Betsy Rubiner Looks at the Hows and Whys of Journaling

From lit.newcity.com

By Mary Wisniewski

The Chicago reporter, who's written eighty-two volumes of diaries over almost sixty years, is out with a book on her lifelong practice 

Chicago reporter Betsy Rubiner’s oldest surviving diary is from 1967, when she was eight years old. It was one of those Page-A-Day books, with a beige, faux-leather cover and a now-busted lock.

Revisiting that diary many years later, Rubiner found a page labelled “IDENTIFICATION,” with fill-in-the-blank lines for name, address, phone and so on. One blank was for weight. There was a scribble on the line, followed by “59” written in pencil. Looking closer at the scribble, Rubiner found that she had originally written “60” and crossed it out. “I smile, recognizing my lifetime habit of fudging my weight,” Rubiner writes in “Our Diaries, Ourselves.” “This is me.”

Since that first little book, Rubiner has written eighty-two volumes of diaries over almost sixty years. They’re packed into a grey fireproof filing cabinet. Knowing she wouldn’t live forever and not wanting to destroy the journals, Rubiner looked into how she could donate them. The existence of women’s archives that preserve diaries piqued her interest—she hadn’t known there was a world of such donations. Then her son asked her a crucial question—“Why have you written a diary for so long?”

A longtime journalist, Rubiner opened the investigative floodgates on diaries. What counts as a diary? Who keeps diaries? Why do they keep them?

And how do they contribute to our study of history? On her search, Rubiner read old diaries—from famous ones like those of Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys to lesser-known accounts by nineteenth-century farm wives. She interviewed diary scholars, talked to diarists, visited archives in Europe and the United States, and even learned about a “diary festival” in an Italian village that also boasts a diary museum. Mixed in with the scholarship is Rubiner’s own diary journey, including snippets about John Lennon’s murder and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

The result is Rubiner’s quirky, fascinating and deeply reported book, “Our Diaries, Ourselves: How Diarists Chronicle Their Lives and Document Our World.” Rubiner says her research made her feel less like an oddball for keeping a journal so long and faithfully—there are diary lovers everywhere. And their numbers may be growing, with some young people turning toward analogue activities, like writing with pen and paper. Stationary stores are seeing lines of shoppers.

                                                                            Betsy Rubiner/Photo: Jessica Tampas

I am also a long-time diarist—writing almost daily since I was twelve. For ten years, I’ve taught a class on diary writing at the Newberry Library. So after reading Rubiner’s book, I interviewed her at a Women and Children First bookstore event to learn more about her adventures in what she calls “Diary-land.”

“One of the things that I really found fascinating is how people go to such great lengths to write diaries,” Rubiner says. For example, in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, there’s a diary written on toilet paper by a resident of a battered-women’s shelter.

“It was sent in by this woman who said ‘I didn’t have any other paper supplies, so I wrote on toilet paper,’” Rubiner says. It was carefully preserved in an elegant box packed with foam and archival paper. “She was desperate to write, apparently. I saw that time and again, even just with people who had these incredibly long days… They plucked seven chickens, washed three loads of laundry in scalding water, this litany of chores. And then they still found time at the end of the day or whatever part of their day to write a diary and to record this. To me, that was astonishing.”

While both women and men have kept diaries over the centuries, Rubiner notes that diaries kept by women had been less valued in the past because they often dealt with domestic matters, like baking bread and nursing children, instead of war and politics. But women’s diaries often show how private life was lived in the past.

An example is the diary written by Martha Ballard, a midwife in Hallowell, Maine from 1785 to 1812. “A Midwife’s Tale,” a book by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich based on Ballard’s diary, won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1991. Ballard “was literally in everybody’s business,” Rubiner says. “She was delivering babies in the 1700s and knew all kinds of stuff about life in that period for women and obstetrics.” Rubiner talked to Ulrich, a history professor who had been trying to piece together the lives of women. “She said other people dismissed the stuff in here as trivia.”

