Who is the audience of my journal?

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Jan 9, 2013

I posted this question as a comment* on this Luminosity article, but I guess that was the wrong place for it and I still really want to know what people think. The article says:

It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that a given idea makes sense; it's harder to fool someone else. Writing down an idea automatically engages the mechanisms we use to communicate to others, helping you hold your self-analysis to a higher standard.

I agree! I have definitely seen the benefits of dumping out my thoughts and looking at them.

Here is my problem: I think I may have been over-trained by high school to write for an audience. So, if I'm keeping a journal of my thoughts to look back on later, who is my audience?

If I'm writing as if I'm writing for myself, then my writing won't make any sense to other people. Like, I'll write "but then I saw that the blue civic was there, so I decided to not leave my apartment for the whole evening." This makes perfect sense to me because the significance of the blue civic is pretty accessible in my memory right now. But another person reading it won't be able to follow the causal links. Instead, I can write in a way that another person would understand, and explain everything that wouldn't make sense to someone who isn't me. But then who am I writing for? At this point in the process, I just start feeling weird explaining something that I don't personally need an explanation for in a document that I assume other people aren't going to see and might not even care about if they did. (Like people with personal blogs! They explain things! Why do they assume they have readers?) Or is it a good idea to unpack those weird causal things that are non-obvious to other people each time I encounter them?

But also, writing for yourself with the assumption that no one is going to see your writing brings up security issues? If I'm writing for myself and I have weird, sketchy thoughts that I want to document about my friend, I'm going to write "Joe" because I think of that person as Joe. But if Joe ever finds my writing, he might be horribly upset to find out that I think something bad about him that I haven't talked to him about directly. Which means I need to censor names. But at soon as I start censoring names, then I'm already no longer writing for myself, but for an audience that I'm trying to hide information from. This sounds like a problem because then I'm no longer recording everything and also trying to avoid adding details that give people away. But, overall, I'm writing for an audience again, which brings up all those other audience-related issues I mentioned earlier.

Help! How should I write things?

*Should I delete the old comment?

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RichardKennaway

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How should I write things?

Encrypted, backed up, and moved from computer to computer as circumstances evolve.

Not the main question here, of course, but whatever information you seriously intend to still have around in 10 years, you need to allocate some attention to safeguarding its journey through time.

The comparison that others made to program documentation is another aspect of this. You need to include enough context to ensure that the words still communicate in 10 years time what they mean now. How much of yourself 10 years ago, or whatever timescale you're thinking of, can you remember? What would you wish your earlier selves' journals to contain?

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I try to write my journal for me, about ten years from now. So, I don't spend much time explaining who people are that I know very well, or what my overall situation is -- but I do spend quite some time trying to express mental states, because I know that how I think now differs vastly from my thinking ten years ago, and I expect similar changes into the future.

On the other hand, I've had lots of experience with trying and failing to understand what I've written in programming and mathematics, so I've internalized the fact that future-me might not even understand an explanation of things I think are obvious right now. ymmv.

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I write my journal as though I'm talking to myself in the future. If it's a detail I think I'll forget, I write it down. I have a general rule that I don't show people that journal, simply because I know I'll be less honest if I do.

Technical notes: I make a new document every six months, and I write in it pretty much every other day. Usually I write about my state of mind, examine why I'm feeling whatever it is I'm feeling, and what I did that day. It was originally an attempt to remember things, since I have a notoriously bad memory for dates, events, and the like. The current six-month diary is kept on my computer, password protected. I made it accessible because I don't want minor inconveniences to prevent me from writing in it. The old ones are kept on a flash drive (encrypted, password protected) and I've put it somewhere safe. Six months because three is safer in terms of "if someone steals my computer or something, keeping three months is less information" but its a hassle to get the old versions out, and I use it to monitor how I change over time. A year would be ideal for that, but that's too much information to keep in one place, so I settled for six months.

To the point: Write frequently, and to your future self. Don't make it so accessible that anyone could get to it, but have it accessible enough that you will write in it.

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Well, you are writing for yourself, but you aren't writing yourself right now who has the event readily accessible in memory. Do you think that you will remember why you decided not leave apartment after seeing the blue civic in a week? A month? 5 years? If no, then fill in the details. For censoring, just make sure the file or physical thing is safe, or you can pretend that you are communicating to your future self through some insecure means and need to encrypt it.

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Do you think censoring names will lead to censoring details will lead to incomplete/wrong/skewed records? My current thinking goes "I should note down this weird experience." → "Oh crap, I can't use this person's real name." → "What's a good fake name?" → "Ionoooo, his name is just David. Murr." → end up not writing down anything.

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Initial, symbol, or phrase. Then you can go somewhere else and write down who each of the symbols refers to, but in a different place so that someone would need to find both objects in order to decipher. And then you could encrypt it to be super safe! (and save the encryption key yet somewhere else)

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Thanks, but the kind of thing you described will just make me less inclined to write at all. I think I tend to really strongly associate people with their name; like I don't give anyone nicknames automatically, or something? So having to find fitting nicknames just feels like a huge amount of extra work. Does that ever happen to you? ^_^

I just gave up and started writing (on paper) using real first names under the assumption that most people wouldn't care anyway. I guess I'll see how that goes. ^_^

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I would say that a good heuristic (in my experience) is that you should write it as you would write fiction. In other words, pretend that you are writing it as a story for publication. (Or maybe publication in a very similar alternate universe where the events you were writing about did not actually happen.)

Think about how much information the reader is typicality given in the standard novel that you read. It is a balance between the factors you mentioned. Enough information for readers to know what is going on, without the burden of irrelevant details.

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So do I just start a journal and consider it to be the beginning of a book and then explain all the stuff I haven't explained in it before and then reference it when it comes up again later? Thanks, this is an interesting idea! Though it sounds like a lot of back-story. Do you think of it as fiction that you're trying to make accessible to an audience or more like those cryptic books that put you in the middle of a situation? That pesky "audience" consideration always creeps up on me.

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It depends for me on what my purpose in writing is, when using this technique.

If I'm trying to make sense of a complex process, I draft as though I were writing for someone who had to implement that process. If I'm trying to make sense of my emotions, I draft as though I were writing for my therapist. If I'm trying to make sense of moral judgments, I draft as though I were the various agents experiencing the consequences of particular judgments.

Typically, when I'm done with that process I go back and revise for a general audience and post to my personal blog, but not always.

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When you say "writing for your therapist," does that mean you answer the type of questions your therapist would ask you? In which case, what are those? :)

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No, I mean that I say the kinds of things that I said to my therapist when I was seeing a therapist. She asked me questions as well, but a great deal of her value to me was that she listened to me talk during a period of my life where I was struggling with stuff I didn't feel able to talk about with anyone else.

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