Journal as a Vessel of Being

by Grant Faulkner

“This book never gets written in, except when there’s nothing to write.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote that line in her journal. I’ve written similar passages in my journals—and then the “nothing to write” that I write about leads to “something to write,” which is one reason why a journal is perhaps a writer’s most important tool.

I’ve kept journals since I was seven, and I’ve questioned the endeavor in many different ways over the years, starting with the question of if I want my journals to be read, and if not, why I keep them, and if so, who do I want to read them?

I received my first journal for my seventh birthday after staring at it in the stationery shop on the town square for ages. All writers are fetishists of writing materials, and I loved this journal for its stately brown cover, its bound pages, and the lock affixed to it.

It was a fragile little lock, with a fragile little key, but it introduced me to the idea that the best writing happens in secret, that there are words in our souls that we need to guard.

But I didn’t know what to write when I first opened it. I was disappointed to discover that the pages had been divided into five sections because it was a five-year journal. I immediately knew a journal should never be defined by boundaries of any sort. Those small spaces were too limiting for even a seven-year-old’s thoughts and feelings, so unfortunately my first journal was stifling, a source of confusion.

It did one thing, though: It led me to a lifetime of experimentation with different journal forms and taught me the way a page can affect thoughts, because thoughts like to reside in places of comfort and sensuousness, just as humans do.

It also taught me the value of recording a life, and how many ways there are to record a life.

I keep all of my journals, but I’ve strangely never read them. They’re crammed in drawers, stuck in file cabinets. When the California fires reached seemingly constant fiery heights, I thought about buying a fireproof safe to put them in, because in some ways this voluminous record of my life is my most prized possession. A journal is a striving for permanence by definition, yet what does that permanence mean?

The Edna St. Vincent Millay quote above resonated with me because I’m often not sure what my journals really reveal. I write in them mainly when I’m depressed or drifting, so if anyone ever reads them, their overall impression might be that I was a gloomy drip. My journals aren’t humorous, and I don’t think they’re particularly smart, and if they offer a window into my soul, then that window is more like looking through a tiny lens.

Still. I remember eras when the journals were confessional, pitched with hopes and anguish, a place to sift through the ever-shifting sands of youthful confusion. They were spaces of experimentation and wordplay and story ideas and observations.

David Sedaris assiduously records each day and then mines his words for details and happenings for his essays. Sarah Manguso kept an exhaustive diary “to remember what I could bear to remember and convince myself it was all there was.”

Ideally, the journal is a topography of the mind. Ideally, it contains everything from confession to observation to philosophical ramblings to the exploration of the mundane. A journal can be a prayer at the same time it can be a scream. It can be a list at the same time it can be a tale of gossip.

John Cheever wanted his journals published after his death—and Cheever’s journals, so full and uncensored, perhaps beg to be locked up. There is something admirable, though, in risking such exposure. There’s good in seeing how a person’s mind works without any consciousness of presentation. We need to see those sharp edges, those moments of weakness, those contradictions that our censorship-oriented age is so vigilant to correct.

I think of the lock on my first journal. In the end, the journal is a space to meet yourself, to be yourself. As Joan Didion said about her own journals: “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

So I write in my journal to find that me again. To find it every day, I suppose, and then to let it go.

I collected these quotes about how writers use their journals as a way to think about your journal writing.

Because words need a warm place

“Writing for a hostile world discouraged me. Writing for the diary gave me the illusion of a warm ambiance I needed to flower in.”

—Anaïs Nin

Because we need to whine

“I’ve been keeping a diary for 33 years and write in it every morning. Most of it’s just whining, but every so often there’ll be something I can use later: a joke, a description, a quote. It’s an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. ‘That’s not what you said on February 3, 1996,’ I’ll say to someone.”

—David Sedaris

Because we need to create ourselves

“In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.”

—Susan Sontag

Because an experience needs to be re-experienced

“These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.”

—Terry Tempest Williams

But what is a good journal entry?

“A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.”

—Anthony Doerr

But maybe Virginia Woolf says it better

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.”

—Virginia Woolf

Because journalers are hoarders

“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

—Joan Didion

Because we need to remember and we need to forget

“To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget. A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.”

―Sarah Manguso

Because we need to be kept

"Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you."

—Mae West