While they are somewhat alike, when we say "journal," we don't mean a book filled with only the details of the day's events. However, some people use "journal" and "diary" interchangeably. I think of a journal as more than a diary. The events are there, but so are answers to other concerns. How did we feel about those events? What interests us? How does a journal help us grow?

Over the years, I have accumulated some "tips" for journal keepers. Some of them you'll adopt, some you won't. These few pages of information are just that -- information for you to use or reject, depending on what works for you. You take what you can use in an AA meeting and leave the rest. The same idea will work with the tips that follow.

I have made journal entries with a pencil on a paper napkin in a restaurant, on the back of an envelope as I sat in a dentist's waiting room, and in the margins of a paperback book as I rode a bus to work. For years I tossed scraps of "entries" into a drawer.

When I first formalized my journal keeping, I scotch-taped the contents of the drawer into a tablet. Not a good idea! The acid in scotch tape simply erodes the paper sooner or later. The scraps I taped in fell out and had to be copied on a Xerox.

My first diary was the usual "one-year diary" with a lock and key. If you offered me one of those today, I'd laugh. I need room for typed entries, for lengthy howls and groans, for short entries, for pages in pen, sometimes even for copied clippings.

Scraps and tablets and bound books are not my choices today. I use three-ring binders because they are so flexible. Pencil writing fades too quickly, so I use black ballpoint pens if I'm away from home. For years my personal favorite was my typewriter. Entries in pen or on the typewriter won't last a hundred years, but they'll last my lifetime. Today I use a Mac computer at home, but I print out my entries and add them to my "book."

Remember: these are my choices, my preferences, designed over a lifetime to fit my journal keeping style. I know a woman whose journals are all 50-page brocade-covered 5x11" bound books. Her entries are in a script I could never imitate, neat, orderly, and completey suited to her nature and habits. My own handwriting is sometimes a disaster, so I love the typed or word-processed pages.

Choosing the tools that feel right to you is the first step in making a journal an ongoing part of your life. I have used red pens and lavendar, black pens and gray, blue pens and green, but if I use a pen today, it's most likely a black Deluxe Uniball with an extra-fine point. Yet the colors I used in my earlier journal-keeping days were part of my process.

"I kept a diary, but I stopped after a month because I didn't write every day."

Sound familiar? Those dreadful dated pages in the usual diary are guilt-producers. An empty page is a loud reproach. But if your pages have only the dates you put on them, your journal has no empty pages. And if you make only a dozen entries in a year's time, you still have a twelve-page journal that tells you the sequence of that year. If you write several times a month, you have even more. A journal kept even once a week becomes at least a 50-page book by the end of the year. Go for it! If you fall in love with journal keeping, you'll soon be writing four to seven entries a week.

If nothing else, a journal offers easy catharsis, a cheap therapist always available, even in the middle of the night. But a journal can also be a writer's practice book. It can be an artist's wordless daily record. It can be a student's repository for lists and ideas about papers to come. It can be a recovering alcoholic's explorations of what the Twelve Steps mean in his or her life. It can be a prelude to a Fourth Step inventory. The reasons for its existence are varied and endless. Your journal is what you want it to be.

The primary reason for most people's turning to journal writing is therapy. We intentionally or unintentionally heal ourselves as we tell our journals what we have been afraid to tell another human being. Indeed, many of us discover that the secrets, once written, can now be shared with a close friend, a sponsor, a spiritual advisor, or a therapist. The "truths" are never as dark as they seemed when we hid them -- sometimes even from ourselves.

However, if therapy were the only reason for keeping journals, most of us would soon become bored with them. Life is rich and varied, and our journals open up when they become reflections of our lives. We talk to ourselves in our journals about our goals, about God, about AIDS, about our character defects, about friends, about the meanings of words, about society's failings and successes‹in other words, we "reflect" pieces of the reality we perceive. We think on paper. Our journals become mirrors that reflect us back to ourselves.

Woven throughout all journals are descriptions. We try to capture what we see and change our visions into words. People, places, and things that we want to remember are detailed and captured for later review. I remember the desert flowers of 1991 because I quickly word-sketched their colors into my journals. I look into my journal and see again the purple wild onion, the red mariposa lilies that hugged the ground and even climbed bushes to face the sun, and the fields of orange poppies that hurt my eyes, so brightly did they blaze. Faces have also etched themselves into my journals, every wart and wrinkle lovingly displayed or furiously pictured.

Finally, all journal keepers find themselves rambling at times, just putting down words as they magically appear, trying to discover themselves inside the rush of seemingly disconnected impressions. We put our minds into neutral gear and rev our mental motors aimlessly, enjoying the process just for itself.

Catharsis, reflection, description, and free-writing -- in the service of these four basic ways of expressing ourselves, ways that often glide from one to the other in our journal pages, we also discover or rediscover the techniques of journal keeping. Journal keepers have a tendency to reinvent the wheel. That is, what one of us has done in a journal turns out to be what others have done as well.

FIRST OF ALL, THERE ARE NO RULES. YOU DO WHAT YOU WANT. IT'S YOUR JOURNAL.

Now, having said that, I offer some suggestions to make journal keeping more useful, more pleasurable, and more effective.

Try to spend at least ten minutes when you write. That's the least amount of time that allows you to really explore some idea. The maximum? The sky's the limit!

Absolutely date every entry. Before you write a word, put today's date at the top of your page. Some journal keepers even put the time of day, the day of the week, the name of the town they're in if they're traveling, or other information they want to know later.

Nothing to say? Just to keep in practice, do an entry that starts with the words, "I have nothing to say" and keep repeating those words until other words follow. This is also a method to use if your ideas have dried up, but your ten-minute goal has not been met -- just keep repeating the last word you wrote, or write "I'm blocked" or "I have nothing to say" until you're satisfied that you're through for the day. Obviously, if your entry feels complete to you, ignore the time constraints.

The following is a "nothing to say" entry from my own journals:

I have nothing to say, nothing, nothing, nothing at all. Maybe my head is empty. How do I know that ideas even live inside my head? How do I know if I am the "I" that has nothing to say? ARGH! I have nothing, nothing, nothing. Don't want to write heavy stuff. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Why am I sitting here anyhow? How can I spend ten minutes just saying nothing, nothing, nothing?

Boring. Maybe I'll stare at nothing while I type. But there isn't "nothing" in front of me. My bulletin board is there. What's on it?

A calendar with scribbled notes telling me about my month's time uses. Clipped to the calendar is a reminder to buy stamps. To the left are phone numbers I don't want to lose. And all the birthdates I "should" remember are on a list to the right.

I must have a lousy memory -- look how many reminders I have on my bulletin board. So what else is new? Of course I have a lousy memory. I probably drank some of it away!

Maybe that's one reason I like journal keeping. It's a memory record. When I read last week's entries, I remember myself. That's as good a reason as any for being a journal keeper, I suppose.

Suppose, suppose, suppose, a pair of silken hose, a rose, a rose by any other name is still a rose, suppose, suppose, nothing more to say today. No way.

Most of the time now, I have little use for "nothing to say" entries. But they were great while I was in the process of becoming a dedicated journal keeper.

In those first years of journal keeping, I found many "get started" excercises in classes and in books. Some of these follow.