Another famous woman’s diary is that of Anne Lister, a nineteenth-century English woman who chronicled her lesbian affairs. Also known as “Gentleman Jack,” Lister’s life was made into a BBC miniseries.

Rubiner talked to American diary scholar Rebecca Hogan about why women have kept diaries through the centuries. “Many women have found, in diaries, a tangible form for saving their lives,” Hogan told her. British writer Sarah Gristwood, who reviewed 400 years of women’s diaries for the 2024 anthology “Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries,” said that the strongest emotion expressed was “anger—frustration.” A diary from Sarah Welch Hill, living in nineteenth-century Canada, tells of her husband’s abuse. “He became outrageous threw the clothes off me & became extremely violent…”

Rubiner also explores whether diaries are therapeutic and can help with creativity. Rubiner quotes novelist Madeleine L’Engle, who started a journal at age eight and advised young writers “to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.” Rubiner also quotes Joyce Carol Oates, who called journal writing “immensely helpful” to develop the essentials for a writer. Rubiner sums these up as “the ability to observe closely, to think deeply for sustained periods of time, to describe the world in language.”

“Our Diaries, Ourselves” also looks at the touchy subject of whether diarists should destroy their work, or reread it. Some people burn their diaries because they’re too embarrassing, or they don’t want to cause hurt after they die to family members because of what they wrote.

Rubiner quotes Joan Didion, who argued in favour of reading about our old selves: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am on a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

For diarists who choose to preserve their work, Rubiner has found a surprising number of repositories. A long-time resident of Iowa and former reporter for the Des Moines Register, Rubiner has chosen to donate the contents of her grey filing cabinet to the Iowa Women’s Archives. She reports that Europe has at least ten archives focused on collecting the unpublished work of ordinary people.

While the United States doesn’t have the same well-developed archive tradition, Rubiner reports of two separate efforts to create an American diary archive, both started in 2022. The American Diary Project collects the diaries of “ordinary, everyday Americans” and thus far has 300 handwritten volumes. It relies on trained volunteers to transcribe them.

Another project was started by five diary collectors, including Chicago-area author Robert K. Elder. The archive intends to collect both diaries and letters written by people from all walks of life.

Rubiner tells me that her diary habit has helped shape her personality. “I’m probably a little bit more overanalytical at times,” Rubiner says. “I think I get myself a little bit more than I might have otherwise, if I didn’t write a diary as long as I have. I don’t know who I would be, if I didn’t have a diary, or didn’t have this diary-writing thing that goes on every single night.”

Ruiner admits that occasionally she has overdone her diary habit, and that despite all its benefits, sometimes writers may ruminate too much in diaries and accent the negatives in their lives. “Like anything that I think generally is a good thing, it can be a bad thing if you overdo it, or don’t necessarily do it in the right way.”

Rubiner writes that one problem with her decision to donate her diaries is that she now thinks of future readership, and sometimes senses other readers looking over her shoulder. She writes, “I have vowed to guard against creeping self-censorship. If I can’t be myself, on any given day, I’ve lost my most powerful reason to keep a diary.”

                                                                                                   Jacket design: Louis Roe

“Our Diaries, Ourselves: How Diarists Chronicle Their Lives and Document Our World”
By Betsy Rubiner
Beacon Press, 272 pages

https://lit.newcity.com/2026/05/20/betsy-rubiner-looks-at-the-hows-and-whys-of-journaling/

6 Ways to Start Journaling and Feel the Emotional Benefits

From shondaland.com

If you want to chronicle your feelings, discover the right type of journaling for you 

Bridget Jones’s Diary. The Princess Diaries. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The Carrie Diaries. In pop culture, journaling always seems so easy. While the notion of keeping a diary comes across as whimsical and beautiful on-screen, it’s totally untenable for many people. If you’ve been too intimidated to start — or return to — journaling, you may not have found the right style for your personality.

