Nonsense Verse

Catching up

A review.

A related blog post.

An unrelated blog post.

Cheers.

On keeping a journal

I swear I’ve been writing, evidence to the contrary here notwithstanding. It’s just that I've been writing for school (and a bit for work), and that takes up its own kind of time. And I suppose I could have been posting some of my writing for school here, except that so much of it would sound out of context and, for many of you, boring as hell — a line-by-line analysis of summary vs. scene in Carver’s story “A Serious Talk”; a dissection of the point-of-view shifts in Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?” — and so I have not. But the little paper I turned in the other week is probably more blog-appropriate, so I present it, with minor edits, below. (Context: Inspired by Janet Burroway’s journal-keeping advice in Writing Fiction, Chapter 1 — Whatever Works: The Writing Process.)

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I’ve never been good at keeping a journal. My first attempt came when I was 7 years old. I know I was 7 without a doubt because of a treasure I found on my recent trip home to San Francisco. The day I arrived at my parents’ house, I went snooping around their attic and found a cardboard box that hadn’t been opened in 15 years. When I lifted its lid, it expelled a puff of dust. Inside were old drawings and writing assignments, penmanship tests, mini-essays from my first three years of elementary school. (The contents took up barely half the box, which meant gaps in the record: Why had my mother chosen to save these items, in particular, over others?) I found drawings of Garfield the cat that I’d made for my little brother, who went through a serious Garfield phase: Garfield bedsheets, Garfield lunchbox, Garfield stuffed animals and notepads and pencil cases. What phases had I gone through? A clue lay in this box as well: a tomato-red Hello Kitty diary, perhaps five inches long, four inches wide and one inch thick, held closed by a copper-colored clasp, the key to which still hung from the diary by a string.

I remember choosing this diary from the Sanrio store in Santa Rosa, Calif., at the big shopping mall where we used to buy all our school clothes. I wanted it badly — it was shiny, and it was red. I loved red, and I loved that it had a key, which in my 7-year-old imagination meant that anything put inside would be turned immediately into valuable treasure. I remember having to beg for it. My mother had looked at the price, then asked, “Will you really use it?” Yes! I said. I would write in it. Every day. I would tell it my secrets. I would feed it my dreams.

In truth, I had no idea what to write. I was 7 — any drama in my life was more likely to be processed through tears than through pages of angst-ridden prose. I remember opening my diary and, even then, hearing the voice of doubt in my head: You are 7 years old. Your life is mundane. Nothing exciting has happened to you — at least, nothing exciting enough to justify putting it here.

But fill the pages I did. The first dozen or so, in hot-pink ink. I seem to have reached instinctively for the Pillow Book method of journaling, first writing a list of “my favorite people,” and then writing short passages describing them. My social circle was rather small — “my favorite woman is my mama”; “my favorite man is my papa”; “my favorite brother [ed note: my only brother] is Jason”; “my favorite boy is ...” — but even in this spare list are found clues to the girl, then woman, I was to become. I liked my papa, I wrote, because “he brings us surprises, and sometimes those surprises are cookies!” I liked Jason because we “played stuffed animals.” I liked the boy because — well, because I was a boy-crazy little girl. I still use exclamation points when talking about cookies, I have loved my share of boys, I travel with a stuffed monkey. My favorite color is still red.

Flipping through it two weeks ago, I saw that the Hello Kitty diary was kept diligently for two weeks. Then (much to my dismay), the writing dropped off.

In the years since, I have bought with hard-earned money, and then barely used, an embarrassing number of attractive notebooks. I started a blog several years ago, hoping the pressure of an audience would spur me to write. I even blogged about acquiring a notebook, a Moleskine, and the novelty of writing longhand. That was in 2004:

The temptation of paper. … When I was in San Francisco this past weekend and in search of a journal, I was delighted to come upon a shelf of Moleskines. … Lined, squared, pocketed and blank pages. All in the telltale black leather with built-in ribbon bookmark and elastic band to keep the treasures inside safe and snug, just as Dervala [a blogger friend] had described. … I’ve rediscovered the satisfaction of putting pen — pen that leaves my fingers achy and inky — to paper, and creating something lasting and tangible. I’m so into it that I’m making a concerted effort to write legibly for once. This keyboard stuff has been death for my penmanship. But the Moleskine is bringing out the letter-artist in me. I’m having fun adding flourishes to my big, bold capital D’s and P’s, dotting my i’s just so — with real dots! Crossing my t’s singly or doubly, those sharp vertical lines begging for embellishment. This is w-r-i-t-i-n-g. This is my brain in print.

I filled one small Moleskine with words and pictures over the course of just a few months. But my journal-keeping, on paper and online, has lapsed again. I’ve bought other journals of different sizes and colors and redesigned my blog at least twice. Part of the problem is that life has gotten busier — although one might argue that this is exactly when one should begin journaling (the fuller life gets, the more there is to forget). Part of it is that I’m more wary these days about what I put online. But part of it has got to be a lack of discipline, too — that, or I possess some kind of anti-journaling gene, evident when I was 7 and persistent to this day. In this case, though, I’d rather take responsibility, chalk it up to writerly indolence. (I have to look at it that way, if there is to be any hope of my vanquishing bad habits.)

I left the Hello Kitty journal in the box in my parents’ attic, but I’m thinking that the next time I'm home, I ought to retrieve it and whisk it back to New York. I could finally fill the rest of its pages. Or perhaps it will become a talisman — something to place on my desk, to remind me of childhood, and lost time, and all the blank pages still to be filled.