A few weeks ago (Over a month actually) I made a beautiful new journal.  I love it.  I love it too much!  I have not been able to make myself make a single mark in the book!  This isn’t the first time this has happened.  Several times in my journaling life I have purchased, been given, or made a book that seemed just too wonderful for me to write in.  This really tanks for the journal process.  Over the last month I have been journaling, of course, I can barely think or function in an organized manner without scribbling notes and drawing diagrams.  The problem is, lately those notes and drawings have no home.  Scraps of paper, legal pads, sticky notes, envelopes!  Its everywhere, and probably will never be gathered in total to a nice, safe home.

Do not fret.  There is a solution for this (and the sister problem of “my life isn’t exciting enough to write down”).  Its actually a two part solution.  The first and most important part is…..

THE UGLY JOURNAL

When I first had to move from my wonderful southern Florida home back to Tennessee, my life/journaling took an excitement nose dive.  What did I have to record?  Did I care for future generations to see my Tennessee life?  So for about six months—no journal.  But soon the hypergraphia itch set back in.  I had to do something.  I grabbed a bunch of printer paper and put together a slap-dash Japanese stab binding book.  I promised myself that I could make it as ugly and unappealing as possible.  It was the ugliest journal I every carried.  On the other hand it was freeing.

Because the journal was so “ugly” and “unimportant” I was able to re-establish the daily (hourly) habit of keeping thoughts and ideas in one place.  As it turns out, the wildness of the entries in that book made it one of the most interesting in my collections.  I just hope the binding holds up. (the good thing about stab binding is that its easy to re-bind). It definitely helped restart my journaling life.

The second part of jump-starting your journal…

GET BACK TO BASICS

Let your prospects of Leonardo type journaling rest for a while.  Do some basic diary work.  Put down the date and one or two events that happened.  Or better yet—start with yesterday or the day before.  After you get a few days down on paper the habit will kick in.  Don’t over write it.  Just jot something down before bed.

——————

Oct. 2 2009
Finally made PJK post for the week.  Better late than never.  Weather beautiful.  Heard from John.

—————–

That’s all you need.

For my situation I grabbed a Moleskine from my dresser and set it next to my bed.  I promised myself 30 days of basic diary, then I will get to the other book.  Ill probably keep up the basic diary in that book as well.  Just until the new wears off the book and I can go nuts.

I am in the process of rethinking the posting schedule for Practical Journal Keeping.  I am gonna add more stuff.  More posts during the week and more information coming at all times.  Unfortunately all the planning for the new stuff  ate up my weekend for getting the regular stuff ready for the post today. (By the way, if the Google spiders are looking for the word “stuff” I should hit the number one spot, right?)
The tentative plan starting next week is a normal, informative journal technique or hack on Mondays, then a book or journal review on Wednesdays, and finally a link fest on Fridays (where I will spotlight some of the other great journal related sites on the web.

Now for something at least a bit informative and journal related:

The Pig Pen Cipher, Masonic Cipher, or Templars Code. A classic.

Care to guess what these people have in common?

Beatrix Potter, writer of children’s stories
Charles Wesley, founder of the Methodist church
William Byrd II, colonial writer, patriarch, planter, and leader
Leonardo Da Vinci, inventor/artist
Samuel Pepys, 17th century man-about-town

Well, yes, the easy answer is that they all kept journals.  More to the point of this post, however, they were all famous for keeping their respective journals in code.  Many of them weren’t deciphered until long years after they died.

Does this sound familiar?  “I can’t keep a journal, what if someone finds it”? So…put the juicy bits in code.

I’ve found that keeping your entire journal in code can be a bit cumbersome.  I am all about keeping your journaling as practical and useful as possible. Sometimes, however, you just can’t risk it.  It’s just as effective to encode a name or a place or (certainly) a Christmas list.

I became interested in codes and secret writing at a very early age.  At one time I had an entire journal dedicated to collecting secret writing systems.  If I found a coded message in a mystery novel I would jot the key down in the book.  I had codes from The Shadow and the Dancing Men from Sherlock Holmes.  I transcribed the fictional alphabets of Tolkien, and Krypton, and the Disney movie, Atlantis.  I copied the rune systems of the Celts, the Vikings and the Dwarves of Middle earth. I was well suited to keep any secret I needed to.

