Defining "The Diary"

Diary Entry - 6/21/24

It’s a Friday in June and I’m away at a summer camp. The word “camp” isn’t entirely accurate as I’m staying in a dorm on the eighth floor of a residence hall on the east side of campus, but the attitude and social environment may as well be equivalent. The area is humid, and therefore greener than I anticipated. The food is better than what I eat at home, and just a fifteen minute walk away is a small cafe-bookstore where framed pictures covering the walls hint that Obama once visited there. I decided on my first day that I liked this amalgamation of a shop. I also decided that because everyone else at camp ordered iced coffee that I had to order it as well. At home, I usually order hot cocoa and lie that it’s a latte, but this isn’t an option as writers never drink anything above room temperature. These writers also don’t go to the cafe to procrastinate on work, or to use the Wifi and 5G service to stream ape documentaries.

It’s Friday, our last workshop for the week is in just under an hour, and my whole class is sitting around a mesh of tables they’ve dragged together at the center of the cafe. I sit with them, between my two best-friends who I only met two days ago, and type idly on my computer. I’m working on a letter for today's workshop. The idea is to write a letter to the author, pointing out areas worthy of praise and of improvement. I didn’t like this story. I write my opening sentence, then spam the delete button, and repeat. I have this horrible habit of writing “stunted sentences”, empty statements on whether something is good or bad, whether a character hates or loves something. I don’t like it when I do this because it doesn’t flow. I need to have reasoning to make a claim, a rule that applies as firmly to argumentative essays as to literary fiction. However, sometimes I cling to hope that one of these stunted statements will convey the quick and unsolicited way that our emotions and opinions sneak up on us, rather than just being a red X to mark my inexperience. 

It’s 1:55 PM and the sun beats down on the pavement outside the window. The cafe-bookshop is strangely placed between a Mongolian take-out kitchen and an Irish bar that remains decorated like it’s St. Patricks day even now, smack dab in the middle of a midwestern summer. I hear shouts from the sidewalk where I can almost picture a drunken man stumbling into the construction signs, and shouting his complaints like an auctioneer suffering from tourettes. It’s worth noting that my classmates have been eagerly engaging in conversation this entire time. 

Plato’s The Republic sits on the table, the pages parted by large slabs of Post-its. “For the people who have been in the cave,” one boy says, “there is no possible way for them to understand what someone from the outside has to say.” 

My phone dings with a text notification. “Hey”, it reads. I put it back down on the table. 

I click through my open tabs, stopping at my voice notes. I’ve taken to recording each class and reading, for the sake of getting the most out of my family's money. It’s bad enough I’m at a writing camp rather than one for coding robots or something equally money-making. The red dot grows and shrinks on my screen, a sign that I forgot to stop recording and have since been documenting our entire lunch like a complete weirdo.

An entry in my notebook. 6/25/24

At this point, or maybe a couple hundred words ago, I should have introduced the topic of this “blog post”, a form of writing I have never tried before. I’m including that this is my first attempt so that you might feel some pity for me, as I spent days compiling all I know on niche subjects of research, such as the Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis, just to throw it all to the wind.

I want to talk about something that requires much less research: the diary. Despite the label of the prior section being “Diary Entry” I don’t keep one in the traditional sense. I do have a notebook, but it’s full of short fiction, poetry, random quotes from strangers on the street, and definitions for words that if I used more often would make me sound a whole lot smarter. It is rare that I sit down and write about my personal life, but I did on Friday, June 21st, 2024, while away at a writing camp. I reworked it a bit to be included here as the original(while more true to my feelings in the moment) was a little too sappy to be made available through Google search, and under my legal name. 

Diaries have been kept for all of human history, as long as we’ve kept records we’ve been driven to immortalize what we had for breakfast. They’ve become a staple of adolescence, where we keep secrets and questions about the world. They can be hilarious too. When I was in fifth grade, I read the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books more fervently than my mother reads the bible. As I said before, I don’t think I keep a diary. I’m not sure I know what makes a diary a diary. When I was in third grade I kept daily logs where I recorded everything that happened throughout the day in neat bullet points with time stamps. I thought that was a diary. 

Here I want to ask that exact question: what makes a diary? Is it an art form for the purpose of processing our personal struggles as they occur, or is it a time capsule of ourselves made purely for the sake of being memorabilia? The definition must differ from person to person, but there also must be a way to identify the most accurate and universal definition. 

In writing classes, the word diary is best avoided, instead it’s replaced with “commonplace notebooks”, and “field journals”. In all fairness, these are kept with specific goals, and as a collection of exercises from which to improve, far different from the diary I assumed everyone else easily wrote to as a kid. I think what differs the diary from the writer's notebook is the aforementioned idea of privacy. Keruac’s notebooks have been published globally to be studied by “angsty” teenagers disillusioned by society, likewise with many other famous authors. Most of the people in the writing classes I’ve been to search in their notebooks, and supplicate to find something worth becoming the next great novel. So a diary must be the antithesis of this, it must be private. And it must not be an exercise or source of inspiration.

Jack Kerouac. Diary / Whole Year of 1936. 1/19-22/1936

If a diary is intended to never be read, and not to purposefully improve, what does that say of its quality and contents? I suppose quality differs based on the writer's educational history, which brings up all kinds of questions about whether writers or scientific researchers will ever be capable of this medium. Maybe my attempt to define a diary will ruin my chances of ever getting to have one. The contents can not be analyzed, any attempt would go against its freeform and effortless nature. And it should be an effortless stream of consciousness. I think the only rule on content should be that a diary remains honest. Not honest in the objective sense, but honest to the writers’ perspective. A diary is a true document of events as they affect the writer. I think this is what confused me when I began my daily logs. I wanted to keep them so that I could look back and remember the events of my life, but not who I was. I think a diary is a record of the person and not the events. 

Okay, so now that I’ve ripped to shreds the fun and humorous idea of writing “Dear Diary,” and subsequently pouring out our darkest secrets; how would I tell my younger self to write a diary? I would tell him to learn how to not give a shit, and write whatever he wants.