothetical reader. Instead of “I” (the writer) addressing “you” the potential reader, the second-person pronoun instead lets the writer build mental distance between an experiencing self and a reflective consciousness. (Sometimes the diarist may feel a need to protect the self at even greater distance by using third person to write about themselves.)
The use of questions likewise implies the two-sidedness of a conversation—or at least a sense that someone (outside or within) is listening to the journal-keeper and invited to respond.
Overuse of the reflective method may call out for its own counterbalancing. Analytical language can begin to feel detached and generalized, so a lengthy reflective passage may find itself giving way to “juicier” stylistic methods like specific descriptions, action scenes, or language that evokes direct sensations, whether emotional or physical.
Remember, too, that the insights gained in reflection only represent your thoughts at the current time. In the triumph of figuring something out, it can feel tempting to view that new interpretation as the final word on a subject, especially an emotionally complicated issue that matters deeply to you.
So even as you round off the reflection, you’ll want to leave the door open to re-question, reframe, and possibly someday replace today’s conclusions as the flow of time continues and the pages of future experience unfold.
Everyday activities have altered across the world. What we called ordinary life feels entirely different from our lives before. On social media we see that increasing numbers of people, confined to their homes, imagine starting a diary. Reduced options for human contact and social connection add appeal to the companionship of a journal. Diary literature features prominent examples of diaries kept by convalescents, prisoners, or people on solitary retreats.
As effects of pandemic touch people everywhere, the present moment also feels historic, producing even greater reasons to track their lives in a journal. Both lifelong journal-keepers and people who never kept a diary before now find themselves wanting to open a blank book and write pages about how life has changed.
You, too, may have had this passing thought, then grew unsure about following through. Maybe you dismissed the idea, telling yourself that surely there will be a glut of such diaries. What could yours add?
Besides, the coronavirus era is no longer news. After a month of staying home, isn’t it a little late to start a diary about what that feels like? Shouldn’t I have started writing on the day when I first heard of the virus, or back when we still went out in groups and everyone in public was overheard talking about it, or maybe that first day we spent entirely at home? Surely the moment for starting a journal has passed.
But the diary offers remarkably flexible ways to handle time, and one of these could help you now. Ira Progoff, who devised a system called the Intensive Journal, understood that people don’t want to write only about today. “The Now of our life,” he wrote, includes “the most recent relevant past.” To examine how we got here, to see our lives in larger context, we need to “expand the present” and develop journal entries that ask more broadly: What is this present period in my life? How far back does it reach? What have been the main characteristics of this recent time?
Progoff recommends sitting quietly to consider at what point the “Now” of your life began: “We stretch the present moment back as far as it needs to go in order to include as much of the past as is still an active part of the present. . . This forms the period that is the Now of our lives, our most recent relevant past as it moves into our present. “ Citing examples like a move to a different city, starting a new job, undergoing an illness, or starting an important relationship—“since that time,” he explains, your “life has borne the imprint of that event, and it, therefore, is the definitive factor in this present period.”
Your new journal, in other words, can open with an entry that reflects on the present period, that explores the elastic Now. As you look back, when did you realize that life had changed, that your freedom of movement and contact with other people would suffer restriction, that all future events on the pages of your calendar had evaporated, that you would need to figure out how to cope?
Whether your Now arrived by way of subtle shifts and adjustments or in one single intense moment that showed the curtain rising on a new act, the story behind your current reality may take more than one writing session to record. Go ahead and weave into this account of the recent past some details of what happened today, bits of what you notice around you in the here-and-now, even while you write.
The concept of an elastic Now enables you to explore earlier life-stages as well. Progoff calls these stages “stepping stones” and we will leave them for a future discussion. For now, if you want to catch up on diary-keeping in a new and unaccustomed time, borrow his method to pull the recent past into the pages of a new journal.
Diaries can heighten awareness of the immediate moment—for example, by writing a “here and now” entry—but they also offer a chance to interpret Now or “the present time” more broadly, as the current phase or chapter in one’s life.
Two classic books on journal-keeping explore ways to expand the present moment into a longer time-period from which to move forward. “There are steps to action, but no formula,” says Christina Baldwin in her book Life’s Companion. Baldwin claims that you can more clearly see the steps toward positive change once you establish a clear understanding of where you are now.
