Who’s Reading Your Moleskine?
By definition, most of us see our journals or diaries as private realms. I suspect few of us feel safe enough to write freely in our Moleskines or journals, always slightly suspecting someone might read them when we’re not around. In a former relationship of mine where we were both journalers, there was an unwritten rule of journal privacy, but how absolute was that? The pull to read another’s inner thoughts can sometimes be too great even for the most honest among us.
Consider the current plight of Prince Charles: a former, ostensibly trusted, staff member copied pages from his private diaries and sold them to the British press, and not just from one journal but a total of eight of the Prince’s collections of personal views and diatribes. To date, the only exposure has been some rather unflattering remarks aimed at the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong (The Mail has published only one excerpt so far). Embarrassing, but likely not as much as that yet to be revealed…assuming the current lawsuit doesn’t reverse the malicious intent of his former staffer.
Sometimes, despite one’s best effort, things don’t go as planned; well-intentioned lists of things to do end up like forgotten-to-tie shoelaces that can trip us unexpectedly.
“T-i-m-e…is on my side, yes it is.” I don’t think The Rolling Stones had waiting-for-the-muse writers in mind when they wrote that song. And unlike the woman those lyrics speak to, a writer can’t sit back and wait for the muse to come to them, thinking as the Stones did that sooner or later she’ll come back. The muse appears when and where it chooses. Some of us are egotistically enough to speculate that a frenzy of activity lures the muse out of hiding (the muse-will-visit-only-when-busy theory), while others think the muse rewards good deeds of daily writing and monk-like dedication with the grace of the muse’s touch. Either way, no one would disagree that the muse is essentially unpredictable (must be female!).
Pretty damn sad when a writer has nothing to say. Nada. Zip. Zilch. The big ze-ro. Oh I have a myriad of excuses that I could lay out like a nervous merchant spreading his trinkets on a carpet before the King as he passes by in the bazaar, but these excuses du jour count for little in the grand scope of “all things writing.” To be a writer means to write: daily, frequently, in spurts, sessions, or moments of freedom. The operative word here, of course, is “write,” or as defined in the dictionary: to form (as characters or symbols) on a surface with an instrument (as a pen). Ah, so it would follow that this means some sort of “action” on my part, an effort expended to produce words and sentences yielding on rare occasions that delicate fruit called coherent thought.
