Keeping a Diary Doesn’t Really Help You Reach Extradonary Levels of Writing Skills.
This is coming from a person who’s been writing a diary daily for the past 6 years.
I’ll forever love my mom for keeping my room tidy, but I’ll never forgive her for snooping into my diaries (in plural).
In her defense, I have a big cabinet filled with my dairies on display!
I’ve been into this arena of daily-diary-writing long before the self-help craze was mainstream (great, I sound like I’m 70 ).
Research shows that keeping a diary lowers levels of stress along with better prospective memory performance in general. Pretty much everybody who is into self-improvement and organizing their lives comes across the benefits of keeping a diary. Be in the form of morning pages or bullet journals, this is one of those key habits that has been relevant to human-developement.
Also personally it proved to help me:
- Brainstorm ideas more effectively
- Stay organized
- Reduce stress and more self-reflection.
- Achieve more goals.
- Improve your memory and stay creative.
But apart from all these benefits, there’s one prominent aspect of improving your “writing skills” that are associated with diary-writing. Which I’m not so sure about.
Does diary writing reflect your writing skills? It’s tricky.
It sort of does help, but then it also destroys a lot of coordination we are expected as a blogger/ content writer online.
Let me explain.
Not All Diary-Lovers Dream to Become Authors.
I was one of those kids who preferred being alone and spending time on notebooks rather than with actual friends. Looking back, every person I’ve been best friends with as a kid tended to show similar tastes in writing notes.
I specifically had to clarify that before I confess my little to no interest in becoming a writer.
Many people love keeping a diary every single day but do not dream about becoming a writer. I’m not an anti-diary person, I just don’t believe in diary keeping to improve your vocabulary, there’s a difference.
Fundamental Rule Of Diary Goes Against Creative Writing
Do you plan before writing a diary?
If you go through your diary entries, you’d find a trend of unrelated things within a single sentence. Like absolutely unrelated sentences in a way that two things cannot even exist on the same page, let alone in the same paragraph.
Like, there you are writing about your obsession with cigarette butts and the old zeppelin shirt you left in your ex’s apartment, all in a single sentence. And nobody cares about that stuff.
These ways of writing go against the rules of blogging, SEO, as well as content writing in general.
Half-done Aftermath.
Writing, constructing stories, and blogging is a form of personalized art.
Compared to that diary entries could be less of art and more like unfinished aftermath.
Your diary entry of 2018 would make absolute sense to you, but incomprehensible to a stranger who reads it. why? Because the pages are half-written words to the experiences in your head. The words on the pages are just one small portion of the entire story in your head.
Hard-Feelings
Even if the grammar is incorrect, spellings wrong, and handwriting falling off the lines of the page, the content still resonates with you emotionally.
Writing this way on the Internet would create/label a numerical value to what you write, which could be mentally detrimental to your practice.
Ideas Versus Thoughts.
There’s a difference between thoughts and ideas. What you write in your diary on morning pages, they are your unfiltered thoughts. What you see or write on the Internet are your ideas. Ideas can be made presentable, relateable which connect us with others. While your thoughts completely belong to you.
See the difference, right?
In hindsight, there are arguably bloggers, writers, or poets openly presenting their thoughts through their art. Yes. They do. And that’s a courageous thingto do.
But beginning your artistic form of expression on the internet with your candid thoughts can be pretty hard. In this “cancel culture” where you could get banned by a single tweet on the Internet, it’s easy to get dejected and lose your self-worth.
Be bold enough to have your heart-broken, but also have a closure to keep your spirit intact.
Diary writing is one of those habits that work in favor of so many different aspects of our lifestyle. Keeping a diary helps as a habit irrespective of what you do. I almost never miss a day writing a diary before going to bed.
Both keeping a diary and writing online are great skills to aim for. But it remains important to stress the fact that, creative writing and diary-keeping are two different habit sets. And both not always aligned to the same arena.
Artworks based on your ideas whereas the diary goes along the line of unfiltered thoughts.
No matter the creative expression you prefer on the Internet, a painter, musician, a writer, irrespective of art, age, gender, everybody should keep some form of diary writing to let go of your unfiltered thoughts.
