journals, diaries

I used to keep a writing journal which I typed in intermittently, as a place for brainstorming story ideas and so forth, so that all my shit would be in one place, but it degenerated into constant haranguing at myself for writing about writing instead of actually writing.

So to answer the last question, it's truth about fiction, by and large.

For some reason, I always thought diaries and journals were a bit pretentious - like "Oh, my thoughts are so great they need to go down on paper." I still don't really get it, but these days I'm not a sanctimonious prick about what other people do.

I've kept paper diaries for years. Good catharsis, it is. It gets depressing when you read old entries and find you go over the same shit all the time tho...

And then theres Livejournal which is sucking all the creative marrow out of anything I do... (thats my excuse, I'm sticking to it!).

I have of course stopped writing properly due to work hell but still have a paper diary I write in when I'm not absolutely knackered. Recent topics have included me beating myself up about not being a good friend, me beating myself up about beating myself up too much, me beating myself up for whining and whining about not having a GBA SP/Dreamcast/PS2/more energy ect ect. It is very mas0ch1stic. It is good for me in that when I read over what I've written I can see how ridiculous I'm being, but bad for me because it reinforces my negative ways of thinking. It's recently alerted me to being a really harsh and cynical person in the face of other peoples issues - I am jealous that they get attention for showing that they're broken and cut myself off so they won't affect me which quite frankly - is cnutish.

Haha ILE is my new journal!!

"Dear ILE yesterday I had some EG on BRED it was num".

"Dear ILE whilst I was playing myself at Scrabble the other day I did two bingos VIZ! "WINGERs" and "SUICIDEs". ROCK!

I tried to keep one this year, just so I could remember stuff like where I went and what CD's I bought, the last entry is 19th January. Oh dear.

Here is the sort of thing I write:
"Oh no! I forgot to write for the last two days. They weren't very interesting days, so nevermind"

I don't try to write daily I just use it to write down anything I find interesting. Maybe mine is more of notes on things I do or think instead of an actual account of what I did.

LiveJournal's different. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the set-up encourages drama incidentally; seventy-something people read mine, and I only knew a third of them before they started reading. Politics come up easily in that sort of atmosphere, it's more like a message board.

I hadn't realised it was such a problem, though. It must get in the way of how you really want to express your views, but then as soon as one chooses to make anything public, a kind of inverse Heisenberg's uncertainy principle comes into effect, viz as soon as you know there's an audience, it'll inevitably change what you write. It's something I'm no closer to finding a cure for.

I'm making that example up, unfortunately.

But yeah, you can avoid the politics, in my experience. Might be tougher if you have friends who participate in them and you don't want to alienate/exclude them, I don't know.

I can sing a few bars of that. My journal starts with a comment about forcing myself to write 500 words every day, followed by two ~3,000 chunks of short story, then nothing. I haven't touched it in months.