Why keeping a diary will release you from the anxiety of the blank page
There are whole books, entire conferences, and multiple post-graduate courses dedicated to helping writers find their way when they find themselves staring at a blank page or screen. I don’t know if it’s intentionally cruel or just careless, but this seems like white-knuckling a fairly straightforward task for no discernible reason.
Remember a few months ago, when all the news magazines had a frantic story about young men who were taking long-haul flights and just staring at the seat in front of them to prove how mentally tough they were? Sitting down at your desk or chair and staring at a blank page with no thought in your head makes about as much sense to me. Thankfully, there might be a better way.
It’s old school.
One of the biggest mistakes writers make when they sit down to a blank page is thinking that everything they write should be good or there’s no point in doing it. Few of us sit down thinking, “I’ll probably never use any of this, but let me kill a few precious hours of my rather precarious life — ya know, just for shits and giggles.”
But we should, we really should, because the idea that anyone faces a blank page with no idea of what they want to say is bananas. That’s like starting to build a house before you’ve designed it — just start nailing shit together and hope for the best. Maybe we could squeeze a door in over here at some point.
Most of what we write isn’t all that important and we know it — if not in the moment, surely after the fact. If we’re lucky, a few pieces we scratch out each month, quarter, or year will stand out from the rest and be meaningful to someone. But that doesn’t stop us from thinking that everything we do should be earth-shattering in the moment. We’re writers, which makes us delusional — by definition.
I’m not talking about “shitty first drafts,” the classic advice from best-selling author Anne Lamott, although she makes a good point about needing to write our first drafts freely and without critical thought.
I’m talking about taking the time to write every day, without considering where you’re going with it, what publication you might submit it to, or how your mother’s best friend will laugh when they read that one clever line you heard at the Piggy Wiggly. Our fantasy life knows no bounds, but if you want to get better at writing, you really need to start keeping a diary.
I’m reminded of a line from the Cameron Crowe film, Almost Famous, where Lester Bangs is talking to the young William Miller and explains to him why the early Seventies are such a dangerous time for rock and roll.
“[Rock Stars are] trying to buy respectability from an art form that is gloriously and righteously dumb,” Bangs says, “and the day it ceases to be dumb is the day that it ceases to be real, and then it just becomes an industry of cool.”
Lester understands that rock music, or art in general, needs to be frivolous, infantile, and sophomoric. It isn’t meant to be held to some ridiculous societal standard of respectability. It is designed to subvert convention entirely. It is supposed to be somewhat stupid because that’s where the authenticity lies.
Shakespeare wrote stories full of shit jokes, violence, and sex. He wasn’t exactly putting on airs. He was his era’s equivalent of Judd Apatow mixed with Quentin Tarantino. Don’t let the language fool you. Bill was writing Stepbrothersand Pulp Fiction for a 16th-century audience.
Lewis Black, noted angry comedian and contributor to The Daily Show, began his career as a playwright. He went to the Yale Drama School, where he says, “I was writing plays and it was all about how important everything was. It’s so important, that it’s the most important thing that will ever be said.” Then he found fame and fortune in standup comedy, ranting about the dumbest shit imaginable.
Nothing destroys art faster than a little bit of success, no matter how small. We start to believe our own hype, imagined or otherwise, and decide that what we’re doing is actually important. Very, very important. While what we’re doing today might one day become important, it’s not likely, at least not in our lifetimes. The most famous artists in the world were all dead before they became successful. So maybe give that a rest.
Rembrandt. Bach. Monet. Thoreau. Dickinson. Van Gogh. Kafka. They all died broke and unheralded. It’s only recently that we’ve stumbled across the financially lucrative pop star era, and most of those kids burn out pretty quickly. If you’re in it for the money and the sex, you’re probably going to be sorely disappointed in the writers’ game. You’re better off playing the lottery or pole dancing naked outdoors in a thunderstorm.
Before the advent of the Interweb, if you wanted to become a writer, you had to spend a lot of time with paper and pen, or banging away on a crotchety old typewriter. You didn’t just start writing your first tome or pamphlet on day one. You wrote letters and you kept a diary, and once you’d earned your chops, maybe you began writing stories that you showed a few friends. What you didn’t do was launch a blog the day you decided you wanted to be a writer, publishing your diary entries as if you were Gore Vidal or Dorothy Parker.
