Writers and Their Notebooks

Lu Chi’s Wen Fu: The Art of Writing.

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

First, as Saroyan mentions, a journal helps jog our memories of past events, the places and people we have known. Second, a journal encourages regular appointments with the desk and provides an orderly place to store the chaotic pieces of our lives. Third, journal keeping prompts us to notice the extraordinary detail in even the most ordinary day.

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

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.

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

“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.”

travel exercise known as a lapidary—an odd name for a writing exercise, as lapidary is a term for working with gemstones, and the point of the exercise is to avoid being “polished.”

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