Adopting an honest view of the current reality is crucial, because as Baldwin adds, “we need to make use of the world as it is. Only from the position of being fully in the world can we influence it” (285). To this end, Baldwin offers a sentence-completion exercise that repeatedly opens with the stem phrase “Current reality is . . . “ She invites journal-keepers to create a page of sentences each beginning with that stem, to “make an objective list of the circumstances in your life.”
After listing the factual circumstances, Baldwin next suggests using the same sentence-stem (“Current reality is . . . “) to detail, in simple declarative statements, the emotions felt by the journal-keeper about the circumstances listed in the first part of the exercise. Though it may not seem like this exercise would reveal anything that the journal-keeper doesn’t already know, try it! Many have found clarifying value in writing out these lists and seeing what emerges, as a first step toward action for change.
A more intuitive way to place oneself between past and future, or “position oneself in the present,” comes from Ira Progoff’s Intensive Journal method. “Now is not limited to the immediate instant,” Progoff writes in his book, At A Journal Workshop. Instead, “we stretch the present moment back as far as it needs to go in order to include as much of the past as is still an active part of the present.”
This “present moment” could be longer or shorter depending on the person. It usually goes back to some significant event that continues to influence the writer’s life. Progoff writes:
For one person this present period in his life may reach back three years since he had a car accident and was hospitalized. Because of the changes it brought about, the period of time since that event is the Now. For another person this present period may be merely a few weeks since she met a new friend, moved to a different city, began a new job, or underwent some other significant change in her circumstances. Since that time her life has borne the imprint of that event, and it, therefore, is the definitive factor in this present period. (47)
To launch this exercise Progoff asks the writer to take a few minutes, with eyes closed, to reflect on the implications of the question, “Where am I now in my life?” Instead of thinking about it deliberately, the goal is to relax in a meditative state, allowing an image or sensation to emerge in response to this question. The awareness may come in many forms—perception, symbol, metaphor—and can be described with the sentence stem, “It is like . . . “ followed by a description of what has revealed itself.
As a final step to consolidate this insight, Progoff has the journal-writer step back and look at this present period more consciously:
When did it start?
What are the main outer and inner events that stand out when thinking about this time?
How has it generally felt to be you? Is it a difficult time, a joyous time, a time of grieving?
What events have focused on the physical experiences of your body?
What relationships with others stand out, especially conflicts or newly strengthened connections?
What internal events—dreams, emotional states, transformation through art or spirituality—had a strong influence?
Have habits or beliefs changed during this period?
For Baldwin and Progoff, the purpose of dwelling in the present and understanding the “now” is ultimately focused on the future. “Present time” entries build a vantage point from which to envision and set forth in a new direction. Such a dynamic model implies that circumstances continue to change, and that the journal-keeper can choose where to go from here.
The highly popular Bullet Journal relies on a format perennially used in diaries: the list. A few years back Ryder Carroll created this system to show people “how to neatly funnel all their notes and projects into one notebook.” BuJo, as it’s affectionately nicknamed, offers a streamlined system of trackers, schedules, logs, and occasional longer passages of reflection.
The clarity of a list punctuated with bullet points appealed to Carroll, who originally trained as a designer, because of his conviction that “few design conventions can do so much with so little.” A list collects and orders information in the quickest, most compact, and simplest manner possible. Hence, as Carroll acknowledges in The Bullet Journal Method (2018) “the list is the core design pattern in the Bullet Journal” (255).
Ryder Carroll was not the first to build a journal system around lists. Some of the earliest known diaries rely on list-making, all the way back to the Medieval Japanese “pillow-books.” Sei Shōnagon, poet and court attendant to Empress Teishi (Sadako) around the year 1000, wrote a famous Pillow Book that included her personal collection of entertaining and thought-provoking lists. Her lists have titles like “Things That Give a Clean Feeling,” “Things That Give an Unclean Feeling,” “Things That Seem Better at Night Than in the Daytime,” “Things That Look Pretty but That Are Bad Inside,” “Adorable Things,” “Things That Make One Nervous,” “Presumptuous Things,” and “Things with Frightening Names.”
Lying between the fanciful lists of a pillow-book and the pragmatic value of organizing one’s life with the BuJo system, a spectrum of list-making practices can enrich the content of any journal.