Fortunately, there are many types of journaling besides the traditional form we’ve seen depicted in films, books, and shows. Reapproaching journaling or experimenting with new styles can reignite a connection with the practice. “Different styles of journaling actually teach your mind and brain different skill sets for processing emotions and experiences,” explains Beth Jacobs, a clinical psychologist and author of Writing for Emotional Balance.

The therapeutic writing specialist says unnecessary boundaries and expectations can stop people from continuing the introspective process. Jacobs encourages potential journalers to play with styles that diverge from their natural way of writing or thinking. “When you experiment with a less familiar technique,” she says, “you have less expectation, and there is less judgment when you don’t have a set of ideas to compare to your writing.”

Writing for Emotional Balance

Another stigma that blocks people from journaling is the notion that it must be done every day or for specific amounts of time. If you are interested in making journaling a habit, a 2009 European Journal of Social Psychology study found that it takes 66 days on average for one to stick. However, there is no rule that it needs to be accomplished daily. “Don’t expect your style of journaling to be consistent,” Jacobs cautions. “Different phases of life and circumstances might lead to different ways of expression. Let it evolve and change to fit your needs.”

Jacobs notes that journaling is beneficial for self-reflection and growth, and those who journal are healthier. A 2018 University of Cambridge study found that writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings contributes to long-term improvements in mood and stress levels, lower blood pressure readings, reduction of depression, and a greater sense of well-being. It’s also been shown to strengthen immune systems and improve the physical health of people battling terminal or life-threatening diseases like cancer, asthma, and arthritis.

The medium is less important than the act of journaling.

GETTY IMAGES

Whether you journal on your phone or in a leather-bound book, write daily, weekly, or whenever inspiration arises, combine styles or stick to one, Jacobs says it can help you process thoughts, feel more settled, build confidence, and be more aware. “You relieve your heart, body, and relationships of burdensome and snarled energy,” she explains. “You feel better and more whole.” Remember: There are no rules, especially for an activity so personal.

“The most important thing is to journal for yourself only,” Jacobs says. “When you try to let the process be open and only for you, it will become easier and easier to get to it. Whatever shape your process takes, over time it will evolve and gain momentum.” Here are six different styles of journaling to consider:

Personal Diary

Keeping a running, unstructured, free-flowing diary is one of the most popular styles of journaling. Writing freestyle trains your mind to be more flexible. If you’re trying to work through personal issues or simply want a safe space to explore thoughts that you might not feel comfortable sharing with others, this classic journaling style could be the best one for you. By chronicling the happenings in your life and your feelings attached to them, you can sort through your thoughts and have a record of your life to look back on.

Bullet Journal

A bullet journal (also called list journaling) is great for those who like to gather their thoughts but want to keep them short, organized, and concise. Bullet journals are often used for tracking patterns, such as water intake and screen time, or keeping lists, like goals and milestones. They are effective for individuals who don’t have a lot of free time but still want to reflect or who like to brainstorm, doodle, and schedule. Don’t be fooled by pretty pictures of these types of journals on social media: They don’t have to be photo-worthy to be effective or meaningful.

Scrapbook Journal

The scrapbook or art journal is wonderful for visually minded types who prefer images to words and like to express themselves through external inspiration. With stickers, tickets, cards, clippings, doodles, photos, and found objects, journalers can collect and assemble tangible objects to create a memory-style journal. It’s a perfect outlet for imaginative people or those who desire to be more creative.

Video or Audio Journal

If writing isn’t for you, expressing your feelings with video or audio could be more advantageous. Hitting record on a voice note, tape recorder, or webcam can be as equally therapeutic as putting pen to paper and will still help you chronicle your days or synthesize your thoughts. When you’re done, you can save them to a hard drive or in the cloud. As with any journal, deciding whether to share the recordings or keep them for yourself is entirely up to you.

