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.
The era of pandemic has affected even our sleep and dreams, and you may find yourself wanting to reflect these odd night-time experiences in your journal.
Yet the distinctive shape of a diary relies on dailiness. Diaries record time in regular periods of waking life covered in an entry, punctuated by gaps of nightly silence between entries, when we imagine the diary-keeper sleeps. To recall the classic example of this framing, Samuel Pepys announces over and over that he arose “up betimes” (or sometimes, he confesses, late) and concludes many an entry by signing off to sleep again: “And so to bed.”
In the diary each day opens the door to a new entry, whether it marks a fresh start or simply dives back into the routines and unfolding circumstances chronicled in entries past. Yet as journal-keepers widen the scope of reflection and explore internal life by describing varied states of mind, the day-by-day structure may run up against the challenge that a significant portion of mental life takes place in sleep. “No matter how you want to think about dreams,” says Christina Baldwin in One to One, “they are helpful pieces of knowledge and insight to include in the journal for self-awareness” (131).
So, how to incorporate dreams into the diary? Nearly every book about journal-keeping sets aside a chapter to address the issues surrounding a dream journal. The first question involves whether to keep the dream journal as a separate book. Ron Klug gives the example of a “dream log” in his list of journals that might stand on their own: Stored right beside the bed, the dream log waits for the writer to “immediately jot down their dream and any thoughts they have as to its meaning” (30).
Kay Adams describes the trade-off between a separate dream log, which has the advantage of providing “a running ‘script’ of your dream life,” versus integrating dreams within the context of daytime entries, a juxtaposition that more easily reveals connections and reference points with events that happened in waking life: “the sum of the parts can create a greater whole” (190).
Tristine Rainer in The New Diary recommends a framing method that both marks off the dreams and keeps them together with the rest of the journal: “If you put a box around your dream titles or write your dreams in red ink or otherwise distinguish them, you can later read through the dreams alone as in a dream log. The added benefit is that the night dream and the day life remain side by side. . . In retrospect you can see even more patterns and interconnections, and you can also observe to what extent you successfully listened to and answered your dreams in your waking life” (158).
Teachers and counselors with extensive experience in guiding dream work agree without exception on the importance of capturing a dream directly upon waking, before the details fade from memory. They all give some version of Baldwin’s advice in Life’s Companion, to “keep a dream journal, notepad, sketchpad, or even small tape recorder by your beside” (139).
Sleep scientists have established that everyone dreams, even if they don’t retain their dreams in memory; apparently the simplest way to improve retention is simply to allot a certain amount of waking time to thoughts about dreaming. If you have dream-related ideas and intentions on your mind during the day, especially in the crucial minutes just before sleep, you are considerably more likely to remember at least fragments of a dream when you wake up.
Books on journal-keeping advise jotting down whatever you can remember of the dream, “catching it by the tail” so you can reel in more of the dream as you write it down. A popular format seems to involve recounting the dream in present tense and first person, as if it’s unfolding before the reader’s eyes. Another standard practice in dream therapy (which in these times seems heavily dominated by Jungian depth psychology) is to give each dream a title (see Tristine Rainer above), presumably for indexing and reference when later analyzing and interpreting the dreams in sequence.
Clearly, though, it’s up to each journal keeper to handle their dreams in any way that feels useful and instructive. Dream life, as part of internal experience, offers access to elusive non-rational, associative, and image-centered mental processes that may reward creative exploration in the pages of a journal.
To figure out a diary’s intended audience, start by examining the amount of background information a writer includes. If the diary, especially in its first few entries, appears to introduce itself to a stranger by explaining basic facts that everyone around the writer probably already knows, that creates a different effect from a diary that jumps right in with comments on people, places, and situations assuming a reader who already has familiarity with them.
The history of diaries includes plentiful examples of both. Samuel Pepys begins his diary by summarizing the previous year. He lists the members of his household and shares with the reader the address of his home, the primary assets he owns, the name of his employer, the “condition of the State” and some notes on his own recent health. Other diaries omit such introductions and take the reader in hand with a familiarity that suggests prior acquaintance and no need to explain the life’s context.
People who come along and read the diary can be divided into two groups: those who know the writer personally and those who lack direct acquaintance with the writer. (This useful division between an initial group of intended or unexpected readers and a secondary audience that inherits the diary later was developed by Kaitlyn Goss-Peirce in her 2019 research on Iowa diaries.)
