1. Writing your own personal story. Maybe you'll get famous (even if only for 15 minutes) and need to write your autobiography later...and you already have a start on it!

2. A record of when things happened. Which year did I have bronchitis? When did we get the car? How old is the cat?

3. Stories about people and pets now lost in the sands of time. I wrote down things that my Aunt Jean told me about her childhood never dreaming that they'd be needed on my history pages 30 years later because no one else had that information any more! She's dead. So are her siblings. I'm the oldest generation in the family now, and the "Keeper of the History".

4. Your memories are kept for you. After a period of high stress -- 5 years of caring for my dying parents -- I reread my diaries and there were sections that were *new* to me because I'd lost the memories. (Stress sometimes does that to you.) I was so glad to have it all in print.

5. Knowing yourself. A glance through your diary will tell you a lot about yourself: what you focus on, what you like, what you dislike. You can also see changes over time, or when something changed drastically. The 20 year old me and the 50 year old me wouldn't recognize each other as the same person, mostly.

6. Gaining writing skills. Having to write just a little bit daily is good practice. Don't avoid writing just because you can't spell don't know grammar! My first diaries had very bad spelling, weird grammar and some sections are cryptic because my inability to communicate plainly. But it improved. (Not perfect, but better.) Practice improves things.

7. Data bank of information. I'm also a writer. This use is mostly for myself and other writers. But here's the traumas, the stories, the incidents, the humor, the tragedy of a lifetime...the raw materials of stories and articles. Or webcomics, or what is your media? Just because they'll never make a blockbuster movie out of my diaries, doesn't mean there aren't a few tales in there worth the re-telling.

8. A way of dealing with feelings. And much, much cheaper than hiring someone to listen who isn't going to be there at midnight when you're feeling like communicating sadness or whatever from the latest problem.

First of all, write down the date: month, day, year and day of week. This helps *so* much when you go back to reread the diary or to find out when something happened.

Since I live out in the woods where weather is a major part of the day, I like to note down what it was. It might be a simple "overcast mostly" or a page or two of details and description when something major happened like a storm that took the lights out, or snow that dropped the shed roof. Where you live and how much interaction you have with the outdoors world will have some effect on whether you bother to note this down.

Write down the major events of the day. This doesn't matter whether they're the physical events of the world, the household triumphs and disasters, what happened at work, or your inner emotional life...what matters is that this is important to you. And don't think that just because you've started with one sort of entry, that all entries need to match. I have diary entries for the world, the household, and my inner life all mixed in together.

Other things I always included: good quotes I've heard, books I've read, the occasional joke I really liked, recipes, and other bits and pieces.

You may have other things you like to note down that I didn't mention. That's okay! You're writing your own book. This list is just to break the ice and get you a starting point.

Over the years, I've found some specific additions to a diary to be very, very useful:

1. A label on the cover. An example is: "March 16, 1992 - Jan 16, 1994 Volume 36." Bare minimum is dates and which volume. You might want to add the name of the writer and that this is a personal record.

2. A label on the spine. This isn't always possible, but I try to get the volume number printed on there somehow. It really helps to be able to line them up in order.

3. An index in the back to the more important events. Please notice that I'm talking about events that are important to *you*, NOT anyone else. It took years to really get the hang of indexing the events I'd need to hunt for in the future instead of stuff I never needed to find again. I've indexed major illnesses, dreams, tarot readings, healings, trips, major jobs, injuries, visitors, start or ending of classes/jobs/whatever, things that I really liked and wanted to remember where to find them quickly. (The index I'm looking at includes all of the above items PLUS the day I got the rainbow colored patchwork boots, the day I found tadpoles in the ditch and the day I saw the Makah dancers & storytellers. Yes, I WAS an adult at the time. These are the sorts of things *I* find fun!) I've even had multiple indexes when one item or another seemed important enough to index it byself for awhile. How do I do an index? I have a finger tucked into the book at the very back page and start reading from the front. When I see something that needs indexing, I write the date and item on the first line. Next item I find is date & item on the second line. Etc.

4. Front page of diary. "This diary belongs to Rowan Chisholm whose current projects are: ..." I do this as a way of saying whose book it is. I've included warnings of who isn't to read it. ("No one except for Molly cat & the chickens are allowed to read this. This means you!") However, I mostly outgrew that. Merely advertise that it's really boring and sleep inducing and there's no way anyone could read it and stay awake. If this doesn't work, read a really tedious section out loud to the offending person until they flee. Anyhow, for the rest of the page, I tend to list what I'm doing, the long term things, at the day that I'm starting this particular volume of my diary. The projects list on the front page of this particular diary lists (among others): "Going to school at Bellevue Community College full time", "Fittikins, Sandy, Rocky & plants as housepets", "Letting subscriptions run out so I can afford groceries", "Playing AD&D on the computer (current game: Pool of Radiance)", "Subscriptions I still have: National Geographic, Science News, MacWorld, Mother Earth News, The Valley Record, The New Times, Panegryria.", and that Basil was still my housemate.