On the most basic level, when life gets incredibly busy and you find yourself with less than five minutes to spend with the journal, a great quick method is to divide the page into two columns labeled with “plus” and “minus” signs. In these columns, simply jot down a few words noting what’s good about your life right now and what’s less than optimal. You can return later to expand on these lists and write more on these topics later, but you don’t have to. Just having these minimal notes will suffice to jog your memory of what mattered during tough times when you couldn’t create a more extensive record.
Conversely, when you find yourself with plenty of time to explore and write, you might be looking for a way to move out of the present moment and pull material from the past into the journal. Ira Progoff’s Stepping Stones exercise, taken from his book At a Journal Workshop (1975) invites you to imagine your whole life up to this point as a set of stages. You give a name to each stepping stone (which you could also envision as chapters in the book of your life). This overview lets you see where you are in your life, from the present vantage-point. In future writing sessions you can select a single stepping-stone to expand, explore through memory, and develop in understanding.
These lists may be relatively short (Progoff recommends a maximum of 10-12 Stepping Stones), but Kathleen Adams, author of Journal to the Self (1990), recommends another practice called Lists of 100. Adams recognizes that it’s hard to come up with 100 examples of pretty much anything. The exercise permits repeating the same item twice; the point is to write fast, listing as many items as possible, with the understanding that, as in many brainstorming processes, the less obvious and more delayed material could end up proving most interesting and useful.
Lists of 100 can be used for many purposes, mostly involving problem-solving, identifying hidden patterns, clarifying what matters, and generally moving beyond the first few (dozen) obvious items to pull deeper, otherwise inaccessible material from the subconscious mind. Examples that Adams gives include “100 Reasons to [Do X]”; “100 Reasons Not to [Do X]”; “100 Childhood Memories”; “100 Fears”; “100 Possessions I’ve Owned Long Enough”; “100 Decisions I’ve Made That Turned Out Well.”
Like other basic journal methods, the list format can work well to write a single entry, but listing also describes a key structural feature of the diary. Anna Jackson comments in her book Diary Poetics that “in a sense, every diary is a kind of list of days, sharing with the list the open-ended structure, the paratactic relationship of its units, [whether it’s] the days of the diary or items on the list” (137).
No journal keeper ever needs to stare at a blank page, wondering what to write. Yes, it can feel overwhelming to open the book to a new page and get started—to select an opening gambit when faced with a rush of thoughts and emotions tumbling through the mind—or, at the other extreme, when bogged down by a sense of having nothing to say. Has too much happened since the last entry, or has nothing seemed to change much since you last wrote?
One method for starting any diary entry has proven consistently reliable. Tristine Rainer, in her book The New Diary, named this method “a here-and-now exercise.” To do it, you engage in describing your surroundings at the time of writing. Rainer advises that this method works best if you “re-awaken all the senses,” intentionally heightening your physical awareness to pick up on concrete details that people don’t generally notice.
Here-and-now starts with describing what appears around you, making the language vivid, to bring readers right into the place of your writing. To do this exercise, it helps if you don’t write in a habitual place at the same time each day. Vary the scene of journal-keeping; look for different times to write and scout new locations.
What does “vivid” mean? To bring your scene to life, most writing guides suggest avoiding abstract words that render judgment (gorgeous, boring, neglected, delicious) in favor of clear factual details that immerse a reader in the experience. “The best way to avoid the trap of dead words,” says Hannah Hinchman, “is to keep a firm grasp on the real stuff, prickly, slimy, or bony as it may be.”
Build a rich vocabulary of nouns and verbs; scrutinize adjectives and avoid piling them on; find out and use the precise names for everyday objects and the parts of things, like a lamp finial or a wall bracket. In my own journals, even as the writing unfolds across the page, I play a game of avoiding “to be” verbs—a page without a single “are,” “is,” or “were” means that I win for clear and pointed prose.
So, describe what you see—branches laden with shades of green outside the window, a fly swatter on the table, softening apples in a bowl—but also note smells, sounds, and even more subtle sensory experiences: The cidery smell and puckered skin of the nearest apple, the whine of the passing housefly, the white-noise hum of appliances around the house—bitter aftertaste of the last, cooled sip from the coffee mug, drape of humid air on arms and neck.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, who writes about mindfulness, describes the state of heightened observation where you might notice, for example, how even when you close your eyes, the sound of rain can delineate a landscape, bringing out the contours and perspective of the surrounding space as raindrops hit different surfaces to produce different sounds, creating a complex acoustic experience.