Gratitude Journal

Many studies note that writing down what we are thankful for can make us feel happier and less depressed. For those seeking a positive mindset or who believe other types of journaling lead to darker places, gratitude or affirmational journaling can provide a lift. Writing down a detailed list of three to five specific moments, things, or people you are grateful for can be rewarding. Whether big or small, elaborating on why you’re grateful or recalling affirmations you’d like to remember will help solidify the happy feeling and contribute to a healthier, more grounded you.

Dream Journal

If you find yourself at a loss every time you open a journal or need a kickstart to reflect, documenting your dreams is an unrestrained way to start. Describe your dreams, draw pictures based on what you experienced, and examine what the dreams meant to you and how you felt within them. You can take dream journaling a step further and compare dreams to what’s consciously happening in your life. Keep your journal next to your bed so you can immediately write things down and enter your day with a fresh perspective.

Mia Brabham is a staff writer at Shondaland. Follow her on Twitter at @hotmessmia.

https://www.shondaland.com/live/body/a42538399/6-ways-to-start-journaling/

Handwritten versus digital diaries

From kathmandupost.com

By Paula Vene Smith

The first time I taught a college course called The London Diary for young Americans studying abroad back in 2002, each student ended up with a tangible book of memories, a handwritten record of their semester in London. But when I taught the course 15 years later, the first question my students asked was whether they could keep their journals online. The question brought home to me how the image of a diary has shifted from words scribbled in a blank book to images and digital text on a screen.

Why not go digital?

Even while journaling apps like Penzu and Diaro become more widely available, estimates and surveys suggest that a sizable number of the world’s diary keepers still keep handwritten diaries.

Fans of digital diaries grant them an edge in convenience, portability, searchability and password protection. Jonathan, one of my 2018 students, described in an essay for class how digital diarists can upload entries to multiple platforms, keeping some portions offline or restricted to a select audience while other parts go completely public. It’s harder to control distribution, encrypt entries or build an index with a journal kept on paper.

I already expected my students to use electronic devices to read course materials, to communicate with me and with their families back home, to write essays for class, and to navigate London. Why not let them keep digital diaries, too?

Diary as artefact

Poet and literary scholar Anna Jackson was researching the private papers of novelist Katherine Mansfield for her book Diary Poetics when she made an unexpected discovery. Jackson came across a “piece of the world” that was also an element of Mansfield’s journal—a kowhai flower between two pages in a notebook: “After all this time, there it still was, still yellow, still between the same two pages Mansfield had placed it between all those years ago. A piece of the world she wrote about was right there as a piece of the world still, not a piece of writing.”

Jackson’s experience shows the power of holding in your hand the diary as a physical object. What scholars call the manuscript’s “materiality” links writer to reader in an unexpectedly intimate way.

For historians and diary scholars, manuscripts are artefacts. A book’s binding, paper quality and ink can signal an anonymous diarist’s socioeconomic status. Changes in penmanship may show how the writer felt—drowsy, extra careful or agitated—while writing certain passages.

Some clues, like the bit of evidence provided by inserting a memento, relay intentional messages. Others, like crossed-out words, may reveal information the writer did not plan to share.

Physical evidence can also hint at what happened after a text was written. Damaged or missing pages may indicate a strong reaction to the contents. A few years ago, conservators at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, discovered a concealed entry in the diary of a 17th-century British sailor. In his diary, he originally confessed to committing a rape, but later wrote a different account of the event, pasting the new page so carefully over the original that it went unnoticed for more than 300 years.

Digital yet material

Every original mark in a diary reflects an impulse of the moment. As diary instructor Tristine Rainer says in The New Diary, “At any time you can change your point of view, your style, your book, the pen you write with, the direction you write on the pages, the language in which you write, the subjects you include. … It’s your book, yours alone.”

With so many convenient features, digital diaries remain a popular choice. This option, we might be surprised to learn, even has its own form of materiality.

