Self-Reflection or Self-Fiction: Is Keeping a Journal Productive - or Even Healthy?

Do you keep a journal?

(Beyond what you write on Steemit, that is?)

Do you ever go back and read the damn thing?

I've gone through several phases of journal keeping, diary-writing, blogging, typing, and so on over the years.

For the most part, I've found this to be more of an addiction - or a nervous habit - than a productive exercise. Not that I haven't gotten some good ideas out of journal entries. The act of scribbling something out by hand seems especially conducive to getting the mind working.

But for the most part, anything I've written that's worth reading has been hammered out, from idea to sketch to finished piece - and then shared - in a relatively short period of time.

I think the journaling compulsion is genetic.

Most of my ancestors have been effective letter writers or obsessive journal keepers. I've already shared my triple-great grandmother's letters to her husband during the Civil War. I've got another box of my grandmother's diaries from her early adulthood, including letters from her courtship with her first husband. And my own father's typewritten journals are all I've ever known of the man.

For whatever reason, a lot of family paper has funneled into my hands.

But I've found over the years that I tend to do this sort of personal writing most when I'm feeling depressed, stressed, or going through a particularly rough patch. (My father, too. All his journals come from the period between his divorce and his suicide.)

Sometimes I'll dip back into them to see if there are any ideas worth dusting off, polishing, and sharing, but I usually can't bear to read more than a page or two. It's honestly easier to come up with something new to say, and a lot more conducive to happiness, as well.

So my realization about "fan fiction" may not be entirely accurate. Journals are definitely a form of self-fictionalizing, but my primary thought when going through the old ones is, "It can't really have been as bad as all that, can it?"

Like many writers, I've used journals to sketch out new ideas and characters for stories. But unless I took the immediate step of working them into a completed work, they never amount to anything. There just doesn't seem any point in going back and resurrecting those corpses.

I think Stephen King hit the nail on the head when he said, "A writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas."

The Ten Year Diary

A few years ago my mother bought me one of those leather-bound Ten Year Journals. A remarkable gift! It's a hefty tome of 365 pages (plus a little padding for overflow) where the same day of the year is recorded on the same page, year after year. It provides four lines per day, so I've got to keep it brief - and leave out all the excess philosophizin' and belly-achin'. I've found this is the perfect way of scratching the itch to record my life without wallowing over-long in the swamps of self-reflection.

Do you keep a journal? Do you recognize the person you find in the older entries? Do you like her?

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As always, thanks for reading. CLICK HERE for a complete catalog of my work on Steemit, organized by category.

Image credits to the author.