For the first group, whom we’ll call “proximate” readers—including the diarist’s spouse or intimate partner, friends and family, neighbors, acquaintances, co-workers, teachers and others—the diary will never represent the whole person. This book, however revelatory, remains a single item among many sources of knowledge, including their own personal interactions. The diarist may describe events that the two of them attended together, conversations they had—the diary may even comment on their relationship. Proximate readers could have memories of the same events—perspectives that may not match what’s recorded in the diary.
And somewhere in this group of proximate readers—whether or not they ever actually read the diary—may be found individuals who have in real life the close, trusting connection that a diary narrative tends to establish with an implied (or imaginary) reader. For proximate readers, we see that the very existence of the diary begs a question: “If your relationship with me is truly close and trusting, why would you need to keep a diary? Why not simply share your ideas directly with us, your friends and family?”
The existence of a diary may uneasily suggest that the writer has certain thoughts and feelings they aren’t comfortable revealing to friends and relatives. Just knowing that a member of the household keeps a diary can feel odd, even a little threatening.
Some journal-keepers write with proximate readers in mind, thinking of them as the intended audience. These journals may even take the form of a letter addressed to a spouse or family member. A long tradition of the journal-letter—sometimes with entries initially drafted in a bound book, then copied and mailed to the recipient—blurs the line between letter and diary. Or a pair of writers may agree to share and exchange their diaries for each other to read.
In other situations, it’s easy to understand why proximate readers may have their access restricted. Depending on what’s selected to include, the writer may realize that to come across this diary may lead to strife and hurt for proximate readers who don’t understand or agree with what they find on its pages. A proximate reader could challenge the writer’s account, feel shocked to find their own secrets revealed in the diary, or believe that their behavior or words were misrepresented. To avoid such potential confrontation and conflict, the diary may be hidden, locked, or otherwise made off-limits to them.
But even when kept secret, the diary is composed in acute awareness that one of these potential proximate readers, especially living within the household, might come across the diary and read it. (Of course, this particular threat can shrink nearly to zero in the age of the password-protected electronic diary). For proximate readers to find and read the diary could undermine the intimacy, confidence, and trust that the two individuals enjoy in real life.
Such considerations affect the diary by leading to entries that are encoded, elliptically written, self-censored, or phrased in a careful way that partially conceals their meaning. Potential proximate readers, then, have a shaping influence on the diary’s composition even while a writer exerts effort to avoid having them read the diary—and even if, in fact, they never do end up reading it.
All other readers might be called “posterity” readers. They’ve never met the diarist in person, though they may feel that they come to know this person intimately just from having read the diary. Their relationship, their entire acquaintance, is conducted by means of the diary. Posterity readers may fish for supplemental context in other personal documents and historical records, but for them, the totality of the person they know is the voice speaking to them through the diary. They have no comparisons to exercise between a flesh-and-blood human being and the diary’s persona or narrator.
The diary may be encountered by a posterity reader long after the diarist’s death, or as a published book. Either way, when a posterity reader opens the diary, they have no choice but to step in and occupy the space opened for them through the diary’s construction of an implied reader.
If a diarist uses the strategy of addressing a confidant—real or imagined—the posterity reader absorbs the diary material by “standing in” for that addressee. As Goss-Peirce puts it, these later readers have no choice but to take on the role, to “format themselves to the space” created for the diary’s intended audience (11). From the first page, the posterity reader experiences the closeness and trust set up by the diarist—arguably in a more immersive way than a proximate reader, who will inevitably be distracted by their own real-life relationship with the writer of the diary and can’t help but project onto its pages extraneous details, conflicting views of the same events and conversations, and their personal opinions and attitude toward the diarist.
Note that I’m writing about the diary as a literary form—as a genre. Otherwise I’d admit what seems obvious: that the proximate reader doubtless knows the diarist much better than the posterity reader. After all, they’ve met the person in real life, and spent time together. No matter how much a posterity reader tries to fill in with external information, parts of the diary will never make sense to them. As Goss-Peirce writes, “because no amount of research can fully substitute the contemporary knowledge drawn from experience, [posterity readers] must settle some of the gaps as a loss” (12).