In How to Read a Diary, literature scholar Desirée Henderson notes that digital diaries, too, are objects, shaped by tools the diarist selects—in this case, software and hardware—to create the diary. The writer’s design choices, such as site structure, networking parameters, embedding of graphics, image and audio files and hyperlinks, offer grist for interpretation not unlike reading the nonverbal signs of a traditional diary.

Writing into the future

As I thought about offering my students the online option, I began to imagine them many years from now, coming upon that London diary from their college days. I remembered my first group of students drawing sketches on their pages, attaching a Travelcard, café napkin, or theatre ticket. I remembered Anna Jackson with the kowhai flower. I couldn’t shake my conviction that future diary readers will be less enthralled by a digital product—even enhanced with multimedia—than by the quirky, untidy books hand-lettered by their predecessors.

In the end, I assigned my students—at least those who were physically able—to create their London diaries by hand. They could still use their phones to capture images or take preliminary notes, but in the end they would produce a material keepsake.

Several students decided to write in their notebooks while also keeping a digital diary. The dual process felt natural to them. To his blog Jonathan posted, “Like many children of the 21st century, I love the idea of keeping everything journaled online. This way I can make notes on my phone as I walk, have them automatically update on my computer, where I can expand with more time. If I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, I don’t need to wake up a roommate with a lamp. However, the course also requires an analogue diary.”

Every diary, “analogue” or digital, can be read as an artefact layered with meaning—one that conveys clues to its writer’s life and times in both nonverbal signals and words.

https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2022/08/13/handwritten-versus-digital-diaries

The appeal of diaries and autobiographies

From thefinancialexpress.com.bd/views

By Shihab Sarkar

The style of conveying the Gregorian New Year's greetings has continued to change radically in the 20th century. Certain popular trends became prominent in the years in the decade of the 1970s. The changed vogue had replaced bouquets of fresh flowers in the morning kept on one's door. Books also no longer remained an appropriate New Year's gift. In place of these 'obsolete' items, the objects which made spectacular entry into public life were lavishly printed 12-page photograph or painting-based calendars --- and the equally expensive diaries. Both the gifts came from single companies. The calendars were regarded as a highly useful item. But when it came to the diaries, a debate could well have warranted to be sparked between those backing the usefulness of the deluxe diaries, their first few pages filled with assorted data and information, and those opposing. The latter would place their arguments saying when the educated people have veritably stopped reading, presenting them with diaries was sheer wastage of a company's money.

Surprisingly, and to the distress of consummately educated persons, the observations proved true. The diaries, finally, would end up being university and college students' class-note taking exercise books. Youth has always been considered the ideal time for keeping diaries. Although a major segment of the entries into the pages of diaries dealt with romantic broodings, lots of others used to keep diaries on serious happenings in a country. Personal or family events would also comprise a significant portion of the day-to-day chronicles. Dozens of celebrities in different areas of activities at some time of their careers enjoyed added reputation for their diaries. Some of these serially recorded accounts of their lives came to light posthumously. The most notable of them published in the sub-continent is, indisputably, 'The Osomapto Atmojiboni' (The Unfinished Memoirs) by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib wrote another autobiography titled 'Karagarer Rojnamcha' (Prison Diaries). It chronicles his life in different jails in the then East Pakistan as a political prisoner. As a born leader, Sheikh Mujib's couldn't remain a purely solitary life. Surrounded by other political leaders of his time, Bangabandhu was able to turn his prison wards into the platforms of different political struggles. The dominant of them was his unflinching mission for attaining self-rule for the then Pakistan's eastern wing, which later emerged as independent Bangladesh under his heroic leadership.

Politicians, statesmen, philosophers and social thinkers have kept diaries in different ages. In the modern age, viz. the 20th century, the world was gifted with several diaries in book forms and autobiographical works. They include the 'Long Walk to Freedom' by Nelson Mandela, 'Dreams from My Father', by Barak Obama, 'Wings of Fire' by A P J Abdul Kalam, former Indian President and scientist, and many others. These were preceded notably by 'Toward Freedom' authored by Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the leaders of the sub-continent's independence from British rule, 'An American Life' by former US President Ronald Reagan. Despite being a portrayal of the socio-political and intellectual state of India in the early 20th century, 'Autobiography of an Unknown Indian' by the Kolkala-based Bengalee intellectual Nirod C. Chowdhury, also deserves a distinctive place among these documentation works.

