The Birth of a Notebook
A book that has been on my to-read pile for a little while is The Private Life of a Diary written by Sally Bayley. The book explores the lives of famous diarists such as Virginia Woolf, Samuel Pepys, Sylvia Plath, George Orwell, James Boswell, Oscar Wilde and many others. A perfect mix of academia and personal lore – the latter I am particularly interested in and here is why.
My life has been haunted by the idea of being a diarist, it is something I have wanted to undertake since I was a child. At Christmas my relatives would give me notepaper and lockable diaries to keep my secrets in but I failed to write in them, I failed to pour myself into them. It was locked but it never contained anything worth imprisoning. Upon reading various diaries over the years I realised that each one is unique to its owner. There is no hard rule and here is where I turned the idea of a diary on its head.
I decided I wouldn't call it a diary or a journal - it was my notebook. My well of creative activity that I went to when I needed to empty out my mind or when I wanted to pick up something for a piece of work. I realised that the word diary had intimidated me and so I took it away.
Diaries, journals, notebooks – whatever you choose to call it - do not always have to contain confessions (unless you want them to be of course) but for some, the diary is more of a place we go to to unload, to explore and to make sense of the self. It is like a surgeon’s table - picking, dissecting, exploring and sewing yourself back together again. I soon came to realise that is a patchwork of ourselves. Some people love to write in their diaries, they enjoy writing down the meticulous details of their days and events of their life and that is fine but it wasn't for me.
To fill a heart with fear we look no further than the blank page but a diarist sees it as a new day, a new era or a new story to tell. The freedom that comes with the blank page is rather different from my days of fiction writing where just one word after another seemed like the greatest uphill struggle. But writing in my notebook is different.
The notebook became a place full of copied quotes, vignettes from my day or a small poem – these would all serve as a framework for prose or just future reading in order to remember those days a little more clearly. I had created a daily practice of self exploration through the power of real life tales, self dissection and poetry.