A vital part of any writing endeavor is using a journal to generate ideas for future writing projects. Journaling is an active learning process and helps us focus our thoughts to give them meaning when before they simply floated aimlessly in our heads. Journaling also gives us a place to record our observations and memories before life gets too fast so we can remember the little moments that once brought us joy. The reasoning for recording writing in a notebook is not new. Long before creative writing classes and the use of journals in these classes, field notebooks or logs were vital tools for scientists conducting their observations in biology, sociology, and anthropology. In social work and nursing, journals were also used during internships to record personal growth and student observations.
Recordings in diaries date back to the year 56 AD. In China, while in the Western world, journaling became a common practice during the Renaissance, when the image of the self became important. In 10th-century Japan, court ladies used pillow books (so called because they were kept in the bedroom or among wooden pillow drawers) to record their dreams and thoughts through poetry and images. Travelers from both the East and the West used journals to record their journeys, although Eastern writers integrated more imagery and poetry into their entries than Western explorers who stated the facts and details of the places and people they encountered. British sea explorers such as James Cook and William Bligh, whose records were later published, recorded their observations, gave an accurate record of events for their chain of command, and recorded important navigational knowledge for other naval captains.
Samuel Pepys, who wrote his famous diary from 1660 to 1669, is generally thought to have been the first chronicler. He not only examined current events, but had access to many of these events as he was a high-ranking civil official. He used generous detail when he described the people he met and also sought to remedy his past sins by writing about how he could have done things differently. In Europe and America during the 18th and 19th centuries, newspapers were published in record numbers and writers influenced by the romantic era and individualism recorded his reflections and feelings.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, journals became vital tools in process writing classes for recording free writing, brainstorming notes, and notes on research and topic construction. Outside of the writing classroom, journaling is also used to gain insight into spiritual quests, while journals are used by large numbers of women to record their thoughts, feelings and observations and to write against and through their Inner Critic. Journaling is also a vital tool in psychotherapy, so that patients can record their thoughts before their appointments and thus speed up their treatment time.
Many times, journaling focuses people who are working on a problem and need space to develop their thoughts. Writer and teacher Ken Macrorie compares a journal to a “seedbed” that needs watering and time to develop into a mature work. He states, “Journaling forces a writer to put something in the sock every day. Often when he reviews what’s in there, he sees materials that fit together and build.” Toby Fulwiler, another professional writer and scholar, says that a journal falls in the middle of the continuum between a journal and a notebook you’d bring to class. He asserts that the language in a journal should be kept informal and that the writer should use the first person, so that she reflects personally on a topic, and not use other sources that would distance her from the material. Fulwiler also lists that a “good” magazine should contain observations, questions (and more questions than answers), speculation, self-awareness, digression, synthesis, review, and information. Also, the writer must make frequent entries, and these entries must take up some space on the page so that more thoughts and speculations can be captured.
Today we have journals to record our vacations, our dreams, and our goals. Like history magazines, we should think of our magazines as a way for future generations to see what we were struggling with at the time, and to know that their dilemmas are not too far removed from ours.