But for this very reason, it might be easier for a posterity reader to make the full leap into a special, intimate connection with the diarist. The posterity reader has no personal ties to complicate the reading experience. While a proximate reader may worry about coming across an entry that could disturb, anger, or hurt them, a reader who never even met the diarist can reach out unhesitatingly to trust this connection. This later reader may even feel flattered or privileged to gain access to another person’s most private thoughts, reflections, and feelings—those that the diarist couldn’t or wouldn’t express to their own family and friends at the time—but that they willingly expressed to the diary.
Something about the diary suggests that no one reads them—or at least, that they aren’t supposed to be read. Like a prayer written on a tiny scroll to roll up and burn, or a penny dropped into a wishing well, the diary seems to carry a message into the universe, unheard by human ears.
If the diary has any reader at all, we seem to accept most readily a fictional reader conjured up by the writer. Anne Frank addressed her diary to an imaginary friend she named “Kitty”; in her book Anne Frank: the book, the life, the afterlife (2009) literary critic Francine Prose comments that a character named Kitty in a popular book that Anne Frank read may have inspired the fictional confidant (90-91).
Other diarists before and since Anne Frank have addressed their diaries to an imagined person they explicitly invent and name. As he starts writing the fourth entry in his “private diary for the public,” Looking in on Lockdown (2010), Dortell Williams, incarcerated in a California prison for more than 20 years, declares that he will write to an imagined woman named Lourdes:
Lourdes. I think that’s what I’ll call you. I’ve always liked that name. And since I don’t know any Lourdeses personally, you can be my Lourdes. A new female friend who I can build an intimate friendship and open up to more deeply than when I share with the fellas. (7)
More than 200 years earlier, a fifteen-year-old Londoner named Frances Burney penned a diary prologue that cleverly combines both conventions: the notion that a diary is addressed to “Nobody” and the custom of addressing the diary to an imagined friend:
To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal, since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved, to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity, to the end of my life!
To further complicate Burney’s playful paradox, these diaries weren’t even intended to remain private. All three diarists mentioned above—Anne Frank, Dortell Williams, and Frances Burney—make a point of conjuring up the secret confidant (Kitty, Lourdes, Miss Nobody) even while acknowledging that they intend to publish their diary for a wide readership.
Anne Frank revised and edited her diary even while still living in the Secret Annexe. She dreamed of a writing career and predicted that after the war, there would be interest in her story. Dortell Williams announces in the introduction to his book that his diary aims to educate members of the American public who labor under misconceptions about the prison system. Frances Burney published her address to Miss Nobody as a preface to her collected letters and journals.
As Francine Prose notes, “it was Kitty on whom Anne decided when, during her last months in the attic, she began to revise her diary and focused on one imaginary listener” (90-91). “This device,” Prose adds,
gave Anne a way of addressing her readers intimately and directly . . . Reading Anne’s diary, we become the friend, the most intelligent, comprehending companion that anyone could hope to find. Chatty, humorous, familiar, Anne is writing to us, speaking from the heart to the ideal confidante, and we rise to the challenge and become that confidante. She turns us into the consummate listener, picking up the signals she hopes she is transmitting into the fresh air beyond the prison of the attic. (91)
Note the key phrase, “we [readers] become the friend.” Through its words the diary constructs its reader, tilting audience sympathies and receptivity in the direction of an accepting, supportive friend, someone willing to absorb intense personal feelings and reactions that, in a more formal relationship, might remain ambiguous or, if expressed, prompt negative judgment.
The diary, then, sets itself up as an encounter between close friends, chatting about a variety of subjects as people do who know each other well. That comfortable tone solidifies the relationship between reader and writer, especially if they have never met in real life. Addressing an imaginary friend, then, appears to serve a distinct purpose for the diary at the very moment when its writer contemplates the challenge of how best to reach an unknown public audience.
Despite Frances Burney’s playful insistence that she trusts Nobody, the script of the imaginary confidant doesn’t mean the writer lacks an audience; rather, this device trains a future audience in how to perform their role. The imaginary friend acts as a stand-in for that future reader. This strategy of discourse develops a relationship of trust between writer and audience, based on the template of a solitary diarist addressing an imagined friend.
When you pick up a diary, why does it often feel like you and the writer become instant friends? Diary language builds quick intimacy through its reliance on everyday conversational patterns—it just sounds like someone talking informally. Diary style often uses punctuation that’s closer to natural speech than formal narrative: self-interrupting dashes, fragmentary phrases that don’t add up to a grammatical sentence, a series of unrelated remarks, and questions that don’t really seek an answer.
