From Ian Brown’s lovely essay about keeping a notebook, published in the Globe and Mail:

“It’s a neurotic habit, a personal notebook. It can work as a diary, but it’s not intended for publication. Anaïs Nin, who kept a diary from the age of 11 to the day she died at 73 (it started as a letter to her absent father), always planned to publish hers. So did Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat who gave us The Siren Years. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, never intended anyone to see her notebooks, hence their wandering and thoroughly private tone. She wrote them quickly, after tea, with a dip nib pen.

A diary is an accounting. A notebook, by contrast, is to record details that reach out as you pass, for reasons not immediately apparent. A notebook is full of moments from days that have yet to become something. “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether,” Joan Didion wrote in a famous essay about notebooks, “lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” “

Read more at Ian Brown: A new year. A new notebook – The Globe and Mail.