After I started using the 8 1/2 x 11 inch acco folders (cardboard covers with metal clips holding covers and the paper inside) I started including things on sheets of paper: copies of letters sent, letters received, pages with comics glued to them, programs from theatres, other items that would fit.

I've also had decorations on the cover by using cartoons, things I've cut out of catalogs that were cute, favorite dish patterns (I couldn't afford to buy one so I have a picture of it), drawings I've done, just pictures that appealed to me.

I've decorated pages with pictures of favorite rock stars, with rubber stamping designs, with drawings in pencil, india ink, or felt tip pens. Sometimes they were incidental, and sometimes I drew pictures of things I was talking about. Sometimes I drew pictures of my emotional state at the moment. Those pictures are frequently very telling when I come back to them. This is actually one major reason for *writing* on *paper* instead of typing at a keyboard. Your handwriting and little drawings add so much to the experience and to what you get out of the rereading of it.

Do use something that has unlimited space for each day such as an empty book or an 8 1/2" x 11" acco folder filled with blank paper. (I've used both.)

My first diary was a bundle of college-ruled school paper held together with brass clips and wrapped with a piece of sample wall paper out of an old wallpaper book. These were all materials I found around the house.

Don't use the sort of little book that has a page for each day. I have tried those. Either half the page was blank on days when nothing much happened or I had to overflow onto other pages when there was plenty to say.

I use typing paper and ordinary pens for the daily writing and those usually work well.

For making colored pictures in with the text or for decorations: The felt tip pens that I was using in the 1970s did not have ink that help up well. Some drawings I made faded and are gone now. I went to using better quality colored pens that wouldn't fade. Fortunately, because of the many people keeping scrapbooks now, these are easy to find.

For putting comics into the diary, be careful.
The paper they print newspapers on is high acid content which means the paper turns yellow and deteriorates. The newsprint can even help make the rest deteriorate. I eventually went to photocopying comics I wanted onto better paper and including that.

I do both. I'm very fond of my scrapbooks and they provide an outlet for creativity completely unlike anything else I do.

However, there's times when you want to say things for which there is nothing you can take a photo. Or which would make lousy scrapbook pages.

Generally, I have the diary to tell my daily life and the scrapbooks to show photos of special events, what the garden looked like in summer, and what the pets looked like. Among other things.

It's like they are each a different form of the media. I tell a different part of my story in each. I use the diary to get information for the long bits of writing I put with the photos in the scrapbook.

It's like the difference between books and movies. You can tell stories with both, but because of the differences in the media, there are things that work better in one than in the other.

The same is true of diaries and scrapbooks. The scrapbooks have photos and so tell stories the diary can't. The diary, because of a nearly all text format and included letters, tells stories the scrapbook can't.

So, even with scrapbooks available, my diary just keeps getting longer.

Not to mention that the diary is less expensive to keep up. $5 will keep you in a dairy for a year with the acco folder and typing paper method I use. A scrapbook with covers, pages, decorative devices like punches & stickers, and all its extras can be around $100 or more for each book, and that doesn't include photo processing for film cameras or printing out digital photos. Or that you might need more than one book for a year if you do alot of things that need photos taken.

Many people are doing this. I've tried a few times at this myself. I've found a few problems.

The formats of the media keep changing. Will you be able to access your diary ten years from now when they're using different software and different machines? Some of my stuff written 20 years ago is nearly impossible to access now. And that's just software. What if you put it on a CD-ROM and they stop using those and there's no players for it anymore? Do they last as long as they claim or will they deteriorate?

What happens if the computer crashes, or worse? I had a computer overload the electricity and *melt* the circuit boards in the drives. I had stuff backed up to other drives (which also melted) and was getting a CDR so I could copy stuff out. But it hadn't been done yet. I lost artwork, writings, photos, momentos. This wasn't a safe place.

On the other hand, paper diaries are subject to fire, bugs, storms. They're generally too big to be put into safe deposit boxes. If stolen, it's a tragedy to the writer. (A cousin of mine had hers stolen recently. It was in her purse and a thief took the purse.) It can be found and read.

Personally, what I'd like to do is take my paper diaries, scan them into a computer (to save the feeling that comes from the handwriting, the drawings), save it to a series of CD-ROMS and store them in a safe deposit box as a backup and review every 5 years to make sure the media is still speaking to the current formats. That would be the best of both worlds.

Why so concerned with security? Because reading back through my diary reveals parts of me I'd forgotten existed, because it contains the dates of events in local history and in the family history, because it tells about people and pets who are dead now, because it remembered things I didn't remember anymore after a period of high stress when some memories apparently went bye-bye. (Exactly--it's not safe in your head either.)