Even with one voice talking, an impression gradually develops on the journal page of a relationship between two people—speaker and listener—who apparently know each other well, as the speaker feels no need to frame each point with a careful introduction nor to explain their abrupt leap to a new topic.
If a journal voice feels casual, it also fosters give-and-take, employing devices that serve to open room for potential response or reconsideration. Planting a question in the journal certainly works in this way. In fact, the grammatical tactic of questioning may create several different effects, depending on whether a question remains unanswered or whether it gets either an immediate or eventual reply.
When the diary writer raises a question and proceeds at once to answer it, this rhetorical move reveals the mind in motion. It shows the writer in the act of considering and reflecting: “What do I think? I think . . .” The reader gets a glimpse into the writer’s mind as the writer wonders about something and lets thoughts spin out from the initial prompt. Following along, the reader gets drawn directly into this current of thought and allows it to occupy the interior of the reader’s own mind.
In other cases, the question touches on something that has yet to happen, so it can’t be answered right away. The writer may return to this question in a later entry, once more information becomes known. Questions asked in one entry and answered in a later entry differ from an immediately-answered question. The question with a delayed answer creates a bridge, connecting the entries into a larger narrative arc. Such an arc of continuity softens the rigid parataxis implied by the diary structure of separate, self-contained entries.
A third type of question is asked but never answered. This question perpetually hangs in the balance, a rhetorical gesture addressed to the outer world as a whole or hurled into the future, highlighting the unknown. Articulating what the writer does not and cannot know, maybe it even refers to metaphysical, forever-unanswerable questions.
In all cases, the use of questioning as a device draws attention to the relationship between writer and audience. Spoken by the writer, uttered in that conversational, intimate diary-language, the question only apparently addresses the reader (who is not present in real time to answer), calling attention to the asymmetry of their relationship.
Questioning nonetheless opens a space legitimately shared by writer and reader. Answered or not, questions set up an open-ended structure for both to explore with imagination, memories, speculation, and reflection—a way to reach out and encounter each other through time and space.
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.
Diary writers have an affinity for the dash, a fluid and flexible punctuation mark used to propel spontaneous writing forward. Hinged on a dash, the sentence pauses before starting to swing in another direction. Or a voice momentarily interrupts itself, cutting off an unfinished thought to launch a new idea.
Physically, when writing by hand, a dash is quickly accomplished by scooting a horizontal mark across the page, even before figuring out whether you’re ending a sentence there or planning to extend the same sentence in your next phrase.
Consider how Frances Burney writes in her diary, upon learning that the great Dr. Samuel Johnson has praised her first novel, Evelina: “But Dr. Johnson’s approbation!—It almost crazed me with agreeable surprise—it gave me such a flight of spirits that I danced a jig to Mr. Crisp, Without any preparation, music, or explanation;—to his no small amazement and diversion” (August 3, 1778).
According to Anna Jackson, who devotes a full chapter of her book Diary Poetics to the dash, a dash-filled passage conveys the sense of prose flowing at a rapid pace. With a series of dashes, the writer may easily leap from one idea or item to the next without having to explain the connection or insert a logical transition. The resulting series of images or details can pile up into a list, strung together into an indefinitely long series.
The relationship among items on a list separated by dashes doesn’t need to be spelled out. If each new diary entry starts afresh, juxtaposed to the last entry but holding no expectation that it must refer back to what was said before, a sentence containing dashes does the same thing on a smaller scale, mirroring in miniature the diary’s formal parataxis.
Especially when combined with exclamation points or question marks, a habit of using the dash can produce an effect more like natural speech than like formal prose. Before completing one thought, the dash leaves off to take up a new idea, as in conversation with a close friend, where mutual understanding makes explanations unnecessary.
In this casual mode, the dash can suggest that we’re following the writer’s thought process in real time. Dashes imitate a mind at work, as each phrase seems to prompt the next by association or proximity. Sometimes the dash is followed by a correction or comment on what went before, or it prefaces the discovery of what Jackson calls “the perfectly chosen word” to crystallize what the diarist has, up till this moment, been attempting to say.
As for mood, depending on the subject matter a profusion of dashes may convey a sense of agitation and lack of focus—or conversely, the dash could create a deliberate pause or gap, to slow things down where normal syntax would shove the message onward. As an example, Anna Jackson cites the reflective and delicate mastery of this punctuation mark in Emily Dickinson’s poems “to open up an interior, emotional space” (121). Whether that space in a Dickinson poem holds reflection open at the end of a line or inserts a gap in the middle of a line, it compels the reader to pause for a moment and think (or feel) before going on.