What surrounds you here-and-now offers a variety of textures, colors, objects, perhaps living things to describe. You may also note interior physical sensations: Kabat-Zinn suggests, beyond paying attention to what you see, hear, and smell, pausing to immerse your awareness in the fluid “airscape” against your skin. Even on a day without wind, or when sitting indoors, if you attend carefully you can train yourself to feel a subtle current or draft moving around, in, and out of your body: cool, warm, wet, dry?
Why bother to note such trivial things and write them down? A here-and-now exercise squarely places you in the moment of diary-writing, and diaries take it as their project to begin in the present. “Put yourself right in the present,” advised the venerable diary-keeper, Anaïs Nin, quoted by Marlene Schiwy in A Voice of her Own. “Start there and that starts the whole unravelling, because that [present moment] has roots in the past and it has branches into the future.”
As you write about what’s around you, the outer world comes into contact with your physical self and produces interior sensations. Stretch to consider the less obvious sensory experiences, like sounds and smells in your environment. Let the here-and-now exercise work to expand your idea of what’s involved in being here, and your awareness of how that feels now.
By starting with the moment of writing, the diarist opens space to move in a variety of directions that we can explore in future posts. Just to give one example, sensory details of the present can evoke intense memories after years have passed. By practicing vivid ways to write about your “now,” you offer a gift to the later self who reads the diary—for whom, in Curtis Casewit’s words, “some long-ago days may still gleam there as if you had just experienced them.”
In posts ahead, we’ll look at ways to use the here-and-now exercise as a springboard. Details observed in the present often spark memories and provide a gateway into writing about the past—how it still affects our lives, or what has changed since earlier times. A single object, once we’ve placed attention on it, can become much more—the choice of words reveals what the writer finds important and how they feel at the time of writing. Mental or emotional state shapes everything recorded in the journal.
And finally, in future posts let’s broaden our idea of the present moment beyond a single point in time—the minutes spent writing today—to consider, as suggested by Ira Progoff (creator of the Intensive Journal), an “elastic ‘now’” that expands the present moment to include the length of time that has passed since writing the previous entry, or even the current period in one’s life. The elastic “now” can open enough space to take a fresh look at present circumstances and envision where to go from here.
People like to say that the perfect time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. I recently attended a meeting that wasn’t even about journal-keeping, but when we went around the room to describe what we’ve done lately and I mentioned the dilemma of 127 diaries, several people said they’d love to go back and read their own diaries from ten or twenty years ago–if only they had kept one.
The tree proverb goes on to add, “–and the second-best time is right now.” Fortunately, the first page of a diary always represents a new beginning, no matter what date appears at the top of the page. Almost any day offers some logic for beginning–the first day of the month, the beginning of summer, the arrival of a guest, your first night in a new home, the day of returning from a trip, your birthday, an anniversary of significance: Something in your life is always starting anew. Certainly there’s no need to hold off until January 1 to start one’s first diary or to revive the practice after letting it lapse a while.
Remember, too, that a diary doesn’t need to focus only in the present moment. Even if an entry opens by settling itself in the here and now, your writing may proceed through a doorway into memory or pause at the threshold of an anticipated future. The end of a chapter in your life also signals the beginning of the next, so it makes sense to start your journal in the wake of an event that feels like an ending, and learn in the upcoming pages what life has next in store.
Some diaries deliberately frame their focus around a marked-off period of time. A student begins a diary-blog to share with family at home the experience of studying abroad. New parents keep a detailed scrapbook of their baby’s first year. An annual garden notebook captures each detail from initial sowing to the year’s final harvest.