Hundreds of educated ordinary people nurture the habit of keeping a diary. These people mostly limit themselves to the circles of family, relatives and friends. Before going to bed, they would record in writing what had happened to them during the day. This practice pays off if the persons concerned are in need of knowing which particular person visited his home on a particular date. They can find the names of certain medicines written on a particular page of the diary. An interesting feature of keeping a diary is many people's entry for a particular day comprises just one sentence --- 'Nothing remarkable occurred today.' The opposite also occurs. Think of the days of the 1969 mass upsurge or other turbulent and historic days of the country like the 7th March in 1971, the great day of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib's watershed speech at the then Race Course Ground. Other equally important national days that deserve to be recorded in diaries include the 25th March,1971; the start of genocide by the occupation army in East Bengal; the 9-month reign of terror in this land, then already called Bangladesh; the formation of the government-in-exile at Baidyanathtola, later named Mujib Nagar; the operations of the Freedom Fighters; the victory of the Allied Forces, comprising the Freedom Fighters and the Indian Army, on 16th December, 1971; the formal surrender of the defeated Pakistan Army at Race Course on 16th December and countless wartime events.

Jahanara Imam, then a teacher at the Teachers Training College in Dhaka, had started keeping a diary after the day his two sons joined the Liberation War. One of them embraced martyrdom on the front. The mother shed tears in silence; but she remained undaunted by continuing her diary keeping, recording the major events centring round the Liberation War in East Bengal. Jahanara Imam's diary came out as a complete book in independent Bangladesh. It has sold hundreds of copies over the last forty-five years. The printed diary has been recognised as one of the most authentic collections of the chronicles of the happenings in Bangladesh, Dhaka in particular.

In the late1940s Tajuddin Ahmad, a young activist of Awami League, began writing a diary. In it he would record in detail the socio-political developments that took place in the state of Pakistan, newly created on the so-called two-nation theory. From the very start of the Bangla Language Movement in Dhaka in 1948, which took a decisive form on 21st February in 1952, Tajuddin got himself engaged in the movement demanding Bangla be a state language of Pakistan. The emerging leader used to note down almost all the events related to the Language Movement which left far-reaching impacts on the consolidation of Bengali nationalism and the 6-point demand, both spearheaded by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. For his active role in all the nationalistic movements, Tajuddin Ahmad was picked by the party leaders as the Prime Minister of the Provisional Bangladesh Government at Mujib Nagar on April 17, 1971. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was declared as the President of the country in his absence.  He was arrested by the Pakistan army on 25th March after his formal declaration of independence and taken to West Pakistan.

After the independence of Bangladesh, the diary of Tajuddin Ahmad emerged as an authentic source for researches and lengthy discourses dealing with the political and socio-cultural movements in East Bengal leading to the start of the independence struggle. Diaries written in countries under the siege of enemy forces, like during the World War-II, were later emerged as highly authentic records of physical and mental ordeals endured by their authors. Although written by the adolescent Dutch girl Anne Frank while in hiding to escape Nazi persecution of her family, her 2-year diary became an extraordinary record of wartime trauma.

