Setting a resolution to write daily -- or even weekly, or monthly -- for the New Year is an achievable and beneficial personal goal to set . It doesn't deprive you of food, it doesn't require a membership anywhere, the cost is cheaper than a latte and it's a fairly quiet agreement between you and yourself. When people ask me how to get started, keep motivated and make … [Read more...]
Writing a Personal Journal: Keep It Private
If I had a choice in the matter, I'd rig all of my journals to blind anyone who dared open them without permission by a light more blazing than the sun. I think one of the struggles everyone who journals on a personal level encounters is the possibility of someone, whether stranger or close, could read their inner most thoughts. I know it's always been a real concern of … [Read more...]
Writing a Personal Journal: Keep it Honest
When you sit down to write your next journal entry, picture this... In 10 years from now, your older self opens your current journal to revisit the past and reads about what it was like in their life during the summer of 2012. That older version of you will want to know what they were thinking, doing, feeling and experiencing in 2012, so it's up to the current you to be … [Read more...]
Writing a Personal Journal: It’s in the Details
As a prolific writer, I find myself drawn to reading other journals and letters from people of the past. If the book says, Personal Diary or Personal Letters of so and so, I buy it. Virginia Woolf was a prolific writer herself, both as her 'work' and on a personal level. It was reading a passage from one of her journals that encouraged me, as a writer of journals, to pay … [Read more...]
Dear Diary Dates: Lessons in Journal Writing
Looking back over my writing life, I can see stages where my personal evolution of style, purpose and attention in all things I've wrote shifted. I hesitate to claim the simple act of aging has been the stepping stone to my writing maturity because I've come across people far younger than myself who already contain the wisdom I wish I had so many years ago. When I observe my … [Read more...]