A vital part of any writing endeavor is using a journal to generate ideas for future writing projects. Journaling is an active learning process and helps us focus our thoughts to give them meaning when before they were just swimming aimlessly in our heads. Keeping a journal also gives us a place to record our observations and our memories before life becomes too fast to remember the little moments that once brought us joy. The reasoning for recording writing in a notebook is not new. Long before creative writing classes and the use of journals in these classes, field notebooks or records were vital tools for scientists making observations in biology, sociology, and anthropology. In nursing and social work, diaries were also used during internships to record personal growth and student observations.

Magazine recordings date back to 56 AD China, while in the Western world, journaling became a common practice during the Renaissance, when the image of the self became important. In 10th-century Japan, court ladies used pillow books (so named because they were kept in the bedroom or between wooden pillow drawers) to record their dreams and thoughts through poetry and pictures. Travelers in both the East and the West used diaries to record their travels, although the Eastern writers integrated more images and poetry into their annotations than the Western explorers who declared the facts and details of the places and people they encountered. British sea explorers, such as James Cook and William Bligh, whose records were later published, recorded their observations, provided an accurate record of events for their chain of command, and recorded important navigational knowledge for other naval captains.

Samuel Pepys, who wrote his famous diary between 1660 and 1669, is believed to have been the first chronicler. Not only did he examine current events, but he had access to many of these events as he was a high-ranking civil servant. He used generous detail when describing the people he met and also tried to remedy his past sins by writing about how he could have done things differently. In Europe and America during the 18th and 19th centuries, diaries were published in record numbers and writers influenced by the romantic era and individualism recorded their reflections and feelings.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, journals became vital tools in process writing classes for recording free writing, brainstorming notes, and notes on research and topic construction. Outside of the writing classroom, the journal is also used to gain insight into spiritual quests, while a large number of women use journals to record their thoughts, feelings, and observations and to write against and through their inner critic. The diary is also a vital tool in psychotherapy, so that patients can record their thoughts before their appointments and thus speed up the treatment time.

Journaling often focuses on people who are working on a problem and need the space to develop their thoughts. Writer and teacher Ken Macrorie likes a journal as a “hotbed” that needs watering and time to grow into mature work. He states: “Keeping a journal forces the writer to put something in the sock every day. Often, when he checks what’s out there, he sees materials that fit and build.” Toby Fulwiler, another professional writer and scholar, claims that a journal sits in the middle of the continuum between a journal and a notebook that he would keep for a class. It states that the language in a journal should be kept informal and that the writer should use the first person, so that he or she reflects personally on a topic and does not use other sources that take it away from the material. Fulwiler also mentions that a “good” magazine should contain observations, questions (and more questions than answers), speculation, self-awareness, digression, synthesis, review, and information. Also, the writer should make frequent entries, and these entries should take up some space on the page so that more thoughts and speculations can be captured.

Today we have diaries to record our vacations, our dreams, and our goals. Like history magazines, we should think of our magazines as a way for future generations to see what we were struggling with at the time and know that their dilemmas are not far from ours.