I’ve been journaling for decades. Recently I’ve been reading up on the various methods of journaling, their various advantages and disadvantages. It seems to be user’s choice in the end. I made mine. I use all of them. This produces quite a mess, as you might imagine. I shall now give my opinion on all the methods I have used. I not only have used all all of the following, but I still do. All of them. From quill pens to word processors. Well, not so much the quill pen anymore.
First one used, still used extensively. Does give you a comfortable feeling of putting something permanent on paper which will be there after you’re gone.
What goes into a handwritten journal can be a lot more than words. You aren’t limited to the alphabet. You can draw and doodle, paste things into the pages, add stickers. That’s the benefit you get from a single instance situation. You (probably) aren’t going to copy or move anything in this journal.
By the way, it seems that at no time in the journaling life cycle is any thought given to a possible use of the journal once written or once created. You fill a journal, you go on to the next one, but nobody ever talks about going back to an earlier journal entry for anything.
Handwritten journals are essentially unsearchable. Every now and then someone writes about creating an index somewhere showing where a certain topic or idea was written about but nobody ever admits to having done this. Too much work. I tried it on an occasion or two. Too much work. I gave up. I tried numbering the pages and using the numbers in my index. I also tried dates as a look-up key. Either would work, but the work involved is too much for the value received.
Spiral bound notebooks have worked best for me. The pages lie flat. Or is it lay flat? Jump on that one, someone. You can write close to the right margin on the left hand sheets. Spiral notebooks are fairly sturdy creatures and can stand a certain amount of life in a backpack.
If you use Loose leaf paper. You can reach all the margins. You don’t have to struggle with the whole notebook to write a single entry. The entry can occur without the entire notebook being present. Probably the most important difference between loose sheets and a spiral notebook is that loose sheets can be removed from one spot and moved to another. They aren’t fixed in a single order for all eternity as they are in the spiral or bound notebook. If you decide to add to an entry after you have written other things, you can add a page. By the same token, if you want you can remove a page or rewrite a page if you want.
The loose leaf binder isn’t as sturdy as the spiral notebook, but if you go to the trouble to get reinforced margin paper they do pretty well usually. They tend to be bulkier than spiral notebooks.
I don’t like them, usually. I’ve tried them. They have stiff backs. The science notebooks come expensively with good paper and numbered pages. The biggest drawback to them is that the binding makes the pages not lie (or lay?) flat. Or not flat enough. This messes up my handwriting. They look good, though. If the main purpose is to impress people with how seriously you take your writing, then the bound journal with its flowery cover and headings and margin art and lines of great beauty really make your words look important. The price of these journals also make your words and efforts look important. Dear Diary comes to mind.
There is also frequently the problem of size. I have over the years purchased a large assortment of the cutest little pocket bound notebooks you ever did see. The problem with them is that they are useless. You can’t write in them. There is maybe room for a grocery list or a list of names and passwords and things of that sort of short data, but expressing any complicated thought, that might take more than a sentence to express, is just unmanageable in a pocket-sized notebook.
So essentially I have found that the professional journals sold as journals in bookstores and office supplies are mostly good for selling and not for journaling. Just my opinion. Depends on what you want to do. If you want to be seen as a person journaling, buy the fancy bound journal. If you actually want to journal and don’t care whether anyone thinks you are journaling or not, then use some other cheaper and more effective way of getting your words on paper.
Pocket notebooks are great for making short notes. I usually have on in a shirt pocket and use it a lot, just not much for journaling.
Writing on a laptop, smartphone, desktop computer, tablet or any other incantation from the world of digital writing has many advantages. The biggest is also perhaps the biggest disadvantage of digital journaling, the ability to edit one’s work.
A fundamental difference between digital and the once and for all recording of your writing is the fact that with digital writing there is no longer the concept of an original, single version of anything. This is a difficult idea for those of you without a background in computer theory, and I know I’m getting myself in trouble when I talk about it, but it’s significant and I have to try to explain it.
Computers store data as ones and zeros. Once a string of ones and zeros is created it can be copied as many times as needed exactly. The word exactly is central to the argument. It has serious implications. Once a copy is made it isn't a copy, it’s another original. This is very powerful. It enables editing in a way impossible to do with handwriting or typewriting as will be seen.
