No details, but just an idea. I have a nice blank one, I dont know what to write in it. I don't really have the desire to keep like a daily diary. Is there something else people do with journals?

I just took a creative writing course in which our professor encouraged us to keep a journal of all the story ideas we had, to write them down so we wouldn't forget. This also included any intriguing conversations we "happened" to overhear, or even mundane ones to get a feel for how people talked. Also to write down thoughts we had about what we wanted to do with a story or where it was to go. That's one idea. I'm sure there are others.

I write entries about what is going on and how I feel (not quite daily or even weekly), I also write random things like different alphabets, and I have been writing some fiction. Next quarter I am going to take Keeping a Journal so I will have more to add when I start the course in about 10 weeks (it is still the begining of this quarter).

One possibility is to make it a commonplace book

Write into it recipes, inspirational or pithy or humorous quotes, letters, poems, your or your family stories to pass down or repeat, reminiscences of events, short references not likely to change (tables, lists, etc. - how big is an A4 sheet, what is the best resolution or format for uploading to You Tube), jokes, ideas to remember, thoughts and observations, sketches and diagrams, notes on topics of interest, useful web addresses, references to magazine articles or other sources, notes about books you have read, list books you intend reading, etc. Paste in clippings, photos, tickets, etc. You might also use it as an address/phone book.

Sort of a cross between a scrapbook, personal blog/wiki, and memory jogger.

You could also add notes about fountain pens, inks, and (as Hélène notes) alphabets or writing styles. Add some writing in different inks and a description of what the ink looks like - see if it still looks the same 3 years later or has faded/changed.

If you aren't using a looseleaf arrangement (or something like the Rollabind or Levenger Circa system), and you plan on using a large commonplace book (or series of books) for an extended period of time, it can be helpful to have some sort of index - possibly looseleaf, card catalogue, or computer based.
You can also use "continued on page nn/continued from page nn" notes if you need to continue a topic on another later page.

Regards, Myles.

My mom kept a diary with one page for each day. I copy her style and use a journal as a logbook. I record brief notes of things that happened that day, contacts with people, births, deaths, what I ate, what the weather was. It sounds boring but it's interesting and sometimes useful to be able to refer to what happened on a particular day in the past.


I like your signature graphic.

I'm currently writing a short story.

I currently begin every entry by recording the day of the week, date, time, and room temperature. (I started recording the room temperature in order to figure out why my November electric bill was always the highest of the year when common sense told me that the temperature would be low and my air conditioner shouldn't be running as much -- I figured out why and to tell anyone would expose my stupidity so I won't.)

The old ship captains would have to record three things: (1) Position; (2) weather; and (3) remarks. A classic entry by Captain Cook, written in the tidiest handwriting, begins, "Gales from the South West with heavy seas from the same quarter." I found out later that he would write his journal days later sometimes -- after the seas had calmed down a bit.

Anyway, taking this as a start, I note my emotional position -- happy sad hopeful discouraged etc. -- and direction. Am I going in the direction I want to go? Do I want to change direction? But most times I don't know what I'm going to write when I start. Sometimes it's something interesting, sometimes (most times) not. But I get to go back later and read what was going on in my life at some day in the past (usually in answer to, "What was I doing two years ago today?"). I also write down ideas or whatever -- all very chatty, but it's the chatter that I find interesting later on.

I write however much or little as I want and try to use a different color ink from the previous day to make it easier to find the boundaries between days. My shortest entry is a one sentence paragraph, and my longest is 11 pages of small handwriting (about an unpleasant experience).

All this in answer to your question hoping it might help get you started.

Doug

I am using one to record the story of my working life - tales of naughty children, incompetent parents and the like...

All my diary entries start out as:

*Day* *Number* *Month* *Year* *Weather:...*

So:

Friday, 11th of January, 2008. Weather: (Cool, hot, cold, wet, rainy etc etc).

Weather is always UNDERLINED so that I can tell where a new entry starts.

I finish each entry with:

Yours (not sure why) and then my name.

And next to it, I record the pen I used (Yes, I handwrite all my entries and make a record of the pen used to write that entry).

The things that thektulu7 mentioned go into my pocket notebook. The things in the notebook destined for long-term storage and reference get transcribed into my "commonplace book". Stories from family history go into a journal. The acquisition and repair histories of all my pens are written with those pens in another journal. Stories describing my bands' musical engagements are written in another journal. The crazy antics of our cats are written in another journal. Stories about our wilderness canoe trips go in another journal. Stories that I write and e-mail to friends are kept in a copy book and in a computer file called "Letters from the World". Some of these things are written in modern English; some are in archaic English; some are in pidgin German.

