Making a journal

Journaling is about as necessary for me as breathing. The on-paper-with-a-pen (pencil, crayon, color pencil, etc) kind of journaling. It’s something I started doing when I was thirteen years old and has been, with only a few pauses, a constant in my life. Up until about three years ago. That was when I discovered Moleskine notebooks and I developed a sudden and astonishing thing for them. Beyond anything rational, I couldn’t stop touching them, toting them around, opening and closing them, reading about them...everything except writing in them.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I use three of them regularly for various mundane activities. Like my eternal list making and garden planning and as a collection agent for the details I used to scribble on a couple thousand little scraps of paper, which I could never find when I needed to remember something. But for a journal? Wasn’t working. I’ve had a Moleskine journal for three years. In those three years, I’ve written a sum total of 37 pages. Mostly moaning about why I wasn’t writing in my most wonderful Moleskine notebook. Three wasted years!

Well, I read something last week that was like a kick in the pants. The final gist of the article—when something isn’t working, quit doing it. Yeah, but. I wasn’t ready to cast off the Moleskine for which I have an unaccountable obsession. Seriously, it’s a disease. So I thought...well, how about pencils. And pretty drawing pencils and pens and inks. Maybe I could bring some life to the pages of that most wonderful little notebook for which I have that unaccountable obsession.

Nah. Three more pages whining about why I loved the stupid notebook and still wasn’t putting anything in it.

People with pen and paper addictions think in strange and tangled ways.

Finally the words penetrated. When something isn’t working, quit doing it. I had three years of words bottled up and they wanted out. As a remediation, I tucked the lovely, lovely Moleskine out of sight and bought a few 85¢ third grade composition books with cheap pulp paper and I wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote. Filled one up and started a second one. Then a third. Words poured out and it was sort of like cleaning out my brain’s basement and attic and all the rest of its rooms. Oh, the freedom and the joy.

When that itch had been sufficiently scratched I made another list (in a Moleskine, naturally) of what I expect from a journal, what I want from one. Sort of like this:

1) It has to be impermanent and burnable. You don’t even entertain the thought of burning pricey bound books. Or, horrors, ripping pages out.
2) It has to be permanent. Archival quality paper and inks for the pages that I want to survive.
3) It has to be fountain pen friendly. In fact, I don’t even want to consider whether a pen’s ink will bleed through the paper. Which ever pen I grab has to work. Period.
4) The paper has to be thick. Enough of this paper that I can sneeze through.
5) It has to be an open format into which I can add pages like clippings and print-outs (sometimes I do type a journal entry) or collage creations or photographs or recipes, or the odd ticket stub and event program.
6) It has to have easily rearranged pages. I change my mind a lot.
7) It has to be entirely customize-able. Different page formats and designs as the whim requires. I change my mind a lot.
8) It has to be fun. Enjoyable. A place for me to relax, do the daily mind dump, create, play, try new things, remember the old.

Three words: Loose leaf notebook.

Like this

The next issue—what kind of paper to put in it? I selected Southworth 100% cotton, 32# ivory paper. It’ll outlive the next six generations. In theory, anyway. It’s thick stock and accepts fountain pens and markers and gel pens and colored pencils and just about anything I can throw at it. The paper’s finish is smooth and my fountain glides across it. Yum!

For a little personalization, to start things off on the right foot, I designed the journal pages so that I’d have plenty of writing room, yet lots of structure and white space. Unfortunately, without lines on a page, I write uphill and downhill. So, I made a template and laser printed out pages like this:

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I added some color with Crayola Twistables Colored Pencils and Gelly Roll gel pens.

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This is a detail of one page where I used the Gelly Roll metallic gels.

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Because I change my mind a lot, the newer pages may look entirely different. But that’s the point. This journal is flexible. I can make it whatever I want. Whenever I want. In the back of the binder are a few clear sleeves to stick things in, a few grid pages for diagrams, some acid-free/lignin-free 65# card stock on which to make collages. And a few blank pages on which to do whatever.

As much as I love Moleskine notebooks (OH, I do!), they can’t do all that. Instead of trying to force it, I finally quit trying to make something work that wasn’t. I love my new journal. It does everything I want: it will keep everything I want; will let me get rid of that which I don’t want to keep; allows for mistakes without messing up the entire book; gives me flexibility to experiment and Change My Mind; lets me write, write, write; lets me use lots of color; lets me be creative or not, depending on the day; lets me switch the order of stuff around; lets the journal grow with me. By the end of the year, I’ll have transferred the contents over to a 3” binder and it’ll live happily on the bookshelf, to be pulled off and examined now and then.

The journal will outlive me by several life times and, maybe, someday one of my descendants will get some enjoyment from it, too. I think I’ve finally hit the age where leaving something behind, more than just a gory collection of introspection, is very appealing.

I remember, after my parents died, sorting through their desk. One of the most delightful caches that my brother and I found was a bundled set of papers my mother had saved and tucked away from back in the Great Depression years. Little mundane grocery lists where a loaf of bread was 10¢ and a pork chop was 5¢. In one of her weekly budgets, she noted in the margin that since they’d already used up their $1 of gasoline for the car for the week—their friends were coming over to sit in the car out in front of the house. Just to talk and have fun, sort of like a front porch.

Those are details that we wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t kept the bundle of papers. Stuff that we routinely throw out. Those are the details of life that add flavor and paint mental pictures. That’s what I want to do, too. For me, for the lad, for his children and maybe his grandchildren. He likes the idea, too. Life is short, 100% cotton paper lives on.