There is no longer the concept of a copy. Multiple copies of anything are really multiple originals. The fun begins when you are looking for a particular version of the set of originals. Confused yet? We back off now.
On to some practical results of the theory. What you type can be edited easily, as you go along if you want to. There are many wise people out there who think that is a very bad idea, that it interferes with the flow of words and ideas. It gets creative writing mixed up with editing, typesetting and publishing.
I agree one hundred percent with that. If you choose to write on a digital platform, you must consider editing and deal with it. It is an emotional and psychological problem rather than a technical problem. Turn off the spell checker. For sure turn off the grammar checker, grammar helper, style helper and everything else that claims to help you journal and actually impedes the flow of creative thought.
Journaling is you and the paper, or paper substitute. I've read the arguments that handwriting on a screen helps with this. It tries to be digital and not digital at the same time.
I've used myself various schemes to avoid editing and rewriting what I’m writing as I go. They work, but you have to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
Adding features to existing software to make it do even more is is the way software companies make money. They put every tool they can build into the product so that you will buy, or be forced to buy the latest version. Nobody makes money on something invented ten years ago and installed on every computer or computer-substitute on the planet. There isn't that much profit in a spiral notebook, either.
So if you choose to write digitally, you will have to make choices about your environment purposefully and stick to your decision. I won’t tell you how I work because I come from a background deep in history and if I were beginning today I for sure wouldn't be doing it as I do.
I’m avoiding giving you concrete advice about what to buy. The usually things apply, battery life, size, weight, convenience. Can I read the screen in sunlight? How much does it cost. Your investment will be much more than a spiral notebook or a loose leaf binder, you can figure on that.
But then, you use it for other things, don’t you? And that brings me to the second major disadvantages to digital journaling.
You get distracted in many ways when you are working on a computer.
As an actual example of this, I just put up with a 10 minute interruption to this epistle because (take this slow, it’s complicated) the sound of the manual typewriter coming from the bluetooth connection of the computer to my hearing aids suddenly stopped. Yeah, that’s a lot of digital stuff that has to work perfectly or be tended to somehow. I’m writing this on a writing internet site which will, if requested, deliver sound effects to accompany my keystrokes. Like a silly child, I invoke that mess of technology and can hear the sounds of a manual typewriter as I type this onto the screen. Very up-snoot, when it works.
But all that takes software engineering, installation, configuration and maintenance. All of which take time, and thus reduce the time I have to actually write something. We used to say in computers that the operating system will always eventually take over the entire resources of whatever computer it is installed on making it worthless for any actual work. That’s cynical, and almost true. The term is "Feature ism" I intend to use it from time to time in this article
That was my personal distraction. On the internet you read of being distracted by Facebook and it’s fellows, email messages, notifications of all kinds, and the internet is always there calling on you to screen the very latest in everything in the world except what you are writing about.
This is such a problem that writing tools have been developed to restrict the computer from such excursions. For a lot of money you can buy a writing machine which stores your stuff digitally but which forbids you from the internet otherwise, for email, texting, or anything else. It’s like buying a light bulb guaranteed not to light up. So why not just turn off all that extraneous crap?
Now we get firmly into psychology. Of course you can turn off all that, not respond to interruptions, not receive interruptions, and stay away from everything digital which isn't writing. But enough of us don’t that people are making machines which don’t do things on purpose and selling them to writers like us. I will mention a few of them.
The Alphasmart Neo and all it’s relatives. This little gadget, no longer in production, was intended to compete with early laptops for elementary students, teaching them how to type, which is now called keyboarding, and how to write without paper. They didn't cost nearly as much as a laptop at the time.
They were nearly indestructible, and did only one thing: Write. It is a keyboard with a memory, period. You get stuff out of it by connecting it by USB to a computer. The computer thinks it’s keyboard and allows it to dump it’s contents one character at a time just as though you were typing it yourself, real fast, into whatever software you had open which would take keyboard input, such as an editor or a word processor.
These things are not made any more. They lost out to laptops and ceased production about 2013 if I remember right. Some people are trying to build and sell a substitute, with of course much newer technology, and a correspondingly higher price.
Neos are available used on the internet for $150 or more dollars now. I bought mine for $20 before distraction free writing became trendy. I use mine all the time, it goes in the backpack and the results can be downloaded later and edited, spellchecked, typeset, and so on to my heart’s delight after the creative part has been done.
