hello! I found this account and was almost immediately recommended your yt lol. as a fellow journaler, I wonder what you write when you don't know what to write? I deal with major writing block, but I love my ecosystem so much (digital + physical!) that I want to engage with it as much as possible, and yet....!
I am a list lover - I started reading journals in literature years ago, and ever since I have realized that a journal entry can be anything. a map, a timeline, a dream, an idea, a list. Virginia Woolf is wonderful at this.
there is an article by the FT that I will never never forget reading. this one! https://www.ft.com/content/6c7e3cc3-f66b-4998-ad55-5f58d151a761 - which says:
What can a list of sheets and pillow cases, tablecloths and bath towels tell us about Virginia Woolf? Quite a lot, I think. I have spent a long time thinking about one particular list. It is written in Woolf’s neat, graceful hand inside the back cover of a small notebook, beneath the heading “Linen at Asheham”. The date is January 1918. There are enough cotton sheets for a house party (and when the beds ran out, we know that Duncan Grant was content to sleep in the bath). Next, she lists “Linen left to be washed”. She did not do the washing herself — her servants Lottie and Nellie took care of that — yet the list remains the most quietly engaged example of her housekeeperliness I have been able to find. It is a record of how, in this period of her life from 1912 to 1919, a time of prolonged recovery from mental illness, of war and isolation in the country, Woolf’s mind turned to domestic things. And in shifting her attention, she was able to emerge out of illness into everyday life.
Each day followed a pattern. Woolf noted the weather; any insects or birds seen on her walk (“3 perfect peacock butterflies”); her daily tally of mushrooms or blackberries (“A record find”, “Enough for a dish”); gardening or domestic activities (“Made chair cover after tea”); what was happening in the fields (“German prisoners cutting wheat with hooks”); what she had for supper (“Eating our own broad beans — delicious”); and the price of rationed goods (“Eggs 2/9 doz. from Mrs Attfield”). Adhering to a structure in her diary gave shape to her convalescence. Woolf rarely used “I” and yet we catch sight of her out walking, or sewing on the terrace in a straw hat. It’s not by chance that she wrote the laundry list on the inside cover of this notebook. During this period, listmaking and diary-keeping became part of the same practice of paying attention to small things and of setting down her experience, sparely and without flourish, on the page. To biographers, this slender diary has appeared inconsequential compared with the weightier stuff of her later longhand diaries and letters. (Until last year, when Granta reissued Woolf’s collected diaries, the Asheham notebook hadn’t been published in full.) It reveals nothing of her thoughts or literary ambitions, her anxieties following the publication of her difficult first novel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those biographers have largely seen the years 1912-19, covering the lease of Asheham, as years diminished by illness and war.
A list is both much and little. It allows the biographer a glimpse of a life in scraps and fragments. Like Woolf’s tenure at Asheham, Warner’s first years in Dorset have often been glanced over, her story seeming to pick up with her communist politics in 1935. But reading Warner’s inventory in the archive, her cottage came colourfully to life, with its mischievous juxtaposition of Regency and rustic, coupling Chippendale with cross-stitch, rococo mirrors with patchwork quilts. I felt as if I were pacing round, rummaging through her cupboards and drawers. And reading Woolf’s Asheham diary in the New York Public Library, the small marbled notebook in my hands, I had the sense of peering over her shoulder as she tallied her pillowcases and sheets.
-end quote, i love a list x
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