Paddler

I'm attempting to improve my handwriting and I started filling pages with song lyrics.. but then after a while, I started writing random thoughts. Over the past few weeks, it has evolved into me rambling about anything important from the day and a lot of comments on handwriting. I guess it's more of a steady stream of consciousness that makes very little sense if I were to re-read it but it provides me page time to work on my penmanship.

I don't know if I call it a journal yet.. but I can see it migrating to that. Once it's a full blown true journal, I'll probably treat my thoughts to a nicer notebook (using a mead composition book right now) and expand my ramblings to include things that happened that day, reminders of things I need to do, how I feel, etc. I never thought journaling was something I'd do but it's turning out to be somewhat therapeutic.

Maybe "Yours" is an homage to Anne Frank...she did that, too.

I use a journal for 'processing' things...usually the difficult things...that come up in my life. I've done this for close to 30 years and it's very helpful.

As an artist, i also keep a 'creativity' journal. It's not so much for my ideas (they go in my sketchbook) as it is for writing about my relationship to art, my creative self...creativity in general, and the spiritual nature of creativity.

Then...my husband and i keep a journal together. We did this in 2000 and kept it up for a yr. and a half. We started it up again just recently. He writes...i respond...back and forth....back and forth...it's great. Don't get me wrong, we do talk to one another, too.

~Jasper

Anything and everything!

• thoughts and feelings
• things I keep forgetting to do
• shopping lists
• daily weight tracking
• handwriting practice (song lyrics & some prose)
• quotes I want to remember
• things/people I hate
• things/people I love
• things I want to buy
• research on various topics
• fiction & fantasies
• food journaling
• exercise tracking
• scheduling
• meeting notes
• foreign language practice
• volleyball notes & plays
• knitting/weaving ideas
• restaurant notes
• surreal NYC moments (there are a lot of these)

And, oddly enough, these are usually in separate journals!

I have several journals, used for different purposes. One is my daily "mind," where I note items I need to do or anything I want to refer back to later or pass on to Terri when I get home.

I keep another to record bits of dialog or gags that come to mind (habit from when I was writing comic books on a regular basis -- I maintain a library of jokes and patter "just in case").

myles wote "One possibility is to make it a commonplace book"

Without knowing what a commonplace book is (I do now though), it seems that is what I am compiling.

I have names, addresses of places I wish to visit when travelling to other cities. There is some basic data ie. postal/zip codes, brands of papers/notebooks/inks to check out, book titles to locate, etc.

There are also some quotes and references that I have come across that I've jotted down.

Pretty much anything that I want to keep or remember longer than a couple of days goes into the book.

Regards,

Milton

Thoughts, happenings, and major events that happen each day. I change pens and inks often which will look goofy to someone if they ever try to read it. I usually note which pen and ink I am using when I change.

I use it as a semi-regular diary/log, with pretty much anything being fair game. I don't write in it daily, just regularly to semi-regularly -- whenever time and inspiration strike. I realized some time ago that there are periods in my life from which I've forgotten a lot of detail; I remember big things and general things, sure, but a lot of the day to day stuff isn't really in my memory anymore. I now wish I'd had a semi-regular journal from those years ago to remind myself of some of those details now. So, now I try to keep one partly to jog my own memory in future years.

I also have a couple of other more purpose-specific ones; one is pretty much just for class notes, for example, and one has blog posts and drafts thereof, and ideas for possible blog posts.

But that's just me, of course.

It is, actually! But I don't start each entry with "Dear Kitty".

Wow...I REALLY like that!! What a great idea!

~~King

Hello,

I want to add a personal experience:
I am used to write diary since 1978. So I can read and remember my life over 30 years.
Sometimes (I think about once a year) I enjoy roaming through the leaves of the books.

Really important became the diary writing, when my husband died of cancer in 2000.
We both knew, that his death was not far away. I asked him to write a diary (to get some relief in sleepless nights) and -
thank God - he did. I also continued with my writing routine. The two books - his and mine - came out as some sort of loving dialogue. It's one of the most precious gifts he left for me: whenever my memories are fading away a little bit, I can read "our" diary and "refresh", what he ment to me.