Battery life: Three AA cells will go a year. You don’t ever worry about charging the thing. Don’t give a single thought to rechargeable batteries, battery chargers or any extras at all except one.
You need a USB cable with the standard computer plug on one end and a square plug on the other that was usually called a printer cable.
In fact, by reversing the cable end to end you can connect the Neo to a computer directly and it will print. I didn't believe it either, but it did. But I digress.
A wonderful journey into the past. Legible type, clean, and easily readable. But there are some fundamentals to consider. Typewriters are in the handwriting branch of tools for journaling in that the output they produce is not searchable, and for the most part uneditable. I use blank paper punched for a binder. It looks good. It’s one of the several ways I journal. I can move pages around, add pages, delete pages, but not much else. Moving material from a position on the page to another place on the page or to another page requires either retyping it or scissors and paste. I can’t use scissors mainly because I can’t spell it. I make a mess with paste.
The temptation to edit comes with the later typewriter models, the electric ones towards the end of the last century. They had spellers that beeped at you when they decided that you had misspelled a word, beeps when you approached the right margin, and correction features involving other spools of white powder which would very cleverly overwrite your mistake.
These later-day typewriters had memory in them, nothing like a computer but they could remember short passages. Learning to use this memory is quite frustrating. That means I never could figure it out, or remember what I had figured out once in the past.
Electric memory typewriters have always been proprietary to a fault. Getting data into and out of one of them remains a feat I have never accomplished. They were competing with each other and would not provide any way to use their data outside of their own equipment. If you bought one of these things, you were a business, and you had the money to purchase all the peripherals. The extra add-ons are no longer available. It takes a lot more perseverance to get and keep one of those multi-part assemblages running that it does to just journal.
This got worse as typewriters went on to become stand alone word processor which had a separate monitor and keyboard and used proprietary floppy disks, also unavailable and forever locked to the machine they were designed for.
So with a simple manual or electric typewriter you get a journal that you can easily read, and that anyone else can easily read but which can not easily be edited or even sorted. Still, if the idea of a typewriter appeals to you, it isn't going to be functionally much different from handwriting, except for the obvious fact that you can’t take it with you when you go somewhere else to write.
I actually did that once and I do mean once. I carried my portable typewriter into the coffee shop. It wasn't well received by the other patrons. They were very polite about it, Missoula is that kind of town, but it was obvious that this wasn't going to work in public and I never did it again. But it is to be noted that I am this minute using a mock typewriter to write this, so something on an emotional level is still happening, which may be age-related. My age, I mean, not the equipment’s age.
So typewriters are a high-maintenance way of journaling that might be a lot of fun but which in themselves don’t make a better job of journaling.
That’s the way to go, I think. They don’t need to cost much, they go with you everywhere, they don’t make a nuisance of themselves in public, and they are ubiquitous. Half of everyone in a coffee shop is looking at one of them. Now that we have batteries, we don’t need line cords tangled on the floor tripping people carrying coffee and pastries past our table.
We used to. Once upon a time, I had laptops, or portable computers, with floppy drives. They do the same job of journaling as the most expensive game machine super expensive computer you can buy today. I want to make that perfectly clear. You might have many reasons for wanting the latest, fastest, and most expensive computer out there but it won’t help you journal any better than some clunker you bought on the internet that is 20 years old.
You will of course have to deal with the distractions, but having an old beater might help with that if you can find one so slow and limited that it won’t run a browser.
And the big advantage to laptop computers, of course, is that you can get your writing off of the laptop and into an editor for further processing, filing, storage, backing up, and so on.
All the stuff you have ever written digitally is searchable. And you can do this without special software or equipment of any sort. Nothing need be proprietary.
And of course you can use any laptop of any vintage that supports some sort of connection to something else, like an internet connection or a USB port with a flash drive poked into it. Generally speaking, you don’t want your stuff trapped on the laptop, but other than that you can use anything.
Journaling on a computer requires very little computer power, the old ones work exactly as well as the new ones. The most important thing, to me, is the keyboard. You have to be able to type on it accurately for a period of time. But having the right keyboard is also an invitation to much dispute and I leave it for another time. It belongs in the same category as the kind of pen you write with. It will be considered by others, somewhere else.
