My main character in All Is Lost keeps a diary. He’s not a literary man, but he’s young and ambitious, and dreams of his admiring male descendants consulting his journal in the future to learn how he rose from his humble beginnings to a man of wealth and influence. Most of his entries are brief and are used in the novel as counterpoints to what is actually happening. They reflect where he is honest and where he is less than honest, what he includes and what he omits, what he knows, and what he does not know. They also record the shift from his diary as a record of accomplishments to a place where he can say on paper what he does not dare say out loud.

In short, his diary, like all diaries, reveals more about him than what he merely writes down.

There are as many reasons for keeping diaries as there are diarists. Restoration-bro Samuel Pepys’ diary was plainly intended for future generations, given the efforts he made to preserve it — which makes its frankness about Pepy’s bawdy misbehavior pretty striking. James Boswell’s was an expression of what some have called hypergraphia — an almost manic drive to write everything down. (There are rumors of a Boswell scholar having a nervous collapse after learning of yet another drawer/jar/chest/teapot stuffed with Boswell scribblings after the scholar had finished what he’d imagined was a “complete” Boswell collection.) Virginia Woolf’s was an exercise in both memory and writing, and her often sharp-tongued entries are fun to read alongside her letters. We can learn both what she said in her thank-you letter to Ottoline Morrell after a visit, and what she says in her diary about it.

My first diary was started when I was nine. Someone had given me a small red book as a gift with the word “Diary” in elegant italics on the cover and lined pages inside. For perhaps a week, every night, I listed the events of the day, always closing with the dutiful observation, “I had fun.” I don’t remember exactly why I stopped, but the “I had fun” requirement I’d imposed on myself could not have helped. There had to come a day where I could not believably add those words. By that time, knowing what I know about the brat, I would have been eager for any excuse to shake my head sadly and give it all up as impossible.

I’ve kept others since then, some for a few days, some for months or years, and even those were for different reasons. The one I kept at fifteen, in boarding school, is somewhere about. It’s the usual record of teenage drama, and I’m not inclined to open it. In my twenties, I began another in the conscious attempt to capture a time and place — San Francisco in the late ’80s. And then there was the one I had going for several years just after the turn of the century, the one that recorded a visit to Australia, the one I wrote during the Coronavirus shut down…

There are, of course, online diaries, but they aren’t the same as those one writes down, or types in private. They shouldn’t be. I know of more than one online blogger in the nineties who learned the hard way how the lines between online and offline life were beginning to blur. Your children, your boss, your in-laws, just might actually read what you’ve written in your blog about them.

So, this online log is obviously not going to be the equivalent of the diaries I’ve typed or handwritten, and the excerpts I intend to post from past diaries are not going to be outpourings of my soul onto a page. They are attempts to capture moments, to put time in a bottle, as Jim Croce sang. I’ll try to make them interesting. That’s the least a writer can do.