Because a dash, like taking a breath, can be followed by almost anything, it seems (again, like the diary itself) to resist finality and closure. Toward the end of her chapter on the dash, Anna Jackson suggests that these moments point toward what can’t be contained, and so befit themes and material that exceed what the writer is able to express. In this sense, the dash gestures toward the limits of language.
Katherine Mansfield recalls seeing a foaming wave “suspended in the air before it fell” and writes: “In that moment (what do I mean?) the whole life of the soul is contained. One is flung up—out of life—one is ‘held,’ and then,—down, bright, broken, glittering onto the rocks, tossed back, part of the ebb and flow” (Journal, p. 150).
Today’s diary-keepers face a decision: Will you make marks on paper with a hand-held writing implement, or enter typed text from a keyboard into an online file?
Both sides have passionate adherents, and while there aren’t too many things you absolutely can’t do in the “other” format, the time and effort involved may differ tremendously. In short, some things that you might want to do with your diary come more naturally with a physical book, while other desired results come more rapidly and easily in a digital environment.
Ten points to keep in mind as you weigh the pros and cons of a cyberdiary:
Electronic text documents can be configured as easily searchable. If you want to find every occurrence of a place-name or a person through all the volumes of your diary, or tag entries with a keyword/category so you can pull out all the entries that have something in common, these processes can be accomplished much more quickly and easily with an electronic document. It’s not that a notebook can’t be indexed, as Bullet Journal devotees will attest. But indexing by hand has severe limitations compared with the facility of these features common to text-processing programs.
The electronic diary may easily absorb digital photographs, image files, and audio and video clips. It can readily incorporate hyperlinks, too, for the diary’s reader to explore. Upon the page of a physical book, on the other hand, you can easily affix little pieces of real life: a postage stamp, a bar napkin, a train ticket, a receipt, a pressed flower. For some diarists, the reproduced image of an autumn leaf does not possess the same power as the brittle-textured, faded leaf layered over with cellophane tape in the hands of the original writer. People who value the creation of a unique material keepsake may find the look-and-feel of an electronic journal too generic and impersonal for their taste.
For those who like the idea of sharing, an online post accomplishes this task instantly and effortlessly. Copies multiply and get distributed with miraculous ease compared with the amount of work and time involved to stand before a copy machine, scanning or reproducing (especially a hardbound book) page by page. When my friend Hanna lived and worked in Japan, she relates, “I wrote almost every night on my computer. It was quicker and then I could adapt my journaling into letters.” But even in places with scarce connectivity she maintains the habit, instilled by her mother ever since she was a teenager on her first trip abroad: “When I travel, I keep a diary and handwrite my adventures every night.”
A public online diary, especially if focused on a trending topic, can instantly build virtual community among people who were strangers to each other seconds earlier—something that, for a book diary, entails the time and effort of bringing a book to publication.
As well as writing words, some people sketch and scribble in their journals. This process can now be approximated with a tablet computer and plastic stylus. Yet some people still find those tools less nimble and pleasurable for sketching than an artist’s pen or pencil held between the fingers.
Even if made entirely of words, a diary written by hand reveals the writer through varied lettering. The personal stamp of handwriting can represent either a plus or a minus. Seeing the letters waver and fade in a fatigued hand, or grow large, intense, and bold when the writer gets wrought up, might enrich and flavor the experience of reading. Studies suggest that writing by hand may benefit memory and emotional health. Conversely, typing offers relief for those who find writing by hand a tedious and muscle-cramping travail. And that frustration may grow even more when they try to decipher their own illegible words.
A diary’s privacy may be more safely guarded through password protection and encryption than by trying to conceal or tuck away a physical notebook—not to mention the level of security offered by the flimsy padlock on a classic stationery-store diary.
The book-diary can remain rooted in the place of its birth, perhaps never leaving the rooms in which its writer lived and wrote. By turning up in that place long afterward, the book might become part of the place’s history. The scenario of discovering an old diary in the attic, or among a trove of inherited material, grows more likely if that diary was created and stored as a material artifact. A cloud-based diary is more likely to “turn up” long afterward by means of someone’s intentional web search for place names or people mentioned in it.