There is something to be said for the gatekeepers of yesteryear. We think of democratization as a good thing, but too much of anything can still be unwise. We all have such easy access to an immediate, receptive audience with no sense of taste, but who are willing to engage and encourage us. We get a few claps and likes and decide we are definitely what everyone has been waiting for all along. But it’s not real.
Part of the process of becoming a writer is knowing what you think about things, and by things, I mean everything. You might be the shyest, most introverted person to ever walk the earth, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that if you have the desire to write, you have an opinion about everything. Why else would you be writing? Writing is how we discover what we think. Publishing is telling others what we think we know.
It’s best not to confuse the two.
There are surely some who will disagree, but I think good writing requires a nice balance of hubris and humility. You have to be egotistical enough to believe that anyone gives a shit about what you have to say, and yet, you will have a much easier time finding your way into the reader’s heart by being humble and gracious. It’s an interesting paradox.
If you can’t be honest with yourself, how authentic do you imagine you’ll be to a stranger? If you’re writing in your diary with the thought that someone might read it someday, you’re really missing out on the beauty of the exercise. This is the place to be free from judgment, not to impress anyone. You can work out what you believe while in the process of deciding what exactly that is. I wouldn’t recommend this in a piece you’re trying to publish, but it’s the actual point of a diary.
My diary is the sandbox where I can let my imagination run amuck. It’s where I test out all my wacky thoughts and half-baked ideas, giving them space to bump into one another and see if they stand up. In my mind, some of these ideas might seem perfectly legit, but once I begin writing about them, I often have a change of heart. The very act of writing forces me to defend my position with logic and reason. It’s easy to be nonchalant about some whimsical notion floating about my brain in all shades of grey, but it gets a little tougher to defend in black and white.
I write so I can understand what I think, not the other way around.
When I was a child, I heard an anecdote about some religious figure who said that everyone should spend at least a half hour in prayer each morning, unless they were busy, in which case they should spend an hour. Martin Luther quipped, “I have so much to do, I’ll have to spend the first three hours in prayer.”
I always liked this.
I have begun to think that maybe I’ve been doing it wrong. If I have a busy day that requires me to be creative, I should grease the wheels by writing first. This contradicts my puritanical upbringing to get to the serious work of life before I descend into the frivolity of art. I’m not talking hours, mind you. I’m no Friar Tuck, though I could easily play one on TV. Maybe a half hour to an hour.
I used to spend an hour or two every morning reading the news and ranting online about the idiocracy in the world. Apparently, my efforts were not all that successful in altering the future we now find ourselves in. There’s a shock.
What if I took some portion of that time and wrote in my diary instead? Not working on my latest essay or article. Just writing about the multitude of things that vex or surprise me and that for reasons passing understanding, I seem to have an opinion on. Let’s call it the first hour. In the second hour, I work on something for publication. If I wake up late, I write in my diary then get to work.
If I have a break in the day, which happens quite often in my line of work, I can go back to the essay I’m working on, and at the end of the day, there’s more of the same. If you want to be a writer but spend all your free time on social media or binge-watching the latest must-see TV, you’re not going to get very far.
Writing is an art, and if you want to be a writer, you have to practice. Don’t think about it too hard. As Sean Connery says in Finding Forrester, “No thinking. That comes later. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.”
Here is the trick, the secret, the key to the castle. You ready? You can write anything you want in your diary with the satisfaction that most of it will never see the light of day. You are working the most important muscle in your head with the faith that it will grow stronger from the effort, and that a few gems may tumble out of your ears along the way.
A funny line. Some unconventional insight. That one inconvenient thought. The bit of dialogue you already almost forgot. That truly odd sight in the grocer’s parking lot, not to mention the dead cow. The lunch you had and that weird — what the hell was that? These are the things you need to scribble down in a notebook or your phone throughout your day. Just little keywords that will jog your memory. All in it goes. Then, when you go to write in your diary, you already have a wealth of material to mine.
Do it every day. Do it without fail. Just sit down and start writing. When you begin, it might feel like an old-fashioned diary entry. I did this yesterday. I ate this. I did that. That’s okay. Eventually, the act of writing will release your brain and you’ll begin to connect other elements from your subconscious because that’s what our brains have evolved to do. What was that song that was playing? Who the hell puts mayo on French fries? Was that guy really named Harry Back or did I hear it wrong? We make all sorts of connections in our minds, not always rational, wise, or justifiable, but we do it just the same. You’re simply reverse-engineering the system.