Personal diaries can also become important documents of "living history". We have a german writer Walter Kempovski (died 2007) who did a monumental work for the country called "Echolot". He was collecting diaries, letters, notes, Photographs, newspapers, all kinds of things from WWII. His effort was to compose personal statements, memories, thoughts and feelings with official documents of all kind. He did it in such genial manner, that you, while reading, get aware of the whole human condition in terrible times. In an interview the author said what his motivation was to do this unbelievable work: " If I had thrown away or had ignored the message of those letters and diaries that came to me, it would have been as if I would kill the writers twice". For sure it was a very depressing work, but he finished it courageous and left one of the most impressive documents of our sad and cruel history in the first half of the 20th century...

Please excuse this turn to the serious side of life...
What I wish to say is: go on writing your personal life, it's worthwhile and you never know how important it will be to other people...

God bless,
Anna Monika

Thank you for sharing, Anna...i was touched.
~Jasper

What an Incredible Idea, Jasper! Thank you, our family will be using this one. I'll let them know this today

--Lorie

bsaint,

I guess how one is kept is as personal as what goes into one. Here's my experience...

I've been keeping journals since teens. Over the years, I've collected dozens of books that have only a few pages of entries in them. Now I was there, and I remember that my life was pretty darn interesting, but it didn't get recorded for the most part. I would get sucked-in by pretty paper, nice cover, etc. Eventually, I realized that I was using something that I thought demanded a certain level of performance in order to make an entry. Most times, I didn't feel up to the demand (when I need to write most, and of course, wouldn't put anything in it.

Now...

I buy inexpensive, bound, blank sketchbooks from Borders. They're like $8 and about 1 1/4" thick -- lots of waste space if I want.

I begin my daily entry with: Day of the Week, Date, Location (spend a lot of time traveling).

Have you ever read/listened to the journals from history. These daily recordings are often used in the narration of documentaries, also. That's because they're interesting! They cover day-to-day happenings ("The preacher didn't like the cake I made for the Sunday dinner."), reactions to local & world events ("The general thinks we can withstand the elements, hunger, and his tyrannical ways. He expects too much of simple soldiers like myself."), etc. How about da Vinci's sketchbooks?

So my journals, I call Daybooks actually, are a compendium of everything. A quick, new, brilliant idea of mine gets a page of its own with a title like: IDEA: Divorce Insurance; knitting designs and patterns I write and sketch; business incidents (courts love handwritten records). Do you get a lot of invention-type ideas? Well, this is a great place to put them down, sketches and all, and then be free of them. After I do this, I accept that in this lifetime I'll not be able, nor want, to pursue the development of most of these creations myself. But, they [the ideas] are recorded, not lost, should someone else want to pursue them.

The front cover, and spine of the book, have the beginning and ending dates for each book's entries.

Well, that was my $.02 and then some!

Enjoy!

--Lorie

Wow all great suggestions. So I have started a mix of profound-to-me ideas Ive come up with and tidbits Id like to remember. My first few entries are "my theory on Alien Life" "my theory on magnets and nuclear fission" and "italian salad dressing recipe." Thanks you you guys/gals it seems I can do whatever and there is no specific boundary dependin on how I start it.

OK, time for a big OCD confession...

In each of my notebooks (from the pocket notebook that contains the usual combination of lists, addressses and random thoughts to the A5 journals and the A4 work project notebooks), I place a small, pre-printed label in the inside back cover and fill in the 4 fields it contains:

1. Reference number
2. Start date
3. End date
4. Subject

I maintain an Excel file which records all these fields, plus 4 more:

5. Size (e.g. A4, A5)
6. Type (e.g. wire, casebound)
7. Colour
8. Brand

Once a book is done with, it goes in an archive box with the rest of them. Becasue of the Excel record, it never takes long to track down some old information if I need to.

Ray

I just started writing a journal as my 2008 new year resolution. I've been wanting to be consistent in writing journals since 1987 when I bought my first PDA (a Palm Pilot) - thinking that technology would motivate a tech geek like me to write. I guess, I was more into the tech rather than the writing.