Tablets are sort of a special case of laptops, and overlap them in many ways.
Computers come in all shapes and sizes. I have watched people with a bluetooth keyboard type into a smart phone. The same arrangement with a keyboard and a stand that you can put your tablet in is even sold as an item.
You just prop up the screen somehow and type away on your wireless keyboard. It works as well for journaling as anything else, if you can see that well and like the keyboard. You still have the distraction problems and the tablet will word process just like it’s bigger relations if you aren't firm with it about that, so be sure not to go down that rabbit hole while you are trying to be creative.
I can’t see using the keyboard built into the smart phone. If you are that good with your thumbs, so be it, but I have never wanted to even try to write anything much on a smart phone. I need a lot more speed and comfort when I write. Fat fingers, poor eyesight.
Chrome books are laptops for the purpose of journaling. You can type stuff into something and then get it out later. Some folks can deal with Google. I can’t, but that’s just me. A lot of journaling is done in Google Docs and Google Drive. Distractions abound in that setup, but if you have the emotional make-up to handle them, you can journal very well on a Chrome book using Google apps.
Software programs to help you journal, programs which encourage you to journal, programs of all sorts and all prices. I won’t have anything to do with any of them. Not at all. They will not exist on my machine. I don’t even want spell checkers when I journal, much less all the other “features” these helper journaling programs have.
They seem to me to be for the folks who have a lot of money and think that they can buy their way into journaling. They think they want to journal but they really don’t. They hope somehow that the program will write their journal for them. Sorry, my children, it doesn't work that way. The fun of journaling is exactly what the apps promise to remove from your journaling experience.
The simplest editor you can find is the one you want to use to journal. Think of a digital replacement for a pen. You just want the words on the page. You do not want them styled, spelled, sized, dotted, listed, or formatted in any but the simplest way. Skipping a line is just about all you ever need for formatting. If you want to properly paragraph and format your document, do that later. It’s not part of writing it.
And I said editor, didn't I? Don’t, repeat don’t, use a word processor to journal. Word processing is for formatting for a presentation of some sort. It isn't for creative writing. So stay away from any and all word processors. Whatever you use should store only the letters of the alphabet, numbers, and simple punctuation. Nothing else. Nothing in the file that doesn't show on the page when you type it. Again, remember the pen and paper. That’s what you are trying to duplicate. All you want is the ability to word-process the output sometime in the future, maybe. You don’t want all that complicated junk staring you in the face while you are writing.
I am not going to spend my time trying to remember how to put something in italics. Use the characters on the keyboard. They have served us well for many centuries.
If you digitize your work, you will want to use a filing system. The most important thing about that is the ability to remember what you did. Storing documents is easy. Remembering where you put them is a whole lot harder.
I hope this doesn't lose too many of you.
I store by year, then month, with a journal file for each month in a folder for each year. So I have 12 files per year folder. I have years back to 1980, which is now 45 years. Some of the earlier ones were typed in after the fact from handwritten journals.
This follows from the Dear Diary past, when you had a new diary every year, or every five years. But stored by date, sectioned into years and months seems to me to be the best.
Categories have never worked for me. I can never keep to a single category when I journal. I can never remember the categories that I have set up. I can’t even remember where all the journals with the separate categories are located.
I’ll tell you what I do use: keywords. I write keywords on the top of the handwritten pages and include them in all the digital entries. A keyword can be anything at all that you think you might remember if you ever wanted to look at this entry again. Use your search engine to list all the occurances of the keyword.
And please back the directories up from time to time. You can buy a USB memory chip for $5 that will store everything in the National Archives. Don’t get fancy, you will forget what you did. Just copy the whole journal directory system (All the folders) to the chip and keep the chip in your jewelry box, or wherever. Get the thing out if it’s a new month and copy everything onto it, again, then put it back.
Don’t use a backup program. It has features. You will forget how to use it to restore if that is ever required. The backup program won’t exist on the new computer you get after a few years. You will be stuck with a chip of files that nobody can read.
Just copy the files. The files have only letters of the alphabet in them, no formatting, no fancy fonts, styles, and other proprietary garbage that won’t come out right when you restore your lost files. Stick to text. It has worked for us since cuneiform. It will work for all time to come. It is almost as safe as paper.