Putting your thoughts into words is difficult, especially since we humans do not usually think in words. The smell of wood smoke, or of grass, for example, can be so...well...what exactly? "Evocative" is a word that comes to mind but evocative of what and why does it evoke this "what" in the first place?
On reflection, it seems to me that scent can stimulate early emotional responses that have no exact place in time. Perhaps the scent was living in the brain in the manner of a window left open to an emotional past. It can be moving and disturbing at the same time and something writers may want to tap in to from time to time. But it takes thought and plenty of revision to produce effective descriptions of emotional responses like the one given above. Writing diaries, on the other hand, can and should be much more immediate, more raw and instinctive. Why is this?
Well, perhaps it is because diaries are not usually written in order to be read. I have written "not usually" because diaries tend to be written in order to make sense of a situation, not to any reader but to the writer. Because of this, there is no need to punctuate correctly or even get verb tenses right. Nor do ideas need to be elegantly expressed. The resulting entries may therefore be described by the word "raw" and this rawness does not need perfection of form. But it does have power.
Diarists are writers too - in the sense that they write - but it is the process of writing itself that differentiates the novelist from the diarist. It is in the process of writing, this movement of pen between hand and fingers across the empty page, that can expose a thought or a feeling that has been lying dormant and is brought to life by putting a word to it so that it has spontaneity, a heartbeat and a soul.
I haven't seen any figures, but I would guess that the writing of diaries has increased since the beginning of the Corona virus outbreak. Perhaps, because many of us are looking for ways to make sense of the pandemic, private writings are searching for ways to guide writers in their "doings and thinkings" and helping them discover how they should react. In a nutshell, writing about a situation can help us understand how we feel about it. By touching our feelings, we can attach words to them, words like fearful, anxious or afraid, and this can help us measure our responses to an unusual situation and do it in a raw and creative way and not in the controlled way of the novelist.
No wonder, then, that several of my own recent blogs concern the current pandemic and no wonder that the following diaries are still very popular so many years after they were written. They give a real and human insight into a particular time or event in History.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
Journals: Captain Scott's Last Expedition
Conversations With Myself
Nelson Mandela
A Journal of the Plague Year
Daniel Defoe.
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