Dear diary

Diary of a plague year.

We’re in an extraordinary historical moment. Right within it, not knowing yet how the world will look when we come out the other side. Careening along the cliff edge Indiana Jones’ style; hat and ragtag band of misfits clutched to our chest. Hoping and fearing the world might end up looking a little different as we emerge to when we entered. And, as with so many key historical moments, the human soul is holding itself together one word at a time. It is not only disease which brings out the epistolary in us; war, prison, violence, illness, all stilt life and turn the mind inwards. How full normal life is, and how easy to rush around talking to all the world and ignoring ourselves? Yet here we now sit, mostly confined, much isolated, or segregated with a close family we have grown used to living around, not with.

My writing group, The Hay Writers, have had to cancel meetings. Instead, we have decided to host email conversations on our regular meeting days. Our first meeting resembled what one member ended up terming a marble scramble, akin to sending a fistful of marbles down the hallway to entertain your cats. Emails bouncing off walls and ricocheting between writers. It was chaotic and liberating. I left with a feeling of euphoria and a handful of marbles as to how my fellow writers are coping with lockdown. I was surprised at how many had decided to keep a ‘plague diary’, following the illustrious examples of Pepys and Defoe, and it set me wondering if this is a common reaction to extraordinary times and what emotions inspire the attempt.

Were they thinking to record the plague itself? Or to immortalise the human condition for posterity? Did they feel greatness reaching out to hover over their own desks? There is a lot of Pepys that I think should have been left to antiquity and maybe the details of rural plague life are best left there too, but oh, the curiosity…I had to see the contents! For that’s the fascination, isn’t it? Tell me, how many of you opened this up because of the title, Dear Diary…? with its shades of intimacy, secrets and confession? We’re following the inky tracks of many famous pens when we aspire to capture the inner workings of our own minds. Will they be the next Woolf, Frank, Scott, Carroll, Mandela, Bennett, Nin or Wilde? Or was the opportunity to do something they had long wished to indulge finally given them? In seeking out a connection to a great past, were they prepared to discover what they might find within the pages of their own mind?

My greatest surprise was that, for many of my fellow writers, keeping a diary was a new form of writing. I assumed all writers kept a diary for I’ve kept one since I was younger than Anne Frank, when the joy of writing first lit me up, but I had nothing to write about. Let me tell you, for the majority, ‘neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl’. I suffered a brief hiatus in this habit in my mid-twenties while living with a painfully jealous older boyfriend who thought it acceptable to read my diaries without asking me and to question me aggressively about exactly what each sentence meant. I decided that hell would do to me what it had done to Scott before the same insecurity got hold of my childhood diaries. I rang my stepmother and asked her to burn the collected scrawled notebooks in my old bedroom. To this day I sometimes wonder if I should have asked her to keep them safe rather than burn them. Most times I end up breathing a sigh of relief that those anguished pages are never to be read again. What happens in our teenage minds should stay in our teenage minds. For several years, and certainly until the end of that relationship, I put down my notebooks and pen. But the habit of writing was not so easily expunged and this (odd fortune of misfortune) is when I really began to write fiction. When I had the sense to move on from the relationship, I turned back to diary writing to help manage the tumult of my emotions and have managed mostly to keep the habit up, partly because I’m not too strict as to the edicts of said habit. I don’t have too many expectations about the contents or their end use, but I am convinced about their value as a regular conversation with myself. They have become a baseline against which I can measure my emotional, physical, social health.

So are you tempted and, if so, what sort of diary should you write? Now, here’s the diarist’s rub. Do you write outwards to exorcise the inner life or write inwards to shape the outer life? Were you even aware there is a difference? There are many ways to keep a diary, let’s sharpen our pencils and look into the options:

Of course, your diary can be a combination of any of the above features, and may even have aspects not mentioned here, but if you find yourself pulled towards any of these ideas, then follow that tug. Now, what else do you need to know before starting your epistolary journey?

One of the questions many people ask me about keeping a diary is how do you begin to develop the habit? If you’re the sort of person who fails at dieting, regularly cancels gym membership or has yet to run that promised half-marathon, fear not, this is a habit even you can do. Because the success of a diary is based around what already fits your life. You don’t have to change in order to create the change. And I have a success story to prove it.

