Diaries, the ultimate in personal writing, can sometimes lead to writing that is the most widely read of
all.
Do you keep a journal? How about
old correspondence? Biographers will tell you that diaries and letters provide
some of the greatest insights into their subject matters and also do good
things for their authors. Yet in my dozens of interviews with successful
people, only a few kept such personal historiesalthough many more wished they
did.
In his biography of John Adams, the historian David McCullough draws from more than a thousand private
letters between Adams and his wife, Abigail, as well as from their diaries. You
gain a sense that their letters were not merely a record of their lives but of
life itself. Abigail admitted that she could sometimes say things in writing
more easily than in person. She got more opportunity than she wished to write
her "Dearest Friend," as she affectionately addressed her husband, given their
many years of separation when Adams was posted in Europe.
Separation also kindled the
poignant letters that Suor Maria Celeste wrote to her father, Galileo, from her
walled convent outside Florence in the 17th century. In Galileo’s Daughter, the author Dava
Sobel uses these letters to draw rich portraits of Galileo and his remarkable
daughter. With her many privations and concerns for her father’s health and
safety, how consoling Maria Celeste’s pen must have been for her.
Diaries, the ultimate in personal
writing, can sometimes lead to writing that is the most widely read of all.
Such was the case for Anne Morrow Lindbergh in the 1950s.
Taking a break from her difficult
marriage to Charles Lindbergh and from her hectic family obligations, this
dedicated diarist took some days for herself in a remote cottage on Florida’s
Gulf Coast. There her reflections, initially written only for herself,
eventually came to print in 1955 in a short book titled
Gift from the Sea. It became one of the bestselling books of the
century, striking a responsive chord with American women on the eve of the
feminist movements of the 1960s.
It means that each day is
something more. At least you’ve done something to make it stay by putting
something down.
While Anne Lindbergh was reflecting
near a warm sea, an ambitious young reporter was covering the Cold War from
inside Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, for the new medium of television. With his
serious reporting on NBC and ubiquitous bow tie, Irving R. Levine became a
television icon to a generation of Americans.
Irving has kept a diary and
personal correspondence dating back to the 1940s. He recently re-read some old
letters, finding things he had totally forgotten until he relived them half a
century later.
"I have a letter describing my trip
over to Europe the first time, on the Queen Elizabeth, and striking up an
acquaintance with an Eva Pawlik, who was an Olympic skater, and then having
dinner with her in Paris. I had forgotten that," he said in a recent interview.
This former newsman is a fast typist, and
these days he writes his diary on the computer before printing it out. His
diary also serves a metaphysical purpose. "It means that each day is something
more. At least you’ve done something to make it stay by putting something down.
I like grabbing the day in some form."
"I tell people to keep a
five-year journal, and nobody values it until they do."
Darlene Kostrub
Darlene Kostrub, the executive
director of the Palm Beach County (Florida) Literacy Coalition, keeps several
journals, each by hand. They are an important part of what keeps her centered
in her busy professional and family life. She keeps a regular diary (usually
starting a new one each year), a gratitude journal for occasional lists of what
she is thankful for, and a book of days, sometimes called a five-year journal.
This last kind of journal devotes just a few lines for each day, and each page
holds entries for that same day for five years.
Of her book of days, Darlene
explains: "I only put something there if it’s significantwhen somebody dies,
is married, if my kids broke up with somebody, or where we spend our family
birthdays or the Fourth of July. I can tell you where we were and what we did."
Each year, on her close friend’s
birthday, the two of them go out to celebrate. This year Darlene told her
friend what they had done for each of the last five birthdays, "She couldn’t
believe it. She was really impressed; it was gone from her mind," Darlene says.
"I tell people to keep this kind of journal, and nobody values it until they
do."
It’s not too late to start your own
journal. No matter how little you write, or how irregularly, it can yield
rewards in the coming years that will be worth far more to you than the minutes
you invest in it today.
They say a friend is a gift you give yourself. So is a journal.
For my own part, I keep a sporadic
journal on my computer, opening a new file for each month. Some months I have
just a day or two when I’ve made an entry. Other months have pages and pages of
writing. As a fast typist, and a slow hand writer, I prefer the keyboard. I
also like the portability of a laptop, since I often find the time to write
only when I’m on an airplane or in a hotel room by myself. A computer is
convenient for moving words in and out of a journal. Sometimes I’ll be typing
an entry when I realize my writing should really be a letter to someone, so
I’ll copy the text out to a letter document. Other times, I’ll copy and paste
in a letter or an email of significance, like the one I received from an old
friend from high school. So my journal is an electronic scrapbook.
I print it out every few months and
keep the pages in three-ring notebooks, having little faith in the future of
digital storage. I’m comforted by the thought that I can go back and read my
journal years from now. In my busy life today I don’t often leaf back, but when
I do it’s like dipping a ladle in clear, cool water and taking a quenching
drink. I savor again the ephemera of life that otherwise would drift away. They
say a friend is a gift you give yourself. So is a journal.
Ten years later, I can still feel my pajama-clad boy do his flying leap
into my arms from his changing table and hear the glee in his voice and kiss
his chubby cheek again. Ahhh...if that’s not preserving important history, what
is?