My cat, Sylvester, loved to sit on the dining room table while I wrote.
I heard something on the radio about Truman Capote saying he always left his diaries lying around open. He said what’s the use of writing something if no one is going to read it. Whether or not this is really what he said, I agree with it.
I don’t know exactly what the genre of writing diaries is called – Diarism? Similar to Journalism, but more personal. Journal comes from ‘jour’ or day. The art of writing down everyday things.
Diarists are rare, but some are famous. Anais Nin and Samuel Pepys come to mind. Charles Darwin kept journals throughout his journey on the Beagle. We have the theory of evolution because of his journals, which contained not only detailed descriptions of the wildlife he encountered, but his personal observations about it all. Children’s author, Elizabeth Yates, took writing lessons from a mentor who instructed her to go outside with a notebook and write down the things she observed about people. Madeline L’Engle wrote A Circle of Quiet from her diary entries, and advised fledgling writers to keep a diary for this very purpose: it may one day become a book.
I learned how to keep a journal (diary) from the practice of writing laboratory reports in college, several times each week, for nearly two years. I had classes in everything from Botany and Plant Physiology to Animal Physiology and Pathology, and all of these had Labs in which I was required to record every minute detail of a process or experiment or observation in precise order. I also kept a nature notebook, in which I drew sketches of plants and flowers and recorded detailed descriptions of color, shape, size, location, and season.
I wasn’t much of a diarist during my younger years, when my Christmas gifts usually included a tiny blank book with a lock and key, meant for keeping my most personal secrets. I only used these diaries for recording the earthshaking events of a new crush or a break-up, and from what I hear from other people, they did the same thing with their little blank books. I think this is where “diary” gets its melodramatic connotation. “Dear Diary,” and all that.
But in reality, diaries are laboratory reports; records of the daily and progressive experiments of our lives. Writing things down trains us as scientists who want to know, to measure, to draw conclusions – about the inner workings of our hearts and minds, about the progress of a project or a relationship, about the local weather or the job search or the training of a new puppy. These “laboratory reports” are meant to be read, reflected upon, even acted upon.
It was by keeping a diary of my gardening activities over the years that I learned the best time to prepare the soil in my region was in late March or early April, before the drenching rains of mid-April made rototilling impossible until mid-May. I suppose this explains the origin of the Farmers’ Almanac, another journal/diary of sorts. People who want to lose weight are encouraged to keep food diaries in which they record everything they eat for a set period of time. Diaries don’t lie, or they shouldn’t. That’s the idea.
Keeping a diary helps us to see the patterns in our lives. It was in this way I made the unlikely connection between crying and red wine. After my divorce, I cried every single day for about three years, until, when I began drinking a glass of red wine in the evenings, unexplainably, I stopped crying. But there was an explanation, and I found it by reading my diary and noticing that the new pattern of happy hour coincided with cessation of the daily tears. More recently, I have been experimenting with what helps me sleep through the night, narrowing down the causes and effects. This is Science.
I have been keeping a diary now for over forty years. Somewhere along the way, I read Julia Cameron’s book, The Right to Write, in which she instructs all creatives to keep a journal of morning pages for inspiration and ideas. I see my journals as jewelry boxes that store the gems of ideas for future poems, stories, essays, and books. And this is not just a nice word picture: I have so far written three books using the notes and details from these journals for reference. After all, this is what journalists do.
Unfortunately, I no longer have my earliest journals because I burned them all in 1982, after converting to evangelical Christianity. Somehow I believed that writing down my life would detract from my conversations with God. How wrong I was!
I finally realized this mistake and picked up my practice again in 1989, with a journal entry describing the experience of witnessing my father’s death, a once-in-a-lifetime event that deserved to be remembered.
While home educating my children I began keeping a school journal about what we did each week, including the priceless things my kids said. Gradually I began adding insights, reflections, and records of events to these journal entries. Sometimes I wonder if these decades of journaling have transformed me into a diarist. Is this my genre?
The nay-sayers who have told me over the years that I shouldn’t keep a diary are wrong. Now I have more proof to back up my claim: David Sedaris has begun publishing books that are taken directly from his journal entries. Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977- 2002 was his first published book of diaries, and since then he has continued the trend.
Below is a review of Sedaris’s published diaries, from Good Reads:
David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making
It’s no coincidence that the world’s best writers tend to keep diaries. If you faithfully record your life in a journal, you’re writing every day–and if you write every day, you become a better writer. David Sedaris has kept a diary for forty years. This means that if you’ve kept a diary for a year of your life or less, Sedaris is at least forty times better at writing than you are.
In his diaries, he’s recorded everything that has captured his attention–overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for his finest work, and with them he has honed his self-deprecation and learned to craft his cunning, surprising sentences.
Now, for the first time, Sedaris shares his private writings with the world in Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002. This is the first-person account of how a drug-abusing dropout with a weakness for the International House of Pancakes and a chronic inability to hold down a real job became one of the funniest people on the planet.
Most diaries — even the diaries of great writers — are impossibly dull, because they generally write about their emotions, or their dreams, or their interior life. Sedaris’s diaries are unique because they face outward. He doesn’t tell us his feelings about the world, he shows us the world instead, and in so doing he shows us something deeper about himself.
Written with a sharp eye and ear for the bizarre, the beautiful, and the uncomfortable, and with a generosity of spirit that even a misanthropic sense of humor can’t fully disguise, Theft By Finding proves that Sedaris is one of our great modern observers. It’s a potent reminder that there’s no such thing as a boring day–when you’re as perceptive and curious as Sedaris, adventure waits around every corner.
