Voices: Abigail Thomas on Keeping a Diary

I have kept journals and diaries for years. I've made sense of my world and the things in it by writing it all down. It was the first place where I realized I love the written word. It's probably also the reason I waited so long to write anywhere else. My creative drive was satisfied with what I wrote in private.

Until recently, when people told me I should write a book, I laughed. I thought it was an outrageous idea. But really, I already was a writer. I had been one for years. Of all the kinds of writing, I still love journals and diaries most. I love that they are authentic and rough hewn and raw -- so close to the life that fed them, as to be indistinguishable from it.

That's why I enjoyed the passage below immensely. It's got warmth, honesty, and a gentle humor which kept me smiling long after I read it. There's no better way to understand your own story than to start writing it down. I'll add to that, there's no better way to understand yourself as a writer.

From Thinking About Memoir by Abigail Thomas:

So there are hours of mulling, stewing, allowing the mind to let down its guard, but the rest of it is the writing part. It helps to be in the daily habit of scribbling stuff down. I suggest you go to the stationery store and pick out a notebook you actually like . . . You can't whip out your laptop on the crowded number one train at rush hour, but you can probably get to your notebook when you hear something you want to remember, or glimpse a memory of the kind that vanish so quickly. I once observed a father holding his son on his lap and the little boy sat straight up, like a vase of flowers. I wrote it down . . .

Call it a diary -- it is less imposing than a journal, which sounds like an end in itself. I steer clear of the word journal -- and its spawn, the verb to journal, as in "I have been journaling all my life." If I were to call my notebook a journal I would probably write with the notion that it be published someday, preferably posthumously, and people would marvel. This would make me self-conscious. I would be trying to perfect each sentence before its time. I prefer notes; if I clean it up too fast, I lose the spark. Everything goes in: grocery lists, things to do (so I can scratch them off), random observations, knitting patterns, recipes, overheard dialogue, everything. A diary isn't sacred. Think of it as the written equivalent of singing in the shower. I don't care what I'm writing about and I don't pay any attention to language. Most of what's in there is boring, but it keeps me in the habit. Writing doesn't have to be good, not at first.

By now I am addicted. I need to feel my hand scribbling across a page. A friend wanted to know what I was working on; she was reading the paper and I was writing in my diary. We were having coffee at Bread Alone.

"Nothing," I said.

"It can't be nothing," she said, assuming perhaps that writers were always doing something interesting. She leaned over and read, "It is taking a long time to get my sandwich."

Case closed.

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What's one silly or uninteresting thing you like to write down?