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The New Diary: How to use a journal for self-guidance and expanded creativity
| Title | The New Diary: How to use a journal for self-guidance and expanded creativity |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2025-03-07 03:10:10 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
The New Diary is about a completely modern concept of journal writing. It has little to do with the rigid daily calendar diary you may have kept as a child or the factual travelogue you wrote to recall the Grand Canyon. Instead, it is a tool for tapping the full power of your inner resources.The New Diary is as much for those who already keep a journal as it is for those who have never kept one. It does not tell you the "right" way to keep a diary; rather, it offers numerous possibilities for using the diary to achieve your own purposes. It is a place for you to clarify goals, visualize the future, and focus your engergies; a means of freeing your intuition and imagination; a workbook for exploring your dreams, your past, and your present life.It is for everyone seeking concrete methods for dealing with personal problems. It is for women and men interested in achieving self-reliance and inner liberation, for artists and writers seeking new techniques for overcoming blocks to creativity.
Review
I finished reading Tristine Rainer's The New Diary this morning. Although it was published in 1978, it's every bit as fresh today, from the preface by Anais Nin to the final chapter on using a journal as a resource and tool to enhance creative work.This is both a book for people new to keeping diaries or journals and an excellent resource for people who've been keeping them for decades. There's something for everyone, even for those who've never considered, never thought they wanted, to keep a diary.What makes this such a good book on journaling is that it explores many ways of looking at the journal and looking at one's life from day to day, moment to moment, from using the four functions of sensing, feeling, thinking and intuiting to exploring various points of view, formats and even traveling through time. The main strength of the book is that it explores journaling or diary keeping as a process. It's the process that's important, not the product, though of course the product will be enhanced by all the methods and ways of thinking about the diary explored here, and the product will be more accessible and satisfying if one uses the advice about rereading given here.If someone told me they were just about to start their first personal journal, I'd recommend two books, this one and Visual Journaling by Barbara Ganim and Susan Fox. Between them I think they cover everything you might possibly want to do with a diary, until you think of new things on your own. I wish I'd read both books when I started. I'm glad to have read them since.
