Friday Speak Out!: Finding the Perfect Writer’s Journal

by Brenda Moguez

Regardless if you’re an aspiring or seasoned writer you’ve heard of or read about the benefits of using a journal(s). For the author, it’s a haven, a catch-all, the place to jot unexplainable thoughts in, capture scenes that play themselves out in dreams, your observations of people found on trains and coffee shops, love letters to lost lovers, and your ideas for stories and future novels.

Deciding you want to keep a diary is the first step, the next is pushing through your apprehension that comes from another writing responsibility.

• What will you write?
• Can you commit to the demand of the daily rite to write?
• Why bother having a journal if you’re already struggling to reach your day-to-day word count?

If you’re like me, you’ll buy several journals, fill up the first ten pages and then stop. Later you’ll buy a Parker Starlight Ball Point pen and a package of multi-colored Sharpies, fill another twenty pages and stop once again. The following year you'll recommit to your desire to maintain a writer's journal but never quite succeed because you haven’t asked yourself why you want to keep a diary.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means” (Joan Didion, Why I Write, From the New York Times Book Review 5 December 1976).

After reading Ms. Didion’s essay, you might say, Yes!

Or you might groan at the idea of committing to such deep contemplation. Maybe you’ll recall what you learned in a writing workshop regarding the usefulness of using individual notebooks. Can you see yourself filling up several spiral binders, each with a unique theme?

• Ideal Journal
• Character Journal
• First Lines Journal
• Dream Journal
• Dear Diary Secret Thoughts Journal
• The Story Notebook

The laundry list of reasons to keep a notebook, as is what to scribe in your diary, are infinite. Journals help the writer tie the pieces of their fragmented thoughts together, but tracking down the perfect journal isn’t as simple as picking up a Moleskin.

It’s a complicated process.

If you love journals, I’ll wager you can’t walk past a boutique stationery store without browsing the inventory. Before you follow me down a slippery slope of acquiring a Smithsonian-worthy collection of journals, consider your writer’s needs.

I knew the conventional college-ruled notebook would not do the job. I wanted a robust on-the-go tool to organize the chaos in my writer’s mind. I saw the value of using several journals but dealing with the paper variety would be unwieldy, pricey, and they didn't provide the structure I wanted. When I considered my immediate needs, the need to manage my to-do list, research, my submissions, writer how-to’s, blog ideas, letters, and everything else in my writer’s kitchen sink, there was one only option: the digital journal.

There are several digital notebooks out there just waiting to declutter your writer’s mind. You will need to research to decide which is best for you. The upside to digital notebooks is their portability, and they do not require a Master’s Degree in Technology.

My love affair with the traditional journal continues to burn bright despite my appreciation of the digital variety.

If you’ve taken the plunge, share with us what works for you.

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Brenda Moguez writes the kind of stories she loves to read—women’s fiction, starring quirky, passionate women who are challenged by the fickleness and complexities of life. She’s particularly drawn to exploring the effects of love on the heart of a woman. She has aspirations for a fully staffed villa in Barcelona and funding aplenty for a room of her own. When she’s not working on a story, she writes love letters to the universe, dead poets, and Mae West. Her second novel, Nothing is Lost in Loving, released in April 2016. You can find her at http://www.brendamoguez.com where she explores passionate pursuits in all its forms.

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Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you!

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8 comments Brenda Moguez, diary, Friday Speak Out, journal, journaling, themed journals

The Public Diary

Buried in the back of my closet, a box sits, unopened for the past eight years. Inside,  a dozen or so bound books - diaries, if you will - from various points of my life. The first, a leatherbound tome that my godfather gave me when I graduated from college. I filled it with quotations and poems and frivolous stuff that, at the time, seemed so important.

One of the others is a book I began when I turned 40. I called it my happiness journal. That book became my therapist, my reason for not letting depression get the best of me.

Each of these journals is an interesting read from a certain point in my life. While some entries are generic, either in content or point I'm trying to make, and suitable for public eyes, other entries were written for my eyes only. And that gives me pause. What will happen in 50 years (yes, I'm going to live to age 100 - positive thinking), I'm not certain I want my daughters to read about my escapades.
Or perhaps I do.

That's got me thinking lately. In a time when most of us are on Facebook or Twitter or write blog posts, we're leaving a digital diary trail for anyone to read. Our autobiographical online journals/diaries are broadcast to a worldly audience, an intimate expression of self-disclosure.

I'll admit that I don't write in a physical diary as much as I used to, but I'm not sure if it's because after writing and editing newspaper stories all day, I'm tired and don't have the creativity to write at the end of the day or if it's because I'm using online versions more. A hundred years from now, will someone hold one of my diaries and use it as an educational tool about life during two different centuries and the hardships endured and joys encountered? That's difficult to do with a Facebook post.

One goal I plan to work on is keeping an updated, physical chronicle of what I find important. Diaries and journals play a key role when it comes to first-person research, a tool for self-discovery and a means of self-expression. A lot of times, that takes more than a 140-character snippet.

Do you keep a physical diary or journal?

by LuAnn Schindler

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3 comments blogging, diary, journals, LuAnn Schindler, online diary

Review of Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich

Reviewed by Cher'ley Grogg

Shadow Tag, written in narrative form allows the author, Louise Erdrich, to move seamlessly between characters. The novel revolves around a single family. The father Gil America, his wife Irene and their three children; 14 year old son Forian, 11 year old daughter, Riel and 6 year old son Stoney. The family is American Indian and their heritage plays a vital role in the story.

Gil is an artist who has become famous by painting a series called "Irene America". Irene and Gil met when as a young maiden she started modeling for him--they fell in love and married. His personal intimate relationship with his wife allowed him the freedom to paint her from virginal girl to sensual woman. Gil painted her in every pose imaginable, pregnant, on all fours, with the impression rape, dismemberment, death by smallpox, and in ways that only he knows what they represent.

Irene hangs on to the elusion of becoming an art historian and has an office in their basement to do work on her studies. In a bottom drawer, covered with ribbons and wrapping paper, in the very back of a file cabinet is her Red Diary. She begins to suspect that her husband is reading her diary. Once she confirms this, she uses it to manipulate him. She still has the need to write out her feelings so she buys a safe-deposit box where she keeps her true diary, the Blue Notebook.

Gil has invaded her privacy and everyday she grows more resentful; everyday she drinks more wine. The marriage goes from rocky to turbulent.
The two older children affected by their parents' stormy relationship cross boundaries that kids their age should not be crossing. The youngest, a budding artist draws many pictures of his family. His mother asks him about the "stick with a little half-moon" that he always paints at the end of her hand. With the simplicity of a first grader he answers, "the wineglass".

A few happy times appear in the novel and one evening, during one of those times Gil and Irene ran outside with their three children to play a Native American game called shadow tag. If you step on a person's shadow, you capture them. Irene felt Gil had captured her and that she had no way out.

Shadow Tag starts out as a slow read; the scenes feel stretched out a little too far. The explicit scenes and language do little to increase the pace. As the book progresses there is redemption because interest grows for the characters.

This book explores human relationships and the intricacies of a broken family. It feels as if the author has had first hand experiences with these issues.

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1 comment diary, Erdrich, family relationships, Louise, Native-American, novel, Shadow-tag, wine