A similar piece of WW-II related writing is considered an autobiographical classic. Called 'The Pianist', it presents the nightmare-haunted life of a Polish-Jewish pianist and composer in Warsaw in occupied Poland during WW-II. While dealing with diaries, they inevitably bring to mind a number of autobiographies. Due to their not being written chronologically, these works are not commonly viewed as diaries. In a sense, they are set against a normally wide backdrop. Their protagonists vary, amazingly, in their identity. Thus the autobiographical works of Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf', Agatha Christie's 'Secret Notebooks', Ernest Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast' and Jean Paul Sartre's 'Words' on the one hand, and 'Baburnama', the autobiography of the founder of the Mughal Empire --- Zahir ud-Din Babur, 'The Greatest: My Own Story' by Mohammad Ali, 'Moonwalk' by stellar singer Michael Johnson or 'The Autobiography of Malcom X' keep the true readers equally spellbound. It's saddening to note that keeping a diary is fast becoming an out-of-vogue trend. In fact, the educated people, even those with a flair for writing, feel tired when asked to write something of their own choice. But still there could be rays of hope flickering somewhere. Optimists firmly believe that individuals living in far-flung corners of the pandemic-plagued world must be jotting down their traumatic times in one or another form of autobiographical notes.

https://thefinancialexpress.com.bd/views/the-appeal-of-diaries-and-autobiographies-1626363415

Note to self: a pandemic is a great time to keep a diary, plus 4 tips for success

From theconversation.com

A search for “Coronavirus Diary” on Google yields 910,000 results. News outlets like the Guardian, The Atlantic and The New York Times have chronicled an increase in personal record-keeping.
Whether for future historians, self-care or to relieve feelings of isolation, we are in the middle of a diarological moment.

And today’s diaries aren’t just handwritten reflections in bound notebooks. They might be social media posts, video entries or visual collages – so long as they are regularly updated over an extended period and personal in nature, they fit the bill. The secret is in the repetition, and the pledge that drives it.

On the look out

The word diary entered the English language in the late 16th century, via the Latin word, diarium, which comes from dies, meaning day. The diary asks us to attend to this day.

Diary-keeping sharpens observational skills, so it is no wonder then that cultural institutions have begun projects to crowd-source details of what otherwise might be quite banal aspects of our lives.
The State Library of Victoria has a Facebook group, Memory Bank, where posts of shopping lists and sourdough recipes have given way to more melancholy images of closed shops and empty streets in the CBD – a collective chronicle both hyperlocal and universal.

The State Library of New South Wales subtitles its Diary Files an “online community diary”, and currently contains nearly a thousand entries, searchable by keywords. School, time, home and COVID are among the most commonly written words, and the greatest number of contributions come from Sydneysiders between 10 and 15 years of age.

Video “lockdown” diaries can also be viewed online, via BBC Reel, or listened to through Corona Diaries, the interactive open source project which collects audio stories from around the world.
Social researchers have identified the diary as a tool to capture the impact of the pandemic on daily life. UK sociologist Michael Ward began his research through CoronaDiaries, where 164 participants ranging in age from 11 to 87 submit entries in a variety of forms. Ward suggests:

These entries are able to highlight the multiple different lives behind the dreaded numbers we hear announced each day.

Famous diary keepers

Most of us can name some famous literary diarists of history – Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Adrian Mole. When we stray far beyond this list, it is often the times, rather than the writer, that make the diary notable.

There is Lena Mukhina’s perspective on the Siege of Leningrad, 13-year-old Anne Frank’s account of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the poignant scratchings of Sir Robert Scott’s on the day he perished: “For god’s sake, look after our people”.

Nelson Mandela’s desk-calendar notes, kept in prison, speak to extraordinary experiences under extreme conditions.

Diaries from the 1918 influenza pandemic came into their own as more than ephemera for both historians and scientists in 2020.

For a book length account, we can look to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, about life in London in 1665 – bearing in mind the author was only five years old at the height of the epidemic, so it is likely a factual-meets-fictional rendering.

Diary-writing serves broader society, and can help individuals make sense of difficult times.
Interviewed for this story, psychologist Robyn Moffitt told us:

From a psychological perspective, keeping a diary is a really useful (and evidence-based) way to engage in healthy self-monitoring of thoughts, feelings, and behaviour … writing things down as they happen can provide some objective evidence and perspective on the frequency and severity of different events, and we can use this to correct distorted thinking.
The process of writing itself can also be quite therapeutic. It can allow us to process and reconstruct past events, problem-solve, and create new meanings, and in some ways this makes it similar to psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is often referred to as the “talking cure”, and writing can provide similar therapeutic benefits (the “writing cure” perhaps)?

