Writers and Their Notebooks

A journal can be a veritable treasure chest of thoughts and anecdotes. It is not only a place to collect ideas, though, but a place to practice writing and overcome writer’s block.

“Writing a journal means that facing your ocean, you are afraid to swim across it,” wrote George Sand, “so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.”

By journaling without constraint, writer’s block ceases to exist. Even if it turns out you can’t use much or anything you’ve written in your current work, it’s gotten you writing. It’s helped loosen you up.

A personal journal can be many things. It can be a record of life events, a sounding board, or a tool for personal growth.

They’re photographs of my mind and they help me make a kind of sense of my development as a person as well as of my development as a writer.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward. Søren Kierkegaard, quoted in Howard V. Horg, The Essential Kierkegaard (2000)

A writing journal is only a process by which one looks at life and a way with words and symbols, with the possibilities of image and story, or the unfolding of a sequence of rhythms and discoveries of feeling.

Keeping a journal, if you’re capable of being honest with yourself, can facilitate a deeper understanding of the role you’ve played in some of life’s conflicts.

I have long believed Keats’s assertion, and later restatements of it by other writers, that writing is selfmaking.

Journal writing is like singing in the shower—I can let ’er rip without fear of judgment.