> For all the effort that Fredericks put into completing his journal project—and promoting it to others—an essential element is missing: he was not a good write

> For all the effort that Fredericks put into completing his journal project—and promoting it to others—an essential element is missing: he was not a good writer. > ... > With Fredericks, it appears that the practice of keeping a journal was less about cataloguing acute observations, or about capturing a milieu, or about imposing a literary sensibility on quotidian moments, than it was about the fact of having written. > As Fredericks asked, in an entry from 1951, “Who will ever wade through these million pages? How will the jewels (and there ARE jewels) be found? What pig will truffle my woods?” I keep a diary, because writing it helps me to think and reflect on things, and reading it helps me to remember things, but I know that I'm not a great writer and I worry that I'm just recording uninteresting banalities. I write in Day One and something I like about it is that it surfaces "On this day" entries I had writtee in previous years. The most interesting entries to revisit are usually a photograph and a couple brief sentences, the least interesting are often the ones which took the longest to write, multi page essays describing or analysing thoughts and events. I harbour no pretensions that anyone else will ever be interested in my diary, but even for myself, the person most interested in my own life, the value I get from an entry should be at least as worthwhile as whatever else I could be doing with that time.