If you want to generate entries on the move, carrying a physical diary around everywhere may feel cumbersome. And the practice of pulling out a notebook in a public place and starting to write in it may create a more attention-getting spectacle than typing into one’s mobile device or even—as some apps allow—dictating an entry from voice to text.
And finally, the evanescence of electronic text means that the document lends itself much more easily to revision. Deletions, insertion of new text, re-ordering of passages, and other editing can take place any time after the initial writing, ultimately leaving hardly a trace of the earlier draft. If you see your diary practice as a commitment to impressions formed in the moment—a first-take preserved, the hot-striking iron valued—you may prefer a diary that actually makes it harder to cross things out or add annotations without leaving evidence of such changes upon the page.
Nothing signals “keep out” to potential readers more than a cipher, shorthand system, or code. Since the earliest years of the genre, writers have guarded their diaries with barriers—whether on every page, or only in selected entries—by using abbreviation, elements from other languages or alphabets, and symbols.
These codes don’t just make the diary challenging to read; in some cases they may render it invisible. During the Second World War Donald Hill, a British pilot held in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, disguised his diary as a mathematical grid that looked like a multiplication table.
Beatrix Potter, who later wrote the famous “Peter Rabbit” series of children’s books, kept a childhood diary written in a code she invented. In its pages she could record her frustrations with the social restrictions placed upon privileged young girls in Victorian England, without fear that her mother would punish her for expressing such inappropriate views.
Anne Lister, whose bold and rakish life was recently made famous in the “Gentleman Jack” BBC television series, kept a 19th-century diary even more voluminous than that of Samuel Pepys. Lister encoded the diary in what she called her “crypt hand,” a personal cipher based on letters of the Greek alphabet and other symbols. She devised the code in her early teen years to communicate secretly with her first love, a girl she met in boarding school.
Other examples abound. Pepys himself used a secretarial shorthand system to keep his diary safe from casual prying eyes; he added further layers of opacity by translating the more graphic details of his sexual exploits into a school-boyish mélange of Italian, Spanish, and French words. While this move probably wouldn’t do much to hide unfaithful behavior from his (French-born) wife, scholars have speculated that the naughty spice of foreign words may have enhanced Pepys’ own enjoyment of the memories upon re-reading.
Diaries kept entirely in code can prove nearly as cumbersome to generate as to read, and people wishing to conceal a whole diary nowadays have plenty of options for password protection and software encryption to keep the whole thing secret. But even pen-and-paper diarists can boost their level of privacy at special moments with a light touch of coding—perhaps by recounting events in indirect or elliptical language, inserting a symbol, or leaving strategic gaps.
Betty Jane Wylie, in her book Reading Between the Lines, points out that many diaries, especially those kept by women, “have a code of their own—subtle hints, ellipses, or deliberate omissions that force us to speculate or make educated guesses” (p. 26). While it’s relatively easy for the writer herself to recall the full story with help from her diary’s hints, or to fill in the omitted material based on the content of her memories, those readers who are farther away in time and not directly acquainted with the writer may never be able to crack the code.
In this way, the writer restricts a thorough reading of the diary to her own future self and to those close to her, who already know enough to fill in the gaps. As for strangers, only those who care enough to pursue the clues and conduct research will prevail: “Reading between the lines, rereading after other facts are revealed, breaking the diarist’s code, and perceiving other facts or contrary emotions with hindsight or with outside knowledge of her life and times, the reader begins to feel like a detective” (Wylie, 27). Even more, the reader begins to emulate a family member or close friend of the diarist, thus earning the right of access to the diary. (I’m indebted to Kaitlyn Goss-Peirce for this last insight.)
Based on her study of midwestern diaries, Suzanne Bunkers found that when a diary speaks evasively—or even remains silent—about something emotionally charged, like a taboo subject, the writer may in fact be expressing something very difficult in the only way possible. Such evasions and silences constitute “encoding” because they attempt to “transmit a message in an oblique rather than direct manner” (“Midwestern Diaries,” 194): “Indirection, contradiction, deviation, and silences” are paradoxical ways “of breaking silences, that is, of finding ways in which to speak” [italics added].
Arthur Ponsonby in his classic English Diaries (1923) is referring to material censored by an editor when he grumbles that “stars, blanks, initial and dashes are often very annoying and tantalizing to the reader.” The use of symbols, gaps, and abbreviations can also serve the diary’s original writer when they wish to track something in their lives that they prefer not to spell out. They may be summarizing material that honestly means more to the diary-keeper than it would to any future readers and that might be dull to read about in repeated detail, such as the current state of their digestive system, the day’s weather, or how often during a given period they paused to pray. In some cases, readers have nonetheless been intrigued enough to make extensive efforts to devise a legend and find what was hidden behind those encoded marks.
