Creative writing journals

The lock was the appeal, really-that and the tiny key that opened it. I loved the idea that I alone had access to the feature-- less white diary with its pages numbered for each day of the year.

For several weeks after I received the diary as a Christmas gift from my mother, I faithfully recorded the details of my twelve-year-old life-- music lessons and homework, a squabble with a sibling, catalogs of foods eaten, television shows watched, and books read, but even the lock lost its appeal when I realized that no one, not even my snoopy younger sister, was motivated enough to pry it open or interested enough to read my words if she had. At first I wrote in the diary every day, then only once a week, and finally not at all. When I lost the key forever, the locked diary was tossed into the back of a closet and forgotten.

Years later, I groaned when the instructor of the post-graduate writing seminar mentioned that we would be keeping writing journals. I thought immediately of the little white diary and my unexciting existence silently recorded in its pages, but the instructor was quick to establish the difference between a diary and a journal-a diary, she said, is private and often factual; our writing journals were to be reflective and written with each other in mind as our audience.

Although I was skeptical, I soon found the journal writing and the shared readings the most enjoyable part of the seminar. Suddenly the other teachers in the room became real people to me with real concerns and real opinions, and I realized that what had bored me all those years ago with my diary had been the privacy promised by the lock.

Despite the enjoyment of writing and sharing my seminar journal, I was reluctant to introduce journaling to my high school students. I...