WRITING A JOURNAL

 

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TO THE CHILDREN OF THE WORLD

 

When I was very young, I complained to my mother, Leonie Feldman, that I was bored. She told me to "take a paper and pencil and write." And I became a writer.

 

My father, George Rubin, listened to the opera on the radio and he took me to second hand book shops and to the movies, and on long walks, so that we could talk and see the world around us and meet friends. And so I grew up loving my father and loving music and books and beauty and  justice. And I wrote about everything I saw and heard and thought and hoped for.

 

A diary, a journal or a memoir is whatever the author wants it to be. It can be a report of everyday activities and observations or a way of using  your imagination and developing new ideas. It can be an expression of your deepest feelings and a way to test your skills. It is your own history that you can look at day to day and look back into decades later. It is something you can share with people you love now and in the far future. Your written memoirs are a treasure only you can create.

 

Phyllis Carter
December, 2009
Montreal, Canada

 

Some famous people who wrote diaries, journals and memoirs :

 

Leonardo da Vinci wrote in journals three times a day, most often upside-down and backward. Anyone who wanted to read his words had to hold the pages up to a mirror. He developed his inventions in his journals, including an early submarine and a helicopter. In the five journals Charles Darwin kept while at sea, he came up with his theory of evolution.

 

Also: Samuel Pepys, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Einstein, Sir Winston Churchill, Anne Frank, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Beatrix Potter, Sir Walter Scott, Henry David Thoreau, Queen Victoria, Elie Wiesel, and Lewis Carroll.