[poll id=”11″]

[poll id=”12″]

(If you’re annoyed at the radio-button nature of the poll because you recorded day to day events and private thoughts, which took up more pages?)

I couldn’t do diaries. I tried a couple of times, but I always shied away from writing down anything I didn’t want to share, and I didn’t have the discipline to simply record how I spent my time.

I remember when I was about 11 deciding to have a go. My mum had taken me to buy my first bra, and I remember being too embarrassed to describe this even though I wasn’t planning on ever sharing the diary with anyone, so I wrote the entry as though I’d bought tons of bras before.

I joined livejournal in my teens, and I still keep it up (I keep it mostly separate from my professional writing) though not as regularly as I used to. Having an audience made it easier for me to commit to it, whether that audience interacted with me or not. I never made use of the ‘private’ feature because if there was something I wasn’t willing to share I simply wouldn’t write it down. As I’d already discovered, if it wasn’t something I was comfortable with it didn’t matter whether it was for me or anyone else; at least in my own head I didn’t try and lie to myself!

What about you guys? Private journals, public blogs? Did you give your diary a name and address entries to it? Did you have your hopes set on being a future Samuel Pepys?