Some ideas for the perfect day to start (or reactivate) your journal:
Day of filing paperwork to launch a business, apply for citizenship, or lease an apartment
Day of achieving a big, long-term goal
Start of an exercise regime, with plan to track progress
First sight of seedlings coming up in your garden
Occurrence in current events that feels like “the end of an era”
Day of receiving important news
Day of purchasing tickets for an upcoming trip
Day of starting a new job or a new big project
Day of packing your suitcase for a trip (or the move to a new home)
Day of making an important life decision
Anniversary of an important event
Arrival or departure of a member of the household/family
First day of a new school year
Full moon
New moon
Vernal equinox (beginning of spring)
Summer solstice (beginning of summer)
Autumnal equinox (beginning of fall)
Winter solstice (beginning of winter)
Your birthday
New Year’s Day – January 1
What do you see on the horizon to guide the shape and direction of your next diary? Will you write each day, or check in with your journal only occasionally? A fresh start can feel good; the act itself of beginning a diary can mark the first step in a journey. Even if no big change looms in your life and everything feels fairly routine, it’s possible that your journal work will uncover a fuller way to see and experience what may only seem like ordinary events.
When you read a diary, not all the entries spark interest to the same degree. So what quality makes a diary entry jump right off the page? How can you bring your diary to life, both for yourself when you look at it again, and for readers who may not even know you?
As I spend hours in the library basement slowly deciphering a young man’s Civil War-era diary, I come across moments that stay long afterwards in my mind: his enjoyment of ice cream as a rare treat, how he’s swept away by the eloquence of a guest preacher at his church, the day he was snubbed by a doctor who decided not to hire him as an assistant.
And when I re-read my own diary, what draws my eye? For one thing, I love it when my former self looks ahead and tries to guess at the future. At age 25 I wrote a few tentative notes about someday becoming a parent; though it would be five years before it happened, here I can identify the earliest stages of imagining parenthood.
Students in my diary class enjoy those entries where diarists question or push back against social conventions of their time. When young Frances Burney, in 1775, successfully resists a marriage proposal that her father and all her friends put her under great pressure to accept, we follow the drama and watch her practice how to explain to people who care about her, and want the best for her, why she doesn’t want to take the obvious and expected path. Burney emerges in the pages of her diary as an individual with her own ideas and feelings, most visibly when these conflict with social expectations.
We also get drawn in by firsthand testimony or even sideline comments that record events of historical significance. I have a friend of a friend who treasures the family diary with an entry that responds to receiving news of President Lincoln’s assassination. Samuel Pepys’ personal account of living through London’s Great Fire in 1666—right down to details like burying a cheese in his garden to protect it from the fire, or watching the urban pigeons singe their wings as they try to escape the heat of a city going up in flames—numbers among the top most-read passages in the entire literary tradition of diaries.
As readers, we perk up when diarists let us in on their thoughts about what they hope to accomplish with their diary. Such passages often pop up near the beginning. When the diarist states an intention, that allows us to examine later entries with an eye to whether they’ve kept their resolution. If family and friends read their diary and offer opinions—perhaps aiming to discourage them from the habit, as we saw with several well-known 18th-century diaries—these accounts lend further interest, reminding us of the writer’s self-awareness and formation of identity.
Reader interest may surge when the diarist offers an account of a “big day”—the day when they learned something, or a whole new phase of life began, or any event that they find especially significant or influential. Among the accounts of mundane and repetitive days, these moments stand out.
But quiet moments, vividly described through the senses, also capture attention. Such moments help us see into the mind and feelings of the person writing. Brief scenes of interacting with a quirky or randomly encountered person (or animal), quoted snippets from conversations, notes on the arrival of a new season or fashion trend, an object that means a lot to the diarist even if unremarkable to others—all these bring the diarist and their world to life.
Conversely, the last thing most of us want to see is another summary of the day’s weather or list of routine tasks. And maybe it’s just me, but I once decided against transcribing an otherwise intriguing handwritten diary, simply to avoid being subjected to daily news about the writer’s digestive system! (Great time, by the way, for the writer to employ a personal code—I’ll write more about using codes in a future post.)
What draws your eye, or increases your heart rate, when you read a diary? Next time you pick up your diary, think about how you’ll make it lively and interesting to those who may someday read it—including your future self.
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Copyright Statement.
As the year 2000 approached, literary critic Frank Kermode, author of The Sense of an Ending (1966) wrote a new epilogue to his book. He returned to the idea “that within human time one can distinguish between the chronos of mere successiveness and the kairos of high days and holidays, times or seasons that stand out (red-letter days, as one used to say) as belonging to a different temporal order” (192).