What makes it a diary?

The turn of the 21st century saw a resurgence of the diary in public reading events such as Mortified, Salon of Shame and our own experiments with The Symphony of Awkward.

It might be argued that social media has since overtaken the diary as a means to chronicle one’s life. Indeed, there is crossover in the ways lives are shared and curated across different media, from the handwritten diary to blogs.

The ritualistic structure offered by the personal diary can be repurposed in digital spaces. The notion of publicly committing to post something – an image, a video, a song – every day offers another way of marking out time when every day is Blursday the fortyteenth of Aprilay.

We have experimented with each recording a sound a day, collected from the few spaces we were still able to inhabit.

A diaristic practice, whether written or not, supports us to stay in the moment, as psychotherapists and life coaches exhort us to do.

And it’s never too late to start diarising. Here are some tips:

1. Decide on your platform

Digital or analogue? Decide on your medium. The written or spoken word? A photo? A sound? A song? Choose something that pleases you (a special pen, a fancy notebook) to heighten the experience.

2. Make a vow

Make an entry every day, or on a set number of days for four weeks. 28 days is said to be a good target if aiming to break or start a habit – though it may take longer.

3. Make time

Set aside time at the same hour each day to capture your experience.

4. Rinse and repeat

Carpe diem. Seize the day!

https://theconversation.com/note-to-self-a-pandemic-is-a-great-time-to-keep-a-diary-plus-4-tips-for-success-144063

"Out of the dust, immortality"

By Tim Holman

After a 40-year delay, I recently published my student diary. Since then I've been pondering some very basic questions, such as:-

What is a diary?
What is it not?
Why bother?
Is anybody else interested?

To start at the beginning, a diary is a very private thing - or should be. It is written by someone for their private thoughts or amusement, or to log all the worries that plague them in the hope that the best form of remedial action will become clear. It certainly helps if the person has an urge to write and can't stop jotting things down.

OK, fine, but in that case why have I now published a portion of my own diary? Am I not guilty of double standards? No, not really. Unknown to anyone else, it was written in complete privacy and it's taken me 40 years to reveal its existence. I had only 2 motives when deciding to publish it:

1 To give my old college, Trinity at Oxford, something for their archive, so that in 100 or 200 years' time someone might find it and be interested in my tales of student life in the late 1970s;
2  To go to my grave as a published author! And why not?

A true diary should not be a dismal catalogue of complaints and whinges directed at particular individuals. Nor should it be written with the specific aim of being published quickly. I know that certain respectable and respected authors do precisely that, but in my opinion what they have produced isn't a diary. A better word would be journal, or possibly chronicle.

Why bother? Well, I've already mentioned an uncontrollable urge to write, but other possibilities include a wish to capture day-to-day events before they're forgotten; a passion to create something unique; a practical wish to log all of one's hobbies and interests in one place; and - perhaps - to inhabit somewhere comforting when one is alone. I'll return to that last theme in a future post.

Is anybody else interested? Answer: no idea. This is something that the diarist can't control and shouldn't really care about.

In 1984 the "Times" published an article by Sir Roy Strong which discussed some of these issues. I've attached it here. (By the way, Pepys didn't really look like that.) Sir Roy was disdainful of "diaries" that are written specifically to settle old scores, but stressed their importance as a means of recording for posterity the little details of everyday life. "...The account of clothes, places, events, food and customs become hypnotic ... (a) mirror of daily life and character, and the cycle of the seasons."

Quite so. Without really thinking about it, that's why I jotted things down 40 years ago and still do today. And note that I just used the word "jotted", which for me means writing things down on paper. Of course we can all record our thoughts and keep diaries on blogs and websites, but how long will they last? That is also an issue for me to return to soon.