Last Christmas (oh hush George) I gave my partner a six-minute diary. This is meant to encourage you to record regular self-check points and poses questions to get you thinking outside the box. Giving my dyslexic, fourth-generation-farming partner a self-improvement diary in front of his die-hard conservative mother was a little like receiving a dildo from your sister at a family Christmas; almost worth the toe-curling drama, but not quite. There were a lot of self-improvement diaries out there to choose from, but what made me choose this one? My partner is forever overwhelmed with his to-do list, there is literally never a day he feels on top of things. Time was short and focus was lacking, and this diary made the cut. The promise that it would take only six minutes a day coupled with the clear target of converting a never-ending to-do list into a to-achieve goal. Together we decided where he would keep it, which pen he needed to use and when we would encourage him to write it. (Note: asking for help with any habit will increase your chances of succeeding). Even my partner could surely concentrate for six minutes a day? And he has! Result. What did it reveal? He struggled to fill in the weekly kindness act for the first two months and told me I made him feel like a horrible human being. Doing an act of kindness became an obsession with him, reminding him how much he loved his social network and how overwhelmed by work and family that has become, and the obsession has developed the diary habit. Be warned, if you go down the gym-honed route of diary you might get addicted with the results.

Which brings us to form. What is the best form for a diary? This is about ease. What’s going to suit your lifestyle? If you can, I would strongly recommend using a paper-based format, even as a side-kick to an online Da Vinci journal. Disconnecting from technology on a regular basis is a solid high-five for your mental health and taking up any habit that can help you achieve this is a bonus. But the form will mostly reflect the type of diary you are keeping. A private exposition diary lost in a bag on the tube will cause you untold stress, these are best kept at home. If you’re a social media lover stick with the form you know best, don’t tell yourself it has to be a notepad. If you’re not the type to write, use your notes app on your phone and email it to yourself. I kept my diary on a Word doc for over ten years because I can type a lot faster than I write and I had a lot of exposition stuff to get off my chest. Now, I use a notebook because I wanted to change the format of my habit. If I go away, I always take a fresh notebook, because I would hate to lose my ongoing one while travelling.

So, how do I journal? Well, I’m not keeping a plague diary. I’ve read Pepys, and there are too many thoughts about living in intense proximity with my family and home schooling my daughter that ought to never see the light of day. I’ve kept up with my normal journal habits as much as possible, despite the extraordinary circumstances rather than because of them. Two years ago, during an intensely unhappy time in my life I found the catharsis of writing an exposition diary had turned to rage recording, page after page of intense misery. I began to reread my entries before writing the next, hoping to uncover some common threads that might lead me out of the pit of misery. I developed a habit of using the left side of the page to pull key nuggets out from the treacle of my thoughts and began to research how other diarists use their ritual. Thanks to Ms Hollis I now split my diary notebooks in two. The left side for my Six Pack self-defence list, each point beginning with ‘I am…’ and repeating themselves. Each day I check to see how many I can embrace in my life. During Coronavirus, my score has gone down from about seven or eight out of ten to about five or six. EVERY entry I decide what I am going to focus on and try to capture what I am grateful for. (More often than not, coffee still features highly in the latter.) On the right side of the page, Songbird exposition. I write without thought, judgement or aim. I write to see what drips to the bottom of the page as being the thing I probably need to notice about my current self. Sometimes I write in close connection to a book. At the moment I am reading Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad. It is a workbook and I find recording my responses to the prompts helps me fully engage with the process, turning the diary into a form of Six Pack. Some mornings I wake with ideas so strong in my head I throw them onto the page and it becomes a River of creativity. Sometimes the pages run to several, sometimes it is no more than a side, I don’t dictate this process. I write most days but without beating myself up for the days I can’t. When I am done, I close the book and get on with my life.

My diaries extend back through my life in various forms; notebooks, word documents, printed emails to myself. Apart from the teenage bonfire of the vanities I have kept them all. Will I one day read them? Perhaps, when I am older and truly bored. Perhaps not. They serve a purpose to keep me focused and calm now. Not all diarists read what they write. If you are focused on a private exposition style the focus here is getting things out, rather than reading through them. If reading your diaries gives you cold feet for the effort, then give over reading them until you have formed the habit. Once the habit is embedded you will have time to look deeper into what it’s doing for you and how you can change that.

For many years I have enjoyed reading other people’s diaries, Eleanor Coppola, Louisa May Alcott, Sofia Tolstoy and Adrian Mole amongst them, and at long last I have come to a place where I am using my epistolary passion to create a character. I have begun the first draft for Book Three in the Riverdell Series and dug into the past of one of my four characters through the diary entries of their mother. Rose de Lavelle is an extraordinary person and it felt impossible to write her character in any way other than via the unadulterated thoughts of her diary. As a diarist it is an odd experience to be a voyeur in the depths of someone else’s mind and I can’t wait to share this book with my editor to see what insight I get back and, eventually, with my readers. As I build towards the release of Book One in November this year, I am thrilled to be writing fresh material. 2020 has until now been an endurance race of editing and I still have many miles to face.