[diary] Reading About Diaries 2: The Books

2938.In missive the last I mentioned reading three books about keeping diaries or journals. I'll list those out now. I haven't completed them all; but I have a ver solid sense of the three. Either one of these three books will give an aspiring diarist the inspiration to start, but each speak with a slightly different voice, and one may speak to one louder or with more coherence than the other.

Thus said, to the shelf.

Samara O'Shea

The first one I read was Note To Self: On Keeping A Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits, by author and Huffington Post blogger Samara O'Shea. This is a very personal account of her diary-keeping over the years, and goes into such deep personal territory that at times I felt as though I were reading Into The Author's Bedroom With Gun And Camera. I'm torn about that. But she had a whole range of useful insights into starting, stopping, how frequent, inspriations, and sharing your diaries with others, and how to look into your own life for diary subjects - including hopes, aspirations, writing when happy as well as when sad, and, of course, sex. She specifically bares her journaling soul by including several excerpts from her various diaries as kept over the years, which are as small gems scattered throughout the book

This book, while well-done generally and thorough, spoke to me the least of all the others. The author gave me a valuable POV on her urban, sophisticated lifestyle, but at times I felt like I was out of place trying to make sense of her narrative. But then, she's the kind of writer who'd worked for magazines like O, Harpers Bazaar, and Esquire, whereas I'm more of a Parade, TV Guide, and Time sort, though I have Utne Reader pretensions. De gustibus non disputandum, and all that.

So, in short, upsides: Unafraid, frank, sophisticated, well-written. Downsides: A little too unafraid for the beginner, a little too urban for the non-HuffPo reader. If you're the fashionable sort, this would be a good starting book; if you're not the fashionable sort, this would be more of an advanced study.

Recommendation: Go in ready to be amused and a little surprised and a little unsettled, if you're a tyro.

I do indeed notice that O'Shea is also famous for trying to bring back the art of letter writing to a wide audience. As someone who used to write letters ceaselessly, I have some idea of what we've lost, so she's indeed doing the Lord's work here, so to speak.

Sheila Bender

Sheila's book is Keeping A Journal You Love. This, the most densely-written of the three books, dives right in with what she calles the 'Seven Sisters'; writing tactics that are writerly explorations of the world around you. This is a book rich in technique, expressed as a writing teacher might do it. This book supplants this with examples of the journaling and diary techniques of other diarists. The result is almost a manual, a shelf-reference that you can go to again and again, with ideas of how others do it so one can either copy a style until they find their own feet, or combine into something new or useful. Overall it encourages the sort of introspection that diaries are famous for being a laboratory for, with the writerly approach incredibly useful.

Upsides: Thoroughly written, wide-angle field of vision provides for a range of viewpoints and inputs for inspiration, encouraging a writerly approach to the diary. Downsides: might encourage too much introspection, the multiplicity of voices could encourage too much copying and masking of one's own voice.

Recommendation: Better for the absolute tyro than the O'Shea work, but might come off as too dry and intimidating for the newbie. Good to go with as a beginner, but one might find oneself working a bit too hard to find ones own voice amongst all the excellent examples.

Alexandra Johnson

Lastly we come to the humbly-titled Leaving A Trace: The Art of Transforming A Life Into Stories, by Alexandra Johnson. This takes a seriously deep approach to the art of the diary by drilling down, finding patterns hidden in all journals, and identifying what she calls the 'through line' to your life. The objective is to coax a story from your life, and is useful if you're the kind of journal writer, as I am, who fancies themselves a fiction writer.

The book draws several lines that I'm deeply impressed with. It draws the line between brief and thorough  between short and containing multitudes, and between direct and gentle. It delivers techniques with a breezy air that is still informational, an easy read with a definite message. The techniques come quickly but are friendly, and one can apply them quickly.

Upsides: to me, this book is all upside. Small yet large, simply-written yet informative, it gifts the reader with tactics to create a diary or journal that goes just as far as you want it. If you want to keep it introspective you could; if you want to knit a narrative out of your life and use the lessons to create a more compleat writer out of yourself, it'll take you there too. Downsides: I love this book! I've not stumbled on a real downside yet.

Recommendation: This is the book you should start with if you want to really come up with a diary that will mean something to you. The above two are good, but they're the sort that I think the experienced diarist will want to use to kick it up to the next level. This book is the beginner's book of the three.

[diary] Two Sites All About Diary Essentials

2879.Those essentials being, of course, pens and notebooks, two things which I absolutely adore.

Two sites I'm abashed to say that I've only now stumbled on:

1. Pen Addict: http://www.penaddict.com.  This is a very spare, cleanly designed site, very few photos, but links, links, and more links. Follow any one for interesting things about pens, pens, pens … so … many … pens. I've only begun to explore.
2. Notebook Stories: http://www.notebookstories.com/. "In search of the perfect page" is its tagline, and there are profiles of notebook addicts, some personal stories … again, I've only started exploring, but it looks promising.

The design of Pen Addict showed me something I might have forgotten myself; a good, efficient design, with just what is needed, no more, no less, can get across as much as a cute little blog festooned with baubles.

Food for thought, there.

[diary] The Diary of a 5th-Grade Girl

2841.Since I haven't posted anything on diarizing latterly, I went looking for something … and I wanted that something to be quirky, cool, and kind of special. And here it is … The Amy Diary.

There is a certain reputation diaries have, and maybe it's because of young tween and early-teen ladies who write in handwriting that is based on squashed circles, beginning each entry Dear Diary and ending by signing their name. It's such a dear, sweet, girly thing.

Maybe that's why few adults, and even fewer men, keep diaries. And if they do, Lord, don't ever expect to hear them call it a diary, because that's what young ladies do! The'll call it a Journal or a Chronicle or a Log or something.

I think that's an unfortunate thing. All a diary is, is a daily (well, more-or-less). But I digress.

AmyBarbara's 5th-grade diary does read like a stereotypical young-girl's diary, filled with friends, boys,  feelings and the like, and written in a stereotypical young-girl's soft, squashy script. But this, too is its charm; it has unabashed sweetness, sincerity, and authenticity. Every time one sees her sign off on one of her single-page entries with the mononym Amy, it's hard to suppress a smile. And the adult AmyBarbara has to be commended for having the courage to share it.

But, too, there's unexpected precision and attention-to-design and layout that is there. Note, above, the format of the page header. Upper right, day; Upper center, date; Upper left, the day's "grade"; below the grade, the year. Each page formatted exactly the same, every bit of information in its place, nothing out of place.

I format my diary pages similarly. Though an individual entry can (and frequently does) span multiple pages, in the upper left is the entry number (I am obsessed with serial sequences) the upper right is the page number (yes, I number pages in my book) and all are formatted similarly - the same form, not symmetrical to the center spine, but as though they were a stack of individual sheets.

I was surprised that I approach the layout of my diary in the same manner, in this way, as a young lady did in 1993. But life is surprising that way.

She was so methodical and organized in the production of her diary …

… that the entry for May 20th already had all the essential elements in place, including the opening salutation and the circle for the day's grade, all waiting and ready to be filled in.

The whole thing speaks of the passion for living of a rather bright young lady who has an ordered mind besides.

She must have been a kick-ass young girl.

What she's released is here, at http://theamydiary.blogspot.com/.

[diary] Diaries of the Just and the Unjust And Everyone In Between

2727.When I talk to people about creating diaries, I find that a lot of folks think this is the province of the 13-year old girl, the young lady who loops her i's instead of dots them, and who begins every entry in a little pastel book with a cute little lock with the phrase Dear Diary.


That's not necessarily to disrespect a notional, stereotypical 13-year old girl. But adults who have little time for reading, never mind writing, think that it's not for them because it's something kids do.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

This diary was kept by Robert Goddard, credited as the father of modern rocketry. His word made possible - even necessary - such things as the Apollo moon missions and the Space Shuttle, and, sadly, ICBMs as well. Here's a graphic of what he wrote on the day he launched his first liquid-fueled rocket, an event which opened the modern age of astronautics:

For the rest of the pictures and transcriptions, go to Clark University's page on it at http://www.clarku.edu/research/archives/goddard/diary.cfm.

For a more modern person of renown, the recently-released-from-Italian-prison Amanda Knox also kept a diary:

The subtitle in Italian, Il mio diaro del pngione (sic), is poignant. The pages are dense with text, neatly scribed in that particular oval, almost uncial, font stereotypically favored by young women. You can read it (the photocopies are a little tough on the eyes, though, be warned) at TruTV here: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/young/amanda-knox-diary/1.html

And wars create war diaries, and diaries by soldiers. Ed Blanco kept a war diary as a soldier in Vietnam which was just a day-by-day chronicle. The thing which attracted me about it was the medium … he picked up a bookkeeper's journal in a Brooklyn stationers shop, and he kept it with him throughout his tour. It lived in has back pocket for a year, and recorded what happened each day as well as the members of his company who got wounded and who he lost. You can see a few graphics here:

http://vietnamdiary.com/Diary_Page.htm.

Diaries are here and now, they're real, and despite what you've heard about the Internet (much as I love it) taking over, they're happening.

They're also for everyone.

[liff] Dymaxion Chronofile: The Ultimate Diary

2636.I have been additcted on various levels since high school of writing a diary. It must be said that right now that compulsion is tending toward a maximum, which is neither here nor there for anyone else but fairly joyous for me; also, there are levels of doing this. I'd like to be doing it a bit more; I tend to be distracted by shiny things and life events. 

If one asked oneself who the most dedicated diarist is, what would they say? Pepys, I'd imagine. I think there's one who kicked it up to the next level, thought, and that'd be the legendary Buckminster Fuller, a man who never did anything by halves.

And so it is with his journal, or, as he coined it, his Dymaxion Chronofile. In it he pretty much saved everything - newspaper clippings, photos, pictures, correspondence, reciepts, business transaction records. Originally it was kept as a series of leather-bound scrapbooks, but eventually due to centrifugal pressures such as storage, economics, and suchlike was simply filed in boxes.

The purpose of it all was to create a study of a life in context. Knowing what happened during certain times and viewing what Bucky saved within the scope of them would, I'd presume, generate some insight as to how a human responded to his surroundings, how he changed them and how they changed him, for starters.

Today, we'd call them lifeloggers or, if it were me, hoarder. Whatever. There may be lifeloggers out there … but they are certainly no Buckminster Fuller, who was smarter than just about everyone I've ever known (no offense, everyone I've ever known).

Here's something about the Chronofile from the Stanford University collection: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/fuller/about.html,  and this link will take you to a Google image search with the appropriate keywords. About four rows down is, for some bizarre reason, a photo of Sarah Palin. I don't know why either. Sometimes you just have to savor the irony. 

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