Varsity: Do you keep a diary?

From varsity.co.uk/arts

Freya Roodhouse encourages readers to get their diaries out and start writing again 

In the last couple of years, my social media has been inundated with Pinterest-style, perfectly curated, well-designed journal spreads. In the summer of 2025, it was all about the leather-bound travel journal, complete with personalised colours and charms, and purchased in Paris for an eye-watering price. And who could forget, before that, the pastel-coloured and painstakingly organised bullet journal? Call it what you want – a diary, commonplace book, or journal – but keeping one has been en vogue, and an essential aspect of the author’s arsenal for centuries. For many, it is the cornerstone of creative practice. For the creative and essay-weary student, keeping a diary can be the difference between writing in term time and not writing at all. But most people don’t bother, or instead fall at the first hurdle. Why is that the case? And how should you use the infamous diary?

“There is no correct way to use a diary”

Keeping a diary can be the difference between writing in term time and not writing at all

Freya Roodhouse for Varsity

1. You can write what you like!

There is no correct way to use a diary: people use them as sketchbooks, scrapbooks, journals, traditional diaries, commonplace books, or simply as a place to store creative excerpts and ideas. Because of this informality, your diary makes an excellent place for experimentation. Whatever you want to write, short or long, fact, or fiction, has a home there. Your diary is nothing more than an outlet. One of the keystone practices in the popular The Artist’s Way are morning pages (a few pages of unplanned, unstructured writing done first thing in the morning). The appeal of ritualising something like morning pages, or your own take on the idea, is that you can exercise your creative muscles and keep practicing without pressure, and instead simply see where the writing takes you.

For the essay-weary and mentally exhausted Cambridge student, diaries are even better. It can be difficult to have the imagination, time, and creative energy to produce a formal piece of writing, even a short story, at the end of a long day of work. With a diary, it doesn’t have to be formal. It doesn’t even have to be imaginative – you can literally just record what happened that day. What matters is not the product but the practice of flexing your authorial muscles. There’s a reason why many famous writers – think Anais Nin or Virginia Woolf – felt compelled to keep diaries even when they were not working on a larger project.

2. You never know, you might write something good!

Lots of writers use their own lives as inspiration for their works. Your own diary can be great creative fodder, especially in a few years when you’re reflecting on it. Characters and events just leap off the page to be altered and fictionalised. If you’re lucky, you might find a section that you can use verbatim – F. Scott Fitzgerald lifted description from his wife’s diaries and letters. Some authors even publish their diaries unfictionalised. Sheila Heti’s Alphabet Diaries are a fascinating example of what you can do with a diary as a creative work.

“What matters is not the product but the practice of flexing your authorial muscles”

3. The page is a place for mindful reflection.

Carving out time to explore your emotions, especially when you’re feeling stressed, is valuable for your mental health: it’s what talking therapy teaches you to do. The page can be a great outlet for anxiety or anger. Knowing that nobody else will see it, you can be totally honest in your reflections and come to terms with yourself. On days when you’re overwhelmed, setting everything out on the page always makes it less intimidating than it felt in your head. And exploring emotion through stream-of-consciousness writing will make you a better writer in the long run!

4. You don’t have to write every day.

I think the biggest deterrent for many would-be diarists, including myself, is the idea embedded somewhere in our childhoods that a diary is something you write in every day. This concept is unappealing and pressurising: what if you have nothing to say? What if you’re too busy and miss one? If you think like this, ‘falling behind’ can be fatal. But this is a misconception. Buy an undated diary. Write when you want to. If you don’t want to, then don’t. The pressure relieves itself when you let go of this myth. You don’t need to beat yourself up when a pile up of pre-reading derails your efforts for a week. Something once in a while is always better than nothing.

I have been successfully keeping a diary for two and a half years now. The practice has been wonderfully grounding in releasing and rationalising stress, but also in giving me a chance to write at the (regular) times when I lack the time or creative energy to produce something more formal. In my time at Cambridge, my diary has become the creative and emotional outlet that keeps me sane.

https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/32202

Review: The Benson Diary - musings of an Edwardian elitist

From theguardian.com/books

By Vernon Bogdanor

At four million words he beats Pepys, but the daily jottings of a judgmental don fail to transcend his rather stuffy milieu 

A C Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria’s letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – “vulgar stuff and not my manner at all”. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master.

                                                                         Arthur Christopher Benson. Photograph: Alamy

Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly unrivalled portrait of the age. Many believe that he did: one review of these two edited volumes declares that because of them, he has entered “the diarists’ pantheon”.

But though he met plenty of writers and other figures of note, he has little of value to say about them. Indeed his literary judgments are crass when not philistine: Henry James’s “idea of art was to tell a tale that few could understand or to present figures so faint & vague as seldom to be more than hypothetical”; Arnold Bennett was “a cad”; of Housman: “I don’t think he is quite a gentleman”.

His musical opinions were even worse. In a concert that included works by Weber, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, he declared the best work to be one by Waldemar Bargiel, a composer otherwise unknown to history; while, “fifty years hence people will probably talk of Wagner as claptrap and wonder how anyone could admire”.

Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys

His outlook is that of an Edwardian clubman; and indeed, the only England Benson knew well, apart from Eton, Cambridge and the court at Windsor Castle, was the smoke-filled rooms of Pall Mall, a world largely without women. Benson did not much like women and was not at ease with them, preferring the company of handsome young men. The editors go to great pains to argue that Benson, while certainly homoerotic, was not actively homosexual. But, really, who cares?

Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam are, unlike Benson, distinguished academics. They have bestowed on these diaries all the apparatus of contemporary research, treating the commonplace utterances of obscure dons as if they came from great statesmen – but to what end? Anyone with misplaced nostalgia for a supposedly golden age of civilised living – an age that fortunately is long gone and which no one of sense would wish to see resurrected – may enjoy immersing themselves in Benson’s observations. But they would have to be almost as steeped in a certain crusted-over establishment atmosphere as he was. Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys.

In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship. No doubt the question of whether the master’s children should be allowed to use the Fellows’ Garden was a matter of great moment to the dons in May 1914 but its historical import is unclear. The account of college squabbles lacks even the waspishness that we find, for example, in the letters of AJP Taylor or Hugh Trevor-Roper. They at least serve to confirm Henry Kissinger’s dictum that academic disputes are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. What the diaries offer, as was once said – perhaps unfairly – of Trollope, is the sedative of gossip. They provide the illusion that one is in communion with great writers and powerful people, but it’s one we shouldn’t fall for.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/12/the-benson-diary-by-ac-benson-review-musings-of-an-edwardian-elitist