Codes need not be so very complicated.  Leonardo simply wrote backwards. A very useful code, that is easy to remember and yet will foil the casual observer might go something like this:

an ythin gyo umigh td ot ofoo lth eey ecoul dthro wof f acasua lsnoo p.

I’ll leave it up to you to decode this message.

I had my trusty book of collected codes to draw from at any time.  You don’t need one.  You can, of course, use a bit of personal creativity to hide your secrets, or, if you are like me and interested in the methods of the rest of the world, there are many websites dedicated to codes and ciphers.

The site I check out constantly is basically an online version of my old codebook.  It’s called Omniglot.com.  Omniglot.com is a fantastic collection of writing systems from around the world, throughout history and literature and even from the imaginations of people out there today.  Admittedly some of the writing systems are a bit complex (one I’ve seen recently actually has animated, spinning letters), but there are plenty that can serve as a code for your journal or at least as a jumping off point for creating your own.

I have to admit I get interested in a lot of things.  Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to what I am suddenly interested in.  I might start out the day with a slight interest in soap carving and suddenly around lunchtime I am introduced and obsessed with the Tung shing (Chinese almanacs).  I am only partly responsible for this.  Yeah I am easily distracted but the Internet is MADE to take me from one subject to another.  What’s a guy to do?

Well I take a page (figuratively and literally) from Barbara Sher’s book, Refuse to Choose.  Barbra identifies with so many of us that go through a half a dozen interests a day.  She has coined the term “scanner” for us.  She realizes that for most of these ideas and interests we don’t necessarily want to get a Ph.D. in the subject but feel the need to at least explore it for an indefinite amount of time.  She suggests the use of a journal that she calls a daybook to record these ideas for later and to explore them for as long as we feel compelled to.

The main tool I’ve adopted from this concept is her use of a two-page spread in the daybook.  Basically what it amounts to is opening your journal (this works great with larger format books) and using two facing pages to record everything regarding the subject you are pursuing.  Anytime you are researching this subject, you turn back to this spread and just add to it.  Soon you have a spread that is very dense with lists, names, websites, drawings, mind maps and thoughts.  It’s all neatly contained on the two-page spread for later reference if needed so you don’t have to cull the information from various pages scattered throughout the book.  If you need more than a two page spread, make another.  I generally use the next spreads to explore a detail from the first spread.

A quick 2-page spread planning a hiking trip to Moab this year.

Uses I’ve found for a two-page spread:

Taking a trip to a new city?  Do some research on what you might like to do there.

Buying a camera? List your pros and cons, wish lists and price lists and even glue in some pictures from the web.

A day at the beach? Sketch some shells and then later you can identify them.

Reading a good book?  Keep notes on the mystery or info from the biography.

Joined a new club?  List new friends names, meeting times, buzzwords etc.

Finally keeping a Journal?  GREAT! What kind? A daily diary? A sketchbook? Fitness Log?  Writing stories? Random thoughts.  All great ideas!  And while its perfectly wonderful to keep all of these things in on great book, sometimes it works better to keep things separate and a bit organized.

I enjoy keeping a daily record.  It’s an exorcise in consistency I love, but by no means a necessary part of keeping a journal.  I also enjoy doing random research and keeping up with projects and crazy schemes and sometimes this breaks the flow of my day-to-day log.  At one time I kept two books.  One notebook that I kept with me all day to snatch up everything as it happened and a book that stayed by the bed to get a nightly entry of the days activities.   Soon I found that by time to make that daily entry I had only a watered down version of the day’s events.  I started carrying both books with me.  I carried “journal” for catching thoughts and ephemera, and my “diary” for catching events as they happened. With two books in my bag to write in, plus whatever book and magazines I was reading at the time, I had quite a hefty load to carry daily.  In addition, I was never happy with the idea of having more than one book in which to write.  I experimented with allotting sections of the book for subjects (kind of like your notebook from school) only it was IMPOSSIBLE to know how many pages to allot for each section and I found I was having to end one section before I finished the pages in another.  Unfortunately it was my only solution for a long time.

