diary

Definition:

A personal record of events, experiences, thoughts, and observations.

See also:

• Twelve Reasons to Keep a Writer's Diary
• Commonplace Book
• Expressive Discourse
• Henry David Thoreau on the Art of Writing
• Journal
• Rural Hours, by Susan Fenimore Cooper
• Virginia Woolf on Keeping a Journal
• Writer's Notebook
• Writing for My Eye Only, by Virginia Woolf
• Your Writing: Private and Public

Etymology:

From the Latin, "daily allowance, daily journal"

Examples and Observations:

• "Easter Sunday, April 20th, 1919
  . . . The habit of writing for my eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. . . What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art."
  (Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary. Harcourt, 1953)



• "I get courage by reading [Virginia Woolf's Diary]. I feel very akin to her."
  (Sylvia Plath, quoted by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in No Man's Land. Yale Univ. Press, 1994)



• "It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order."
  (Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989)



• Safire's Rules for Keeping a Diary
  "For people intimidated by their own diaries, here are a handful of rules:
  
  
  1. You own the diary, the diary doesn't own you. There are many days in all our lives about which the less written the better. . . .
  
  
  2. Write for yourself. The central idea of a diary is that you are not writing for critics or for posterity but are writing a private letter to your future self. . . .
  
  
  3. Put down what cannot be reconstructed. . . . [R]emind yourself of the poignant personal moment, the remark you wish you had made, your predictions about the outcome of your own tribulations.
  
  
  4. Write legibly. . . .
  Four rules are enough rules. Above all, write about what got to you that day . . .."
  (William Safire, "On Keeping a Diary." The New York Times, Sep. 9, 1974)



• Vita Sackville-West on Capturing Moments
  "[T]he fingers which have once grown accustomed to a pen soon itch to hold one again: it is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on on the hop."
  (Vita Sackville-West, Twelve Days, 1928)