Tuesday, January 6, 2015

One Year Diary

Posted by: Nicole Luiken



In 1979, when I was eight years old, I bought a diary with some birthday money. The diary purports to be a one-year diary and each page is thus labelled, starting with January 1. Perhaps the marketers hoped to make an annual sale. Alas, they failed spectacularly with me. I promptly scratched out January 1 and wrote June 14th in pencil. By the diary’s February 8th date, it was already 1980. I don’t think I ever kept to the ‘write every day’ for more than a week. Even as a child I never poured out my heart to the diary—I was far too conscious of the fact that I had siblings who might read it. 

Nonetheless, I still use the diary to record important events. Most recently, I scratched out October 10th and wrote a 2014 in review entry. Every time I start writing a new book I make an entry, recording things like title, what dates I wrote the various drafts during, when/if it was published. Thus I know that in 2014 I revised two novels, wrote the first draft of my 35th novel and started working on novel #36.

At my current rate of about four pages per year, I ought to need a new diary sometime in about 2035…

Do you diary or journal or keep a record of important events?

3 comments:

  1. Now I don't feel so lonesome in my un-journaling :) I scribble notes in a notebook if something in a book strikes me as needing recording (and I do look at the notes years later), but I've never managed a journal. Blogging is the closest I've come to that.

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  2. Yes, and everyone expects writers to journal madly, but I'm all about the stories. I find my own day-to-day life happy but uninteresting. (Does that make sense?)

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