So far, 13 days into January 2008 ==> I've been using my journal to capture the dialogue I have with myself. My first entry in my journal captured the reasons why I started my journal:-

1) Moleskine + fountain pen: gotta love the tech of journal writing
2) Continuation of my 7 Habits training: use this journal as a collection of my study & thinking to be a better Muslim
3) Leave a legacy for my kids: lesson learned from not knowing my departed dad about 4.5 yrs ago. I think this is a good medium for my boys to have an insight about their dad.
4) Motivate me to write snail mail letters to my Mum.
5) Improve my handwriting.

Hopefully, this becomes a life long habit for me.

Rizal
Sydney, Australia
Lamy Safari

Ray, good to hear someone else being so... uh... precise. I have my Excel spreadsheet compute the number of days in each volume, and the number of pages per day. I then graph the number of pages per day and the moving average of the last 3 volumes. Not very useful, but for some reason I find all this interesting...

Doug

Doug, you're clearly a soulmate. You'd probably enjoy my Access library database which records the books I own and read (including the dates I finished reading them) and then automatically calculates how many books I've read in the current month to date, the last 4 weeks, the current year to date and a rolling 12 months.

By the way, rather than 'obsessive compulsive' I think it should be called 'compulsive obsessive', because that's in alphabetical order.

Ray

With my journal it's mostly about trying to get down on paper all those thoughts and ideas that you think about later and go "damn, I wish I'd written that down!"

If you opened my journal right now you'd find rants about network television dumbing down society running right into pages of me trying to wrap my head around Relativistic time dilation, running right into an essay about my thoughts on Nikolai Gogol's short stories, running right into something on the philosophical implications of some bit of theoretical particle physics, or something. I just write down what I feel compelled to write about at the time, and now that I think about it, I sort of consider every bit of it a rough first draft of something I may want to flesh out later. It's a big mish-mash of short aphoristic bits of philosophy, story fragments, some notes about concepts I'll want to remember, stuff that's going on in my life, and a whole lot of me thinking out loud (or as 'out loud' as you can get on paper).

I could never bring myself to get too formal about it. A lot of people really enjoy structured systems for their journal writing, and that's great for them, but for me it kinda takes a lot of the joy out of it.

I feel better now. I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who keeps these multiple journals. In addition to some of the ones you mention above, I have one entitled "Storm Notes" since I live in southern Louisiana.

Judybug

I started a journal in the mid-70's when my husband was in grad school and my oldest child was a toddler. I found that I was sending soul searching letters to people that were a bit too soul searching and realized that a journal was probably a better place for that. I also realized that keeping track of my child's developmental milestones would probably be a good thing. Since then I have used a journal to record and describe my children's accomplishments and my feelings about them, the struggles and challenges, and high points and low points of raising three kids. I have found that sometimes as I write about a problem or challenge, the solution becomes apparent. I also use my journal to reflect on daily Bible verses. And sometimes I use it to describe the very ordinariness of everyday life. Like some of the previous posters, I record the date and time of day at the start of a journal entry.

Like most people who have already chimed in, I make preliminary note of the date, time, and place (if I happen to be traveling). I've journaled since high school -- I have journals dating back from the mid-1980's -- though I rarely read back. It's fun though sometimes to just leaf through pages.

Journaling is built-into my morning routine. It's the first thing I do with my first cup of coffee. It's essentially a brain dump -- to clear my head for the day. I also try to journal right before bedtime. Throughout the day I also write in my journal if I happen to read or overhear something of interest. I also jot down ideas and will tease them out in my journal. If I'm puzzling over something, I map it out in my journal. I also doodle in my journal -- drawing things at random. So my journal is hodgepodge. I do not keep more than one journal going at the same time.

I tend to journal at night just before I sleep. I use this for several things. Part to record information that I need to remember and tasks to do. Those list type items...what to cook, music to buy, meetings to keep. I also use the journal to record information about what I am doing at the time and where to go next. Right now I have something in my life that is making me livid (not husband nor child) and this thing is going to take months to resolve and lots of information processing. The journal is where I will do that. Like talking to myself and sort of like Dumbledor's Pensive. I offload my crowded brain to make room for more. It helps me live life with intent and focus.

i write in my journal when i'm anxious, upset, bothered, obsessed or...any feeling that needs to be examined. i usually get to the core, feel better and close the book. the next day i am often embarassed by what i wrote--but so be it. i use the recordings to remember where i have been.

I keep a single journal to make notes about fiction and poems I'm writing in my other journals. My plan is to ruin the life of an archivist one day after I'm dead (if one should bother sifting through this half tonne of paper in my office)!

Nathan Hondros