Nicole Junkermann on Keeping a Record Worth Rereading

Written for a reader, not for a shelf

A notebook kept only to be kept fills up quickly and is never opened again. One kept for a reader behaves differently from the first line, because somebody is going to have to make sense of it, and that somebody is you in about a year. Nicole Junkermann has come to think this is the only rule that really changes the writing.

The test is simple and slightly uncomfortable. Read an entry from twelve months ago and see whether it tells you anything you did not already remember. If it only confirms what you would have said anyway, it was written for the shelf. If it mildly contradicts you, it was written for a reader.

Most notebooks fail that test, and they fail it for an understandable reason: writing for a future reader means writing down the part that is still unresolved, and the unresolved part is precisely what nobody enjoys committing to a page.

Write it before it settles

The useful window is narrow and inconvenient. A thought written while it is still unformed keeps its hesitation, its alternatives and the reason it felt uncertain. The same thought written a fortnight later has quietly resolved itself, and the resolution is usually the flattering one.

That means writing at the wrong moment on purpose. In the middle of a journey rather than after it, during the difficult part of a piece of work rather than at the end, on the day a decision was genuinely open rather than once it has closed. The sentences come out worse and they last much longer.

Keep the dull entries

There is a strong temptation to record only the days worth recording, which produces a document in which every page is interesting and nothing is true. Ordinary weeks are the baseline against which everything else is read, and without them the record has no scale.

A line about a quiet afternoon, a route walked twice, a book abandoned halfway, a plan that simply continued: none of it is worth reading on the day it is written and all of it is worth having later. The ordinary entries are what make the few remarkable ones legible.

Leave the page as it was

The last difference is restraint. Once an outcome is known there is a powerful urge to go back and tidy the reasoning that preceded it, and tidying destroys exactly the part worth keeping. A record that has been improved after the fact is a story about the present wearing the clothes of the past.

Add a dated note underneath if something needs correcting, and leave the original sentence where it is. That habit sits at the centre of the writing kept here, and it is the reason the reading pages carry abandoned books alongside finished ones. A record that only ever agrees with you is not a record.