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Ana muses about the idea of keeping a diary.
During one pre-teen summer, schmancy, floral cloth-covered diaries with "locks" and teeny tiny keys didn't appeal to me. Diaries were for recording successes, and I wasn't the kind of girl who knew the cute boys in school were standing in line to pair up with me.
The how-do-I WIP of my life needed bigger pages, room to cross out mis-written lines. I needed spiral notebooks, narrow lined and narrow margined, so I could get words on a page.
I wrote about serious things. Like where I would live when I grew up, and what I would do. How I would immediately say the right things in casual conversations. How I would be skinny and pretty, know how to make up my eyes to look like deep pools of mystery. How I would be in charge of my life. Be certain about everything.
I ripped out page after page. By the end of that summer, all I had were the yellow cover, hard back, and the wire spiral. School started, and I was tossed back into the pool of social awkwardness without a plan.
But these were your first steps to becoming a writer, Ana. You could even write a story about a heroine who kept diaries for years and somehow they got intertwined with a man she meets.
ReplyDeleteI always started out keeping a diary and never finished them.
ReplyDeleteI think I kept a diary for the sum total of two days when I was a kid. I did journal my vacations to Europe, and since those were in the days before scrap booking became popular, they are a nice peek into the past and a way to relive the memories. I still have those journals in my nightstand.
ReplyDeleteI kept a diary in my teens, but it was a detailed account of where I had been, who with, and what happened. I've also kept diaries of my trips abroad (with dozens of photos/leaflets etc). However I've never written down any of my thoughts or feelings. Probably most of them are too complicated to explain, even to myself!
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