How to Keep a Journal You’ll Want to Read
So that the writing flows naturally while also fitting into your journal’s arc.
On a recent visit to my parents’ house, in the spirit of archeology, I hunted through all the dusty cupboards of my childhood bedroom for any of my old journals that my parents had kept.
I found all my brief childhood attempts at keeping a journal — a comical polar-bear adorned one from my first decade and two from my teens. From one of the teenage journals, I had torn out all the written pages and left only the blank ones.
The other teenage journal began with a few pages of tortured debate on whether or not to keep a diary, raising privacy concerns, epistemological issues (can any account ever truly capture reality?), and gripes that my life was too boring to be worth writing about. I only wrote a handful of pages over two years, all grappling with the weighty issues of the time.
Reading it now, I consider that diary a grand success. It paints a better picture of my angsty teen years than I could have hoped. And its brevity is to my current reader self’s advantage, distilling two years’ worth of history to a single sitting.
Five years ago, I finally started a journaling habit that stuck. I started off with bullet journaling and the morning…