What comes from this won’t be a cohesive essay, or anything you’d ever want to publish, at least not at first. But when you look back on it in a few days or weeks, a new story idea will pop out at you. You’ll steal this bit of dialogue for the piece you’re currently working on, and snag that whole paragraph for an article you’re pitching, and you definitely need to explore your feelings on people who believe in astrology. I mean, seriously.
This is where good writing comes from. It’s mining and all the words are not gold. You have to do a lot of sifting to find the nuggets because there’s a whole lotta rubble down there. Keeping a diary is the act of seeding the mine. You’re doing the work of being your mind’s typist, with the hope that you will be rewarded with gold. If you’re writing every day, there are no more blank pages. There’s always a wealth of material, right there in your silly little diary, simply because you’re still breathing.
Now, I can hear some of you, more than a few of the men and a fair number of the women, whining just a little. Do we have to call it a diary? Yes, I think you do.
Journal is to diary, as picture is to movie. It’s an attempt to elevate the mundane in order to find respectability. When I was a kid, a diary was something you got when you were twelve and came with a key so that you could keep your deep, dark, twelve-year-old thoughts under wraps. We wrote a few moronic things down, one embarrassing crush, and then quickly forgot about it until college when we upgraded to a leather-bound number and started writing obtuse poetry full of longing and despair.
In today’s society, at least in Western culture, there’s nothing at all cool about saying you keep a diary. There’s no prestige in it. No badge of honor. No hipster street cred. If you’re a grown woman, it’ll make you feel like a little girl with a diary covered in pink hearts and glitter, and if you’re a man, well — pretty much the same thing. The point is, when you’re writing freely, you should stay as far away from pride as possible. Ego kills authenticity, so you should be approaching your work from a position of humility, not triumph.
You need to think a lot less of yourself when you sit down to write in a diary. Be the twelve-year-old girl inside of you and write about whatever comes into your mind, without care or worry. You must have a few ideas about unicorns or ponies in there somewhere. No one is ever going to see any of it, not in this iteration anyway. None of it matters. It’s a dream sequence. Don’t get so precious about it.
We live in a time when we all have this expectation of near-instant gratification. Finish writing a piece and have it published before you’ve finished your morning coffee. No need to have it edited or approved by a team of professionals. Just hit send and poof, you’re a published writer. It’s not the same, but we do it anyway.
I used to write in a blog and was once known for my long rants on social media. I’ve certainly taken advantage of the state of technology and the relative ease of putting things out there. Platforms such as Medium are great for that. The way I see it, I have three tiers of writing that work for me. I write in my diary, some of those thoughts become stories, and some of those stories I publish.
You are free to publish your diary, of course, and I’ve toyed around with such things in the past, but the danger is that you won’t write the same if you know someone is going to read it. It’s just not the same exercise. You need to write without thinking of the reader, the audience, or the publisher. You need to write freely and for yourself. It’s not a waste just because you don’t publish it. It’s time well spent.
You don’t have to give away all the parts of yourself. You can keep some of it just for you.
I stopped writing in cursive in about the fourth grade so I can no longer write longhand with any proficiency. Like it or not, I am tied to my iPad. I open a new file each day and begin pecking away. It’s not very sexy or craftsman-like. It’s quite antiseptic if you want to know the truth, but we shouldn’t be thinking about how cool we think we look when we sit down to write.
I doubt any of us look all that stunning. Knees bouncing, chewing on our lips, nervously twitching like the Grinch before Christmas because we’ve had to pee for the last twenty minutes but refuse to get up. It’s the writing that counts, not the method. If you want to hunt and peck on an old Underwood while humming show tunes, knock yourself out. Whatever blows your hair back.
The important thing is to write every day.
Not only does it condition your mind to get to work on time (it’s remarkable how well this works), but the more you write, the better you’ll be. It’s not just that your structure, phrasing, and vocabulary will get better, you will never again be at a loss for something to write about. Daily writing is how you prime the pump. You simply need an outlet that doesn’t involve an audience.
A diary is something you keep. A journal is something you publish. I’m recommending the former. You get to decide if there’s a key.
If you’re interested in seeing what one of my diary entries looks like, click the story below. Follow me on Mastodon.
A Day In The Life Of A Diarist
An annotated diary entry from the life of a writerabitdodgy.uk