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General Software Discussion / Trying a journal again - inspired by Virginia Woolf
« Last post by Dormouse on January 17, 2021, 05:46 PM »I'm also having another go at doing a serious journal/diary.
I've been inspired by Virginia Woolf's diaries which I hadn't read until I was recently gifted a copy. (Ebook versions are available for free on the internet, like all of her work.) I've always been impressed by the famous diaries (Pepys etc) , but they'd never seemed relevant to my own potential use. These diaries fit much better. They seem to cover everything. She took them seriously, trying to set aside a small amount of time each day, but there are still many days with no entries. There's description, observation, activities, introspection, planning and recording her reading and her writing programme. Recording and trying to analyse her feelings and emotions and health (frequently poor). Practicing phrasing and style (and reporting her feeling, after some years of use, that it had helped her writing to flow more easily).
In the past, I've often been caught out by the physical methodology getting in my way. And limited time. That led me to focus on what seemed important (with the habit stopping when it no longer was), and books (printed diaries/plain notebooks) which then became inconvenient. And I've tried so many digital methods without ever getting going seriously with any of them. At least with the pen and papers ones, I still find the ones made years ago interesting today. But in recent years I've never been able to do more than a few days at a time in a paper diary, so digital it has to be.
I tried a plain document approach using Obsidian, but that became messy and not very useful. So as my system is opening again, I've returned to Diarium, which I first looked at in March last year before encountering Obsidian. AND I'm having another go with dictation on the phone. The availability suits me well and I'm accustomed to dictating, even if it is never as fast as typing, when it feels as if it ought to be faster. Worked okay so far, but very early days, so mostly likely another false start; maybe not because the Woolf model could easily work for me. And I'm not limited to dictation or the phone. I expect to export regularly into .txt files.
But the dictation works remarkably well. 'Marques de Riscal, Rioja Reserva 2016' without a hitch. I was well impressed.
I've been inspired by Virginia Woolf's diaries which I hadn't read until I was recently gifted a copy. (Ebook versions are available for free on the internet, like all of her work.) I've always been impressed by the famous diaries (Pepys etc) , but they'd never seemed relevant to my own potential use. These diaries fit much better. They seem to cover everything. She took them seriously, trying to set aside a small amount of time each day, but there are still many days with no entries. There's description, observation, activities, introspection, planning and recording her reading and her writing programme. Recording and trying to analyse her feelings and emotions and health (frequently poor). Practicing phrasing and style (and reporting her feeling, after some years of use, that it had helped her writing to flow more easily).
In the past, I've often been caught out by the physical methodology getting in my way. And limited time. That led me to focus on what seemed important (with the habit stopping when it no longer was), and books (printed diaries/plain notebooks) which then became inconvenient. And I've tried so many digital methods without ever getting going seriously with any of them. At least with the pen and papers ones, I still find the ones made years ago interesting today. But in recent years I've never been able to do more than a few days at a time in a paper diary, so digital it has to be.
I tried a plain document approach using Obsidian, but that became messy and not very useful. So as my system is opening again, I've returned to Diarium, which I first looked at in March last year before encountering Obsidian. AND I'm having another go with dictation on the phone. The availability suits me well and I'm accustomed to dictating, even if it is never as fast as typing, when it feels as if it ought to be faster. Worked okay so far, but very early days, so mostly likely another false start; maybe not because the Woolf model could easily work for me. And I'm not limited to dictation or the phone. I expect to export regularly into .txt files.
But the dictation works remarkably well. 'Marques de Riscal, Rioja Reserva 2016' without a hitch. I was well impressed.
