(Please read this before starting your journal.)

Adapted from Dorothy Lambert in Writing to Be Read, Ken Macrorie

A journal is a record kept for one’s self.  As such, it is fragmentary, elusive, disjointed, uneven in quality.  Nor should it be polished and unified.  Then it would be a collection of essays.  What matters is the one entry in ten that sparkles, ready to be set in the ring of an essay or story or poem or letter . . . .

Not only is it a record for oneself, but of oneself.  Every memorable journal, any successful journal, is honest.  Nothing sham, phoney, false.  Who is there to kid?  Yet euphemism, the word which hides the fact, is so much a part of the world; to break through the euphemistic mold of thought to honesty is very difficult.  A journal need not be confession, or a psychoanalyst’s couch, however.  Honesty lies in observing undeceived what lies about, not necessarily what lies within.

Finally, a journal is a place to fail.  That is, a place to try, experiment, test one’s wings.  For the moment, judgment, criticism, evaluation are suspended; what matters is the attempt, not the success of the attempt.  In a journal, one practices the lines before going on stage.

A journal may be all gems, or all logs, or all plans and blueprints, or all test tubes, or all confessions, or all collections of oddments--what follows are some ways of seeing, of thinking of a journal, and some suggestions of what to do with it.  You may follow one suggestion consistently, or try all, or none.  At least you will become aware of what is possible.

1. Think of your journal as a treasury, a jewelry box for gems and gold nuggets, or quotes, pithy ideas, epigrams, turns of phrases, insights, analogies, puns, aphorisms, nutshell wisdom.  You will write little, but think much.
2. Think of your journal as a storehouse into which you pack canned goods (others’ ideas), fresh fruit, nuts, corn, string, straw, K-rations--almost anything useful, in preparation for a rainy day, when you can browse through your storehouse with delight and constant amazement at what is there.  Like a pack rat, don’t stop to be discriminatory in your salvaging and collecting.
3. Think of your journal as a snapshot album and you a roving reporter clicking a shutter on life.  Light and dark contrasts, color, textures, angles and circles, portraits, landscapes:  what will you photograph?  . . . See life through a lens, telescopic, microscopic, or wide-angle, but a lens.  In focus.  Focus.
4. Think of your journal as a laboratory for experiments, blank pages waiting to be tried.  Dissect.  See what the insides are like, how it runs, how it’s put together.  Examine minutely:  see with a microscope.  Mix test tubes, weight, trace patterns, fix laws.  Ask questions and set about to find answers.
5. Think of your journal as a giant wardrobe which you can step into and try on marvelous clothes.  Put on others’ styles, look in the mirror, see and feel how they fit.  Wear what you like, change with the seasons:  try on 49 hats and buy none.  Be Parisian, Ethiopian, or Hindi: experiment, experiment.
6. Think of your journal as a drafting board.  Blank pages will become blueprints, plans for a house to live in.  Or are you drafting just window sills or a whole cathedral?  Accuracy, careful detail, sharp lines, no smudges on the pages.  If you are an idea-person, what will you build?  Watch your idea-house grow as you add bedrooms for the birth of new thoughts.
7. Think of your journal as a psychoanalyst’s couch, a confession.  Lie down and talk, talk, talk.  Ramble on about irrelevancies, or else list in order your sins.  Repeat, go over and over as you peel away each layer of onionskin to the core.  Explore your depths.  Dreams, Fantasies, Truths.
8. Think of your journal as a tape recorder attached directly to your brain.  Record your stream-of-consciousness, your associational dashes, dots, skip lines and spaces for “punctuation.”  Replay.  Can you find coherence in your thoughts?  Emphasize and clarify such associational leaps.
9. Think of your journal as an unmailed letter to a specific real person.
10. Think of your journal as a letter to yourself.  What would you have yourself know?  Or remember ten years from now?  Which self of your many selves will you choose to write to?  Or yourself as you were, say, at ten?  Or yourself as you will be?  Will your other self/selves answer back?  Turn your journal into a dialogue with yourself.  Argue, debate, reconcile.
11. Think of your journal as a history-memoir and you as a VIP:  the average citizen.  Write for an extraterrestrial citizen, or a terrestrial citizen of the 22nd Century.  Let them know how we really lived and thought.  Or else record the current world events, as filtered through your eyes, your consciousness, your concerns.  Record how history touches you.
12. Think of your journal as a travelogue, even though you may travel only through tunnels from dorm to class, like an underground person.  See afresh, as if you were born yesterday, or recently distilled from another planet.  Record the quaint customs, folkways, lore, speech patterns, superstitions, magic, and miraculous sights of the local terrain.  Chart the unknown; fill in the map of your world.
13. Think of your journal as a religious exercise, one which might lead to a religious experience or insight.  Search for new metaphors for the wordless, the inexpressible.  Reach out into the void, reach down, reach up, to find ways of telling others what you believe.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

~Anne Sexton