9 Reasons Why People Don’t Write it Down

Sharpening Your Saw: Body, Mind, and Heart

After writing the last post, Write it Down! I thought about people who don’t like to write in diaries, notebooks, or journals. As a researcher and diary scholar, I was curious about the resistance; therefore, I decided to investigate why people resist keeping a diary, despite its benefits.

Here are a few reasons.

1. During a FaceTime chat with my 22-year-old daughter, she said, diaries are a place to vent, and she complains to herself all the time; therefore, she doesn’t want to keep a tangible record of venting. She doesn’t want to reread those thoughts and get angry all over again.
2. A student in my classroom, starting the project called “Ongoing Diary, Journal, and Notebooks.” She said, “I’ll keep a diary for the grade, but you can have it when I’m done. I don’t want to read what I’ve written down.”
3. Even novelist Zadie Smith refuses to keep a diary although she has attempted to keep a diary and has read several diaries. For her, it’s a miasma of non-memory. In an article for Rookie Magazine, she writes: I realize I don’t want any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he progresses along with it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened—and I like it that way. I feel when I am very old and my brain “goes” it won’t feel so very different from the life I live now, in this miasma of non-memory, which, though it infuriates my nearest and dearest, must suit me somehow, as I can’t seem, even by acts of will, to change it (“Life Writing: I don’t want any record of my days”).
4. Writing in a diary requires honest, authentic work, which possesses a mysterious and intimidating power. The power to see yourself on the page is different than looking at yourself in a photo. In a picture you can smile, look happy, on the page your truth spills forth whether it’s anger, bitterness or joy.
5. Some people don’t want to understand their emotions or work through those emotions to help them see life from a different perspective; therefore, they will not write it down.
6. Perhaps, life is just not that interesting. In other words, your own existence is not interesting to you, so you prefer not to write it down because you are not interested in the present but waiting for something to happen.
7. Someone will find it and read it. When writing with the thought of another finding or reading your diary, you’re writing for others, not for the self. The diary’s audience is self, first and always. It comes back to honesty, not writing pretty patterns.
8. Can’t stay consistent with writing because you’re worried about the correct style or the psychological effects of the written word.  Whether writing positive or negative thoughts unwanted memories of your most negative and positive experiences intrude into your thoughts. And it’s possible you’ve avoided thinking about those experiences.
9. Many non-diary-keepers believe the diary is a place to hide and keep secrets. Kathleen Collins refutes this claim, she writes in her diary: “I don’t write to hide from the world. I don’t write to protect myself or so say things I don’t dare say to others. I don’t cater to pamper images of myself as a too sensitive soul for whom the world is too much and the diary her only friends” (Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary, loc. 617).

She keeps a diary, like many others, because something is happening in our lives, “a kind of clarity.” A cementing of life in the here and now.

“If the act of writing is not its own reward then let the diary remain forever unwritten,” (Diary Habit, Cosmopolitan, 1918).

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