One day I picked up a magazine to read and noticed that this issue had a “special addition” that was a dedicated second magazine that was attached to the back of main magazine only it was flipped upside down.  It was a clear demarcation of where one magazine ended and the other started.  It was, in a sense, two books in one.  I snatched the idea IMMEDIATELY!

Here is how the “Flip-Journal” works:

When you choose a book, choose one that has basically the same back as it does front.  One of those plain black sketch books work great for this.  Then choose one side and make a note of what you are journaling in this side.  Then flip the journal end-over-end and make a note about what you are journaling on this side.  I usually make an adjustment to the two covers to indicate what goes in which end.  For example, I drew the right half of a brain (complete with an ornate letter R) on one end and the left half on the other.  The “left-brained” side was for daily entries and the “right-brained” side was for what ever I felt like exploring or just jotting down.

That’s it.  That’s my simple but powerful technique to get two journals out of one book. All of the entries in one section will be totally upside down when reading from the other end. When the two sections meet (somewhere in the middle) the book is full. Both sections cover the same period in time so it’s easy to file and reference later.

Here is a brief list of some of the subjects of my Flip-Journals in the past.

• Daily Diary / Random Journal
• Random Journal / Sketchbook
• Random Journal /Fitness Log
• Sketchbook / Wine Journal (yeah, a Bohemian phase)
• Random Journal / Blogging drafts and ideas (currently)

The ancient Egyptians didn’t write directly on the walls or papyrus .

The Romans and Greeks rarely sat down with a blank scroll and just started writing.

Even Leonardo DaVinci didn’t pull out a pristine book and start making notes and drawings and just trust his luck that all of his thoughts would come out in the order he wanted them published.

The Egyptians (like many ancients) would make notes on pot-shards (broken pots were a dime a dozen and you could scratch on them with anything) then later collect the important information in a more usable format.

Likewise the Romans did day-to-day note taking on wax tablets.  These were shallow frames of wood with wax melted into them that could be scratched into with a stylus.  These notes could be later transcribed onto a scroll.

The “Notebooks” of DaVinci didn’t start out as actual books.  He made notes on separate leaves of paper and then organized them as to topic.  It was years after his death that his followers managed to have them bound into books.

As much as I love having my clunky journal around to write and scheme and make notes, sometimes (actually quite often) it’s just not that practical to pull out and start scribbling.  At the same time, if I don’t write these things down they may become watered down in memory or even forgotten before I can get to my book.

My advice for journal keeping on the go is to take a lesson from these great thinkers of history.  Use something else to collect your thoughts.

I don’t carry pot-shards or a wax tablet but I do carry a small spiral notebook, or, four or five 3×5 index cards in my back pocket.  I can get a lot of information on two sides of a single index card.  I write small and do a lot of on the spot shorthand but later I can expound on the notes and ideas.

You can even get a sheet of the printable business cards and separate out a couple and keep them in your wallet for a more elegant solution.

You could try a folded sheet of paper like a Pocket Mod.  Go to their website an you can create and print a small book that is blank or has lines, grids, columns, calendars …  just about anything you can think of to help you stay organized.

Lately, however, I have been utilizing my cell phone as a collection book.  When journaling on the spot or making notes I can pull out the phone and start typing away.  Then just email or texts the notes to myself and I don’t even have to re-type them.

Think texting yourself a few notes is too tough.  Check out Robert Bernocco.  He managed to knock out an entire science fiction novel on his cell phone.

Okay, I admit that I am actually using an iPhone with an Evernote app that stores all sorts of information, including voice recordings and photos.  In any case, it’s actually become quite trendy to be typing into your cell phone when out and about, whereas scribbling in a notebook might actually be considered rude.  Go figure.

Just because you don’t have your journal with you doesn’t mean you have to stop journaling.  You can use almost anything to collect your thoughts or notes on the go, and then transcribe them at your leisure.