How to Keep a Journal (and Actually Continue)

There is a drawer in a great many houses containing three notebooks, each with eleven pages used. The handwriting on page one is careful. By page nine the entries have shortened to weather and complaints, and then the record stops mid-January without ceremony. This is such a common object that it deserves a diagnosis rather than a scolding.

The first cause of death is the audience problem. Almost everyone, on page one, writes for a reader — a biographer, a future child, a version of themselves who will be impressed. Writing for a reader means editing, and editing means the boring true things get cut in favour of presentable ones, and a document with nothing true in it is not worth continuing. The cure is deliberately unglamorous: write one sentence you would be embarrassed to have read aloud. If the page is safe, it is dead.

The second cause is the size of the promise. A daily page is a large commitment made by a rested person on behalf of a tired one. Three lines is not a lesser journal; it is the only version that survives March. What matters is not the length of an entry but the existence of a record, because the value of journals is almost entirely retrospective — nobody has ever regretted having a paragraph from a hard month.

It also helps enormously to have a prompt, since the blank page asks an impossible question. Two of the oldest work best. What happened today that I want to remember, and what am I avoiding? The first builds an archive; the second does the therapeutic work, and it is remarkable how often the second question, answered honestly for four lines, resolves a mood that had survived an entire evening of thinking about it.

There is decent evidence that this is not merely pleasant. Expressive writing — putting a difficulty into ordered sentences rather than letting it circulate — has been repeatedly associated with reductions in rumination and improvements in sleep. The mechanism is unremarkable: a worry held in the head is a loop, and a worry written down is a shape, with a beginning and an end and, sometimes, an obvious next step you had been circling for a week.

Keep two more rules and the notebook will outlast the year. Never reread within a month, because rereading fresh entries turns writing into performance. And skip without penalty — a journal with gaps is a journal; a journal abandoned because of a gap is a drawer ornament. Years later, the entries you will value are not the eloquent ones. They are the three lines from a Tuesday you had entirely forgotten, which turn out to contain the whole of a period of your life you cannot otherwise get back.