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| Photo credit: owly9 on Flickr |
So when my feeble attempts at maintaining a journal (and there have been many) fell flat, I felt a little silly. I was a writer, for crying out loud. Why was it so difficult to think up of a couple entries a week to document my life?
I think the conclusion I eventually came to was that while I had no problem spending hours a day in made-up worlds, torturing my characters or writing blog posts, for that matter, I just didn't find writing about my day, or week, or whatever span of time, nearly as interesting. I'd write a couple journal entries over the course of a few days, then get distracted, and, ultimately, bored.
As much as I wanted it to be, journal-writing just didn't come naturally to me. It was something I had to force, something that I didn't want to force. I conceded to trying to write just a couple entries a year (and sometimes less...oh well).
Maybe in the future I'll be able to maintain a journal or maybe I'll forever be one of those writers who just...doesn't. But while writing a journal isn't something that works particularly well for me, I know there are many writers out there who swear by it, who find writing the entries cathartic, or who just enjoy having something to look back on later in life (which I completely understand—it's one of the main reasons I still hope to one day pick up the habit of writing journal entries).
There is a lesson in all this, I think, namely that even the most basic of writing habits doesn't work for everyone. You see, that's the great thing about writers (well, the great thing about everyone, really)—we're all so diverse and interesting and what works for one writer doesn't necessarily work for another and that's ok. It's something to be celebrated, even, because how boring would it be if everyone worked exactly the same way?
We all think, speak and process the world in different ways, which is what makes our writing so unique. And I wouldn't want it to be any different.
Do you keep a journal? Why or why not?
