Joan Didion’s essay on notebooks opens with a stranger in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper.
“That woman Estelle,” the note reads, “is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today.” Dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper, hotel bar, Wilmington RR, 9:45 a.m. August Monday morning.
Joan Didion copied that line in a hotel bar in Wilmington, Delaware, and years later she could not fully say why she had. She did not know the woman, and she could not explain what use the note might have. The Joan Didion notebook was full of scraps exactly like this one, and in “On Keeping a Notebook” she turns that small mystery into the best short argument I know for why an ordinary person should keep a journal. What follows are eight lessons I pulled from her notebook, each with a line in her own words and something you can try tonight. She sits comfortably among the others who filled notebooks their whole lives, but she may be the only one who wrote the manual.
1. Joan Didion’s Notebook Was Never About the Facts
Most people abandon a journal because they think it is supposed to be a record. What did I do today, who did I see, what did we decide. Didion set that idea aside on the first page.
So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.
A diary reports events. A notebook, in her sense, catches the things events leave behind: an overheard line, a color, a feeling you cannot place yet. That is a lower bar and a more forgiving one, and it is why her notebooks survived when a dutiful daily log would have died by February. If a blank, ruled page still intimidates you, a loose structure to start from helps, but the permission underneath it is Didion’s: you are not filing a report.
Try this: Tonight, write down one thing you noticed today that had nothing to do with your schedule. A phrase, a smell, the way the light did something. Do not explain it. Just get it on the page.
2. Write Down How It Felt, Not What Happened
Didion pushed the point further. The value of an entry, she decided, was not its accuracy but its charge.
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.
She admitted she often could not verify her own entries and did not care to. What she wanted back was the emotional weather of a moment, the thing a photograph misses. Later in the essay she says it even more plainly:
Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
This is the quiet reason journaling works when it works. You are not building an archive for a biographer. You are keeping a line open to a self who will otherwise vanish.
Try this: Take an ordinary thing that happened this week and write two sentences about how it felt, not what occurred. Skip the facts entirely. See whether the feeling is sharper on the page than it was in your head.
3. Every Entry Gives You Away
Here is the twist that makes the essay honest. Didion admits she liked to pretend her notebook was about other people, the woman in the wrapper, the strangers in bars. It never was.
Our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”
She returned to this in “Why I Write”, where she notes that the three words of that title, borrowed from George Orwell, “share a sound, and the sound they share is this: I I I.” Writing, for her, was “the act of saying I.” Your notebook is doing the same thing whether you mean it to or not. What you choose to notice is a portrait of who was doing the noticing.
Try this: Reread an old entry and underline every judgment, every adjective, every thing you decided to record instead of something else. That underlined layer is you. It is more revealing than any “Dear Diary” confession.
4. Notebook-Keepers Are “A Different Breed”
If you have ever felt slightly odd for wanting to write things down that no one asked for, Didion has your back. She thought the impulse was a specific temperament.
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
That is not a flattering self-portrait, and she meant it half as a joke and half as a diagnosis. But naming the type is oddly freeing. You do not keep a notebook because you are disciplined or optimized. You keep one because you are the sort of person who cannot let a good detail go by unrecorded, the same reason Susan Sontag, another compulsive list-keeper, covered a hundred notebooks in fragments and inventories. It is a temperament, not a chore.
Try this: Stop trying to journal “properly.” For one week, write only the things you already feel a pull to save. Notice how much easier the habit is when you stop performing it.
5. Collect the Images That Shimmer
Didion described her raw material as pictures that stood out from the rest. In “Why I Write” she put it this way:
Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop.
Some of what she collected went nowhere. Some of it grew into whole essays; the title piece of her 1968 collection reported on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in 1967. A notebook is where you keep the shimmering images long enough to find out which ones matter. Emerson mined his notebooks for finished essays the same way, and Thoreau logged what he noticed on the same walks for decades. You are not wasting a page when you record something with no obvious use. You are making a deposit.
Try this: Start a running “shimmer list” at the back of your journal. When an image snags your attention for no reason, add one line. Do not judge it. Revisit the list in a month and see which ones still glow.
6. Joan Didion’s Notebook Kept Her in Touch With Herself
This is the heart of the essay, and the reason it belongs on a site about building a journaling habit. Didion argues that the real audience for your notebook is the person you will become.
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Then the line that could be the motto for this whole site:
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.
A notebook is a letter to your future self, and the future self is the one who benefits. Virginia Woolf reread her own diary across twenty-six years and watched her mind change on the page. You do not need decades. A year is enough to make an old entry feel like a message from someone you half-recognize.
Try this: Date every entry, and once a week reread one you wrote at least a year ago. If you do not have a year of entries yet, that is the reason to start tonight.
Before: a drawer of half-filled notebooks you never open again. After: a record you actually return to, one that hands you back a version of yourself you had forgotten. The bridge is small and repeatable, which is the only kind that lasts. I send a short email about exactly this – one idea from the history of journaling and one thing to try in your own notebook that week. Subscribe and I will start you off with the 6-Step Guide to Getting Started with Journaling. You can sign up here.
7. Go Back to Page One (The Case for Rewriting)
A notebook does not have to be precious, and Didion’s own working method proves it. Long after the notebook stage, when she was drafting a book, she rebuilt her pages by hand every single day. She described the routine in her 2006 Paris Review interview:
Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have… At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done… so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past that blank terror.
Retyping was not busywork. It was how she got back into the rhythm of the thing and past the fear of the empty page. The lesson for a journal-keeper is that your words are not carved in stone the moment they land. Rereading, recopying, and rewriting an entry is not cheating. It is often where the real thinking happens. As she said elsewhere, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.”
Try this: Take one messy entry and copy it out again slowly, changing whatever wants to change as you go. Notice what you understand at the end that you did not understand at the start.
8. The Habit Outlasts the Words
Didion kept arranging words on paper for her whole life, through every kind of weather. After her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly in 2003, she wrote The Year of Magical Thinking. She told the Paris Review that retyping was especially important for this book because so much of it depended on echo. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
I raise it carefully, and only to make one point. The value was never in any single entry. It was in the practice of putting the world into words, kept up over decades until it became the way she met her own life, including the parts no one would choose. A habit that survives that long is not a productivity trick. It is a way of staying in touch with yourself when almost nothing else holds.
Try this: Stop measuring your journal by whether today’s entry was any good. Measure it by whether you showed up. The showing up is the whole asset.
Keeping In Touch
I went into “On Keeping a Notebook” looking for a famous writer’s secret and came out with something plainer and more useful: a notebook is not a record of your days, it is a way of staying on nodding terms with who you were. That is a low bar and a lifelong one. Didion herself could not always explain why one detail earned a page and another did not, and she wrote the manual.
If you want a fuller picture of why the habit is worth the trouble, the documented benefits of the habit are a good next stop. But you do not need to be convinced to begin. You need a page and one honest line about how today felt.
And if you would like a little company in the habit, that is what my newsletter is for – short, no fluff, one idea and one thing to try. You can subscribe here, and the 6-Step Guide to Getting Started with Journaling comes with it.
Featured image: Joan Didion in Los Angeles, 1970. Kathleen Ballard, Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection, UCLA Library (source); CC BY 4.0. Cropped, resized, and compressed from the original; sRGB preserved.
