There’s a notebook in your house that cost eighteen pounds and has four pages used. The paper is lovely. That’s the problem.
An expensive notebook comes with an implied standard. Good paper asks for decent handwriting, decent handwriting asks for a considered sentence, and a considered sentence at eleven at night is more than anybody has. So nothing gets written, and the not-writing feels like a flaw in your character rather than what it is: a book too nice to use.
Buy the cheap one. A pad from the corner shop, the notes app, the back of last year’s diary. Something you’d happily write a shopping list in.
Page one is the worst page you’ll ever write
Everybody knows the first page is the one an imaginary someone opens the book to, so everybody writes an introduction. “I’ve decided to start journaling again. This time I want to stick with it, and I’m going to use this space to…”
Nobody in the history of the practice has reread that paragraph with pleasure.
Start on page four. Start in the middle of the book. Start with “Tuesday. Rain. Missed the train.” Skipping the ceremonial opening removes the one entry in the whole archive that’s about nothing.
Complete sentences are a school rule and it doesn’t apply here
Fragments are fine. Lists are fine. One word is fine. Crossing something out and not rewriting it is fine.
The grammar reflex is expensive because it drags in the internal editor, and the editor doesn’t stop at commas. Give it a minute and it’s asking whether the thing is worth saying. That question empties notebooks.
Write badly on purpose for a week if it helps. Deliberate scrappiness holds up better than accidental scrappiness, because the permission was granted in advance instead of being negotiated every night.
You’re editing for a reader who doesn’t exist
Preciousness usually turns out to be an audience problem wearing a disguise. Somebody is being written for: your future self, your children, whoever eventually finds it.
That’s why you explain context you already know perfectly well, why the petty stuff gets left out, why the tone comes out faintly noble. It’s also why entries about the bad days are the vaguest in the book, which is backwards, since those are the days you’d most want an honest account of later.
Nobody is reading this. If somebody does read it one day, the useful thing to leave them is what a Tuesday was really like, not the version that holds up.
Things you’re allowed to do
- Skip days, and skip noting that you skipped them.
- Leave pages blank.
- Write three entries on one day and none for the rest of the week.
- Use a biro that came free with something.
- Write about the argument about the dishwasher rather than about your feelings regarding the argument about the dishwasher.
- Abandon a book halfway through and start another.
- Keep it in a phone note with no formatting whatsoever.
- Write “no” and nothing else.
The good entries are accidents
Ask anybody with a long archive which entries they value and it’s never the polished ones. It’s a scrawled half-line from a day they’d completely forgotten, which turns out to hold a detail nothing else recorded: the name of the pub, that it snowed in April, that the baby was ill that week.
You can’t tell in advance which day that will be. That’s the real argument for lowering the standard, because ten seconds of rubbish on four hundred days beats twenty beautiful pages. Coverage is where the value sits, and coverage is exactly what a high standard costs you.
Tonight’s entry can be three words. Put them in the cheap one.