On Writing
Why Do We Keep a Journal?
On Writing
So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
eepers of private notebooks are a differ ent breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
I feel this is somewhat true of myself
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly com pulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only acciden tally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
Joan Didion - why she feels the urge to write things down?
I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea
Maria Popova • Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
Another practical sense of self improvement
But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
Virginia Wolf sees diary writing as good practice.
A journal is an artificially permanent record of thought and inner life, which are invariably transient — something the most prolific diarist in modern literary history articulated herself in her elegant defense of the fluid self. We are creatures of remarkable moodiness and mental turbulence, and what we think we believe at any given moment —... See more
Maria Popova • Celebrated Writers on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood — irritation or misery, say — and of not writing one’s diary when one is feeling the opposite. The portrait is therefore from the start unbalanced, and, if someone then deliberately removes another characteristic, it may... See more
Maria Popova • Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
We’re an unreliable narrator of our own lives, even if we are only narrating them to ourselves
How it felt to me : that is getting closer to the truth about a note book.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
he reader completes thecircuit, because he influences the author both before and after the act ofcomposition. Authors are readers themselves. By reading and associating withother readers and writers, they form notions of genre and style and a generalsense of the literary enterprise, which affects their texts, whether they arecomposing Shakespearean... See more