Lou's Blog

For a time I wrote every morning. Even before my first trip to the bathroom, I'd roll out of bed and write. I was executing Julia Cameron's "morning pages." Her notion was that every morning one should rise and write, by hand, at least three pages. Write what? Anything and everything, but just write, non-stop. I used it for stream-of-consciousness stuff, or to recall dreams I had just left or to add a little salve to some lingering pain. That's what this morning and yesterday morning feel like to me: morning pages, this time in digital format. It's still difficult to see a blog taking the place of my tried-and-true paper journal. I can tell the effect for me as the writer is the same; writing is healing and empowering for me, and it's especially interesting now when I don't really need any healing or empowering just now. At this moment in time I'm not journaling a great deal, though I certainly turn to it to help me work certain difficulties out. Yet to some extent all my writing muscles are spent on comiccritique.com, leaving little time and energy for journaling, or blogging for that matter. In writing these entries I'm as much being a computer geek as a journaler, since I'm testing blogging software and the like. At any rate, since I'm writing and letting my fingers and mind take me where it will, the little voices in my head (not the ones that tell me kittens belong in the freezer, the other voices) are saying I should give a quick how-to on keeping a journal. Sure, Voices, I'll do that.

How to Keep a Journal

First, I've always called it a "journal," not a "diary." They might be identical to some minds, but "diary" sounds just too girly for me. I imagine a diary being kept by a teenager where she recounts the trials of school and the injustice being too young for a forehead piercing. Meanwhile, "journal" evokes images of a 19th century sea captain describing how he had to remove his own left leg and attach a peg leg himself because the ship's surgeon had just lost both arms to a giant squid and was at the time performing surgery with his toes in an attempt to save a man from a cutlass wound. That's a journal.

Second, get the right equipment. One can indeed keep a journal on a computer or a laptop, but I recommend going for the traditional gear: a good pen and a leather-bound blank book. Computers are fine, but they require electricity and space (even a small laptop requires some elbow room). With a good blank book and a good pen I can journal almost anywhere at any time (and I have). First let's discuss the book itself. It should be leather bound with archival quality pages. This is a book that looks good and will last years. My personal preference is that the pages are unlined, but those are rather difficult to find sometimes. You'll find your own preference after a time. At this point you might say to yourself that you don't want your words to be stored forever on archival quality paper. I hear that — I've been there. You're wrong. You can lock the journal up so nobody reads it for years and years if you don't want to share it, I'm all for that (I don't share mine). At the same time, I want my daughter and her children to have my journal (of which there are several volumes now). I'm not proud of everything I wrote in those volumes, but the aboslute worst that will come of my descendants reading them is that they'll see I was — am — human.Write it down in a real book. Trust me. Expect to spend anywhere between $15 and $60 for a good blank book.

On to the pen, known in high-falootin' as the "writing instrument." DON'T SKIMP HERE. Go to an office supply store and get a really good pen. Expect to spend at least $50 or $60. I prefer fountain pens, but there are excellent pens of all sorts at that price level. Aside from being cool man jewelry, high-quality writing instruments make the act of putting ink on paper nearly effortless. If you're going to be a serious journaler, make it easy on yourself to write for an hour or more. In my days of heavy journaling I would go for three hours at a clip (no lie), and it wouldn't have been possible without the Mont Blanc I had in my hand.

So that's it for the equipment. Now for the whens and wheres. I journal whenever I have time and a space, which means that I keep my book and pen with me at all times. Yes, it admittedly sounds a little neurotic, but time and again it's proven a Good Thing(tm) to have my journal with me. If I'm setting out on a journaling mission, one of my choice spots is to head to a bar on a weekend afternoon. I like to sip a beer and put pen to paper right at the bar itself. I don't seek solitude when I'm journaling; I like to be out in the world in some way.

How long should you write? I like to go at least thirty minutes. My experience is that it takes me that long to write the things that have to be written: where I am, what's been bugging me, how I'm feeling. Once that is out of the way (and arguably a good enough reason to keep a journal at all), I move on to other things. I simply write and see where the pen takes me. It's meditative and rewarding. And I've come away from some journaling sessions feeling as though I've solved the mysteries of the universe, at least until the next beer arrives.

That's my how-to on keeping a journal in a very big nutshell. I'm off for another cup of coffee and to move on with the day.