Historic Diaries

Isaac Werner's Journal

When I was a young girl I kept a diary.  Two of my diaries survive, both with faux leather covers and a flap from back cover to front with a metal closure secured by a lock that could probably be picked with a hair pin.  They contain the typical adolescent secrets, and my attempt to read one of them after I was an adult ended in disappointment.  Frankly, it was boring, even to the author.
 

Reading Isaac B. Werner's journal was another matter entirely.  Each day's entry was fairly mundane, but as one day built on another, I was transported back into another time.  His day-to-day chores and encounters allowed me to experience the era of my great grandparents and other settlers who had claimed homesteads on the prairie.  Isaac was influenced by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, (See "Advice from Henry Ward Beecher, 12-7-2012 in the blog archives) and kept his entries free of most personal opinions and emotions, sticking to the weather and actual events during his days.

Queen Victoria

Isaac was not alone in keeping a diary in the 1800s.  England's Queen Victoria wrote almost daily for sixty-eight years, and her diaries constitute over one hundred volumes.  Isaac wrote daily from 1884 to 1891, filling 480 oversized pages, and the journal was labeled "Vol. 5th."  With the opening pages including entries from 1870-1871 and an unexplained gap of 13 years, it appears that four volumes were kept prior to 1870 when Isaac was in his mid-20s and volume five began.

Isaac's journal provoked a curiosity that led me to read a book title A Brief History of Diaries>>From Pepys to Blogs, written by Alexandra Johnson.  The author acknowledged the ancient keeping of journals and diaries, but it was her history of those kept in the 1800s and 1900s that I found most interesting.

Francis Kilvert

The words of an English country curate named Francis Kilvert writing in the 1870s particularly caught my eye because he was keeping a diary at the same time Isaac was keeping his.  Kilvert wrote:  "Why do I keep this voluminous journal?  I can hardly tell.  Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record...and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me."  I can't know whether Isaac shared Kilvert's anticipation that some future reader might enjoy his journal, but I certainly have enjoyed Isaac's record of his day-to-day life.

Charles Darwin

Alexandra Johnson also selected examples from travel and explorer journals and diaries.  One such example was Charles Darwin, whose notebooks and journals filled 2,070 pages and became the sources from which he formulated his theory of evolution and natural selection which led in 1859 to the publication of The Origin of Species.  

Cover art by Sophia Thoreau

Another explorer did not go far from home.  A reader of Darwin throughout his life and a friend of diarist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau's exploration was of Walden Pond, which was only a mile and a half from the center of Concord, Massachusetts where he and his circle of friends lived.  Yet, from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847 he recorded his observations of nature and Indian trails while living in his secluded tiny cottage beside Walden Pond.  Those observations became the material for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854).  Thoreau explained his purpose for devoting himself to exploring and recording observations of Walden Pond and the surrounding environment, saying that he used his journals "to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."  The cover art for Walden was done by his sister Sophia.

Unlike Thoreau, Isaac documented not so much the native plants but rather his meticulously kept records of planting, nurturing, harvesting, and storing the crops he introduced to the prairie's sandy loam soil.  Yet, he too wrote about the weather, the native birds, and nature's spectacles, such as eclipses, mirages, and sun dogs.

Next week's blog will continue sharing other examples of journal and diary keepers described in Alexandra Johnson's History of Diaries.

Writer's Angst

Books whose titles were in Isaac's Library

Most days the craft of writing is incredibly satisfying, but one night I experienced a serious bout of writer's angst, lying in bed awake, with thoughts jabbing at me.  I announced with satisfaction several weeks ago that my manuscript was finished, but I continued to tighten and polish it, each edit making it better.

 

 

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.  Henry David Thoreau 

 

 

I have been living with Isaac for about two and a half years.  The transcribing of his journal was a sort of courtship.  The research was a matter of meeting his friends and family, getting acquainted with his neighborhood, and familiarizing myself with the books, ideas, and goals that were important in his life.  There was no point in considering an engagement to Isaac until I had done these things.

 

 

Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.  Lord Chesterfield 

 

 

I knew very quickly after the discovery of Isaac's journal that his was a story that should be told.  However, it was not until I reached the point in his journal when he began to write about farmers organizing to confront their problems politically that I saw the arc to his story.  What had been a struggling homesteader's diary became a history of the populist movement with Isaac at its center.

 

 

Close the door.  Write with no one looking over your shoulder.  Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.  It's the one and only thing you have to offer.  Barbara Kingsolver 

 

 

I begin every day reading aloud what I wrote the previous day before writing anything new.  I edit with a more objective eye and I fall back into the rhythm of my writing, and only then can I start a new writing day.

 

 

An essential element for good writing is a good ear.  One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.  Barbara Tuchman 

 

 



Isaac's journal

There is nothing like reading my work aloud to show me awkward passages or if I am being verbose or dull.  As I told someone once, if it bores you to read it aloud, why would you expect a stranger to find it worth reading?

 

...an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.  Colette 

 

By the time I finish a chapter, I have read it aloud to myself, deleting, rewriting, tweaking it in countless ways many times.  I then put it aside for several weeks to allow me to edit with a more objective eye.

 

Books aren't written, they're rewritten.  Including your own.  It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it...  Michael Crichton 

 

Eventually, all the chapters were written, and the process of polishing and editing the manuscript as a whole began--was the tone consistent, were characters properly introduced when they appeared and identified as they reappeared, were recurring events threaded through the manuscript in such a way that a reader could recognize the sequence as it advanced the story, were there enough clues to orient a reader without being redundant?

 

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.  Don DeLillo

 

I write at the computer, so when I edit, the old version disappears.  After completing a careful rewrite, which I see at that time as the best I can do, I print it.  I use colored paper clips to hold each chapter.  My first saved version of the manuscript was clipped with white paper clips.  My second version used red.  I have now gone through blue, green, pink and yellow.  The version I announced as finished used the yellow clips, the last color option in my box of paper clips.  The subsequent rewrites were not printed...not because I am out of colors but because I knew when I finished that they were not my last revisions.

 

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.  Thomas Jefferson

 

I have realized that my night of angst was the result of knowing that, while I had been successful at tightening the manuscript, doing what Jefferson advocated, the manuscript was still too long.

 

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.  Truman Capote 

 

My sleeplessness just may have been the ghost of Truman Capote poking me with scissors.  Writers know to ask themselves, does this advance the story?  If it does not, it must be eliminated, regardless of how interesting or beautifully written it is.  Doing all of the research that I have, I discovered so many interesting things, but taking Truman Capote's advice, I have cut wonderful sections from the manuscript that did not seem necessary to advance the story.  In short, I may miss them, but I don't think an editor will.  Perhaps I will share those deleted stories in future blogs!

My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start.  So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M's and a chocolate cake.  I feel better already.  Dave Barry

This time the manuscript really is "finished" and ready to be shown to others.  Isaac is