For the contemporary journal-writer the option to encode parts of a diary may offer a useful tool—one that has earned a place in the diary tradition. When an experience, topic, emotion, or relationship feels uncomfortable or even perilous to discuss explicitly, it can still find a place in the diary if noted indirectly, in disguise, or in a fragmentary way. Include just enough information to jog the memory and preserve what matters to the writer’s ongoing life. Ingenious use of codes can minimize the risks of betraying privacy or planting a landmine that others (such as the writer’s descendants) could trip over in the near or distant future.
When journal-keepers try to sum up how their diary works, or what it means to them, they’ll often use a metaphor. If you want to see a book that pops with diary metaphors on almost every page, Alexandra Johnson’s Brief History of Diaries (2011) provides a good starting-point.
From Johnson and other sources, I looked at more than 250 diary metaphors from nearly three centuries of English-language writers. Taken together, most fit into just a handful of categories, and from this pattern an interesting picture of the diary begins to emerge.
To start with, many people think of their diary as a tool—an instrument for observing, measuring, and navigating through life’s experiences. These writers might portray their diary as a camera, a thermometer, a magnifying glass or microscope, a time machine, a compass, or a map.
And what unknown territory do they claim to discover or chart with these instruments? Possibilities include measuring progress toward professional goals, gains in mental health, health and wellness habits, or the spiritual growth of the journal-keeper.
Related to this type of description is the diary as a formal record: a set of data to consult later, perhaps at some point of reckoning that requires evidence or proof. From this perspective the diary may look to its writer like an account ledger, a ship’s log, a witness statement, a field notebook, or an inventory.
An even broader view of the diary describes it as a miscellany: a big comfortable container into which the writer can toss the raw material of life. The writer may hope that while stored inside, the contents will undergo transformation and clarification. In this class of metaphor we find objects like a specimen case, a tote bag, or a storage bin. Virginia Woolf’s famous passage describing her diary as a “deep old desk or capacious hold-all” exemplifies this category, especially as she goes on to say:
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. (Woolf, Diary, April 20, 1919)
Beyond gathering and sorting random experience, some people experience their diary as a place to develop skills and produce new work. This type of metaphor may depict the diary as a creative refuge where writers feel free to experiment with style. “For a writer,” Kristine Dugas writes on the first page of her doctoral thesis on Literary Journals, “a journal is a work-space.” Metaphors of the diary as a sketchpad, studio, crucible, workshop, or playing-field convey how they put their diaries to use.
Metaphors describing the diary as an inanimate object like a tool, container, or workroom don’t tell the whole story. The perception of a human presence, a person inside the diary—perhaps seen through a lens, window-frame, or mirror—may strike the journal-keeper even more strongly.
Gail Godwin, in her essay “A Diarist on Diaries” (Antaeus 61, 1988) explains how she has “found many sides of myself in the diaries of others. I would like it if I someday reflect future readers to themselves, provide them with examples, courage, and amusement.”
Parallel to this image of a mirror, writers have compared their diary to a portrait or a shadow of the writing self. These writers may address the diary as their alter ego or companion. The diary develops a personality, often with more freedom to air its views, desires, and attitudes than the writer may feel comfortable expressing outside its pages.
These categories don’t exhaust all the possible diary metaphors. You can devise a unique image that expresses how you see your diary—this is an exercise I’ve sometimes asked students to do.
James Boswell probably wins the prize for the most quirky and unforgettable diary metaphor. In 1783 he published a newspaper column (“On Diary”) in which he tried to persuade readers of the value of keeping a diary.
Boswell worried about the problem that even the most ordinary life offers vastly more experiences than a writer possibly has time to record. “I do not think it possible to [keep a diary],” he acknowledged, “unless one has a peculiar talent for abridging.”
To convey his idea of condensing the multiplicity of life into a concise journal entry, Boswell confided, “I have thought my notes like portable soup, of which a little bit by being dissolved in water will make a good large dish; for their substance by being expanded in words would fill a volume.”
The views and opinions expressed on individual web pages are strictly those of their authors and are not official statements of Grinnell College.
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).
