I write every day in one I call My Main Journal. It has dated pages and is a midsize book. In it I write pretty much whatever I want to write. I react to people and events in it. I express anger, pleasure, gratification, astonishment, etc. I have kept that journal now for fifty-two years.
I have one I call a One-liner. In it, I enter a single line. It is a dated journal, but not associated with any year. When I look at January 1, I see entries from 1996, 1997, 1998, etc. Typical entries: I see the first robin of the season and Finally complete the big history of the Depression.
I have a Gratitude Journal. I make frequent entries, sometimes as often as twice a day identifying one way I feel grateful. Typical entry: I am grateful to have been born after the invention of Novocaine.
I write maybe once a week in a Moments Journal. I remember an important moment in my life. I write a full page, perhaps three hundred words leading up to the moment. The last few sentences are always descriptions of the feelings I had in the moment.
Of course, I have a Vocabulary Journal. Each entry is a word I would like to sock down deep in my memory, make it part of my active vocabulary. Each entry is a date – maybe the only necessary element of any entry in any journal – the word, the type of word it is, an adverb, for example, and the definition. I reread the entire journal periodically.
I have a People Journal. In it, I write the name of one person in my life and then a brief entry about who that person is and how she has participated in my life.
I have a large format journal, my Diagramming Sentences Journal. Typically, I will find a good complex sentence drawn from a non-modern source because so few writers are interested in complex sentences anymore. Dickens is good. So is the Federalist Papers. I write down the sentence at the beginning of the entry and then I dissect the sentence is excruciating detail. Some sentence analyses go on for eight or ten pages. The journal has blank pages. I like to use colored pens and my own rules rather than the formally proscribed rules of analysis.
A journal that I have completed, which means I simply ran out of pages, is one I call my Tens Journal. In it I make lists of tens. Some are superlative lists as in The Best, The Worst, My favorite, etc. Others are just the first ten things that occur to me for a specific category. Examples: Ten countries I have no plans of ever visiting, Ten movies I have seen more than twice, Ten weird foods I have eaten, etc.
I have started another small format journal I call my Fours Journal. In it I keep lists of sets of four: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. John, Paul, George, and Ringo. I have identified perhaps fifty such sets and am not expecting to find many more.
One of my favorite journals is one I call My Lists of 100 Things Journal. In it I propose to write a lists of one hundred things. 100 red things in my life. 100 successes. 100 things I love about my wife. My daughter Phoenix once moaned that the only thing she was good at was soccer. I told her that I could name more than a hundred things that she was good at. I stopped at one hundred and five. These I printed in a large format, put in a frame and hung on the wall. You wouldn’t think you could complete a list of 100 people I need to forgive me something, but I have never started a 100s list without completing it. There is even a list of 100 topics to write lists of one hundred about. Writing entries in this journal flips my mind into an unusual orientation, an openness. Usually, at about number eighty, I hit on a zinger and wonder why it took me so long to find it. The only rule is that the list must be completed in one sitting, typically an hour and a half. Repeats are okay.
Of course, I have one journal each for my three children.
I have a Sex Journal, in which I wrote at tedious length about who I am sexually. No one sees that one, why I am uncertain of.
Similarly, I have a Dream Journal. I don’t share that with anyone because other people’s dreams are tedious.
After completing my Tens Journal, I have set out to complete my 10,000 Memories Journal. It is what it sounds like. The entries are frequently brief and I will be working on it for several years.
I have what I call working journals. They are usually dedicated to specific projects like a series of articles I want to write, stories I am working on, etc. The journal I take to my photo class qualifies as a working journal. I have two journals in which I write what amount to notes for an autobiography. I write about events in my life, what they meant to me, and how they shaped me.
I have a journal with no title in which words are prohibited. Only undated drawings appear in it.
I have a Coincidences Journal. I collect instances of unexpected connections I have with people. For example: My best friend and I ate at the Macaroni Grill for many years. There we built a friendship with one of the servers. That server went to Denison College in Ohio. One of her friends there is my god daughter, whose mother knew Adele and me before Adele and I met and has also worked with my best friend’s wife. Weird, huh. In this large format lineless journal I try to fit together as many coincidences as I can in a single scheme.
In My Concerns journal I enter lists of what is absorbing my interest on the day of the entry, which I make about once a month. Concerns can be trivial, such as seeing Infinity Wars with my nephews, or significant, as in making strategic decisions about how I want to become more involved with The Minnesota Peace Project. Both claim a slice of the churning of my mind and so have similar psychological dimensions even as they have different scales of impact on me or my world.
I keep a Death Journal, in which I write messages to people who survive me. I record the things in my life that I hope don't get lost when I pass, like my autograph of J. R. R. Tolkien. I have described what I would like to see happen at my funeral, not that I would care anymore. I list things that my survivors ought to know about my house and my finances. Mostly though, it is a personal book, one in which I follow Montaigne’s instructions about the importance of preparing for death.
I have a large format lineless Geometry Journal in which I work out geometric solutions, such as the construction of a pentagon. I use lots of colorful pens because the designs are pretty. To support that exploration, I use a little book called Ruler and Compass.
I have a Preferences Journal. It is a long list of preferences: I prefer broccoli to cauliflower. I prefer red M&Ms to blue M&Ms. I prefer the Pierce Brosnan James Bond to the Sean Connery James Bond. The contents of that journal can be found in this website under the Preferences tab.
Here's a bibliography of good books on journaling that I have learned from:
· Journal to the Self* by Kathleen Adams
· The New Diary* by Tristine Rainer
· The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
· Life’s Companion by Christina Baldwin
· Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
· Creative Journal Writing by Stephanie Dowrick
*On everybody’s lists of best books about keeping a journal