What makes a good diary/journal?

. . . it is also true that almost all diaries that give genuine and protracted pleasure to an ordinary reader do so because the diarists possessed, instinctively or by training, some of the verbal, intellectual and emotional talents that characterise the novelist.  Diaries are not novels; they are bound to reality, with its deplorable habit of providing excellent story situations and no artistically satisfactory ends.  Nevertheless, it is not hard to think of the best diarists as novelists tied for the occasion to reality and the daily round.

These practices and habits have been called novelistic . . . .  Whatever it is called, however, in the diary it is essentially an artistic gift, and one that few diarists have possessed.  It is probably the lack of that essential gift of art rather than any lack of opportunity that causes diaries in general to be rated low in the literary scale . . . .  But although tens of thousands are called to be diarists, few are chosen to be really good ones.

So who was that written about?  Samuel Pepys, the great exemplar and model of diarists, of course.  I’ve been re-reading parts of the Diary, and found those extracts in William Matthews’s Introduction.  The basic truth of it strikes me the more forcibly when I read the guff that passes for so many people’s diaries on LJ; they hold no more than quotidian minutiae and nugacities pretending to reveal something-or-another about the writer’s personality.  (In truth, they do nothing of the kind; they merely burn bandwidth.)  Not, however, that such tedium is the exclusive province of LJ; earlier in the Pepys introduction, Professor Matthews says, “That it is possible for a diarist to be historically minded, scientific, honest, accurate, careful, copious, even to write in shorthand, and yet to be considerably dull, is evident from the diary (1709-12) of an eminent American colonist, William Byrd of Westover, Virginia.”  (I know this to be true; I’ve read part of Byrd’s diary and “considerably dull” doesn’t begin to cover it.  “Massively, stupefyingly dull” is more like it.)

Such considerations are why I don’t have—or want—all that large a blogroll; I’d far rather read a relative few who make quotidian minutiae interesting than force myself to digest a great wodge of stodge.  Fortunately, I’ve found bloggers who regularly write entries I feel are worth the candle, and for them I’m thankful.

And for many of the same reasons I can’t stand overflowing blogosphere garbage, I doubt I’ll ever be read by more a few for whom I’m an acquired taste, more’s the pity.  I restrain myself from logorrhea, and I write for people with more than a modicum of intelligence and discretion.  There aren’t an enormous number of them about.