I don’t often carry my notebook, so if I feel the itch creeping up my sweater, I would write on a napkin, a receipt, a newspaper. Even a book. Sometimes deciphering a poem is journaling. Sometimes writing two lines is enough. Sometimes you need half a book to speak.

I wonder if we’d know what we do about who Sylvia Plath was, or Franz Kafka or Orwell, or even Emerson if it weren’t for their extensive journals and diaries. Recorded like memory capsules, in their voices with their own eyes. You may not be Kafka, but you possess the magic to write if you are lucky, so how can you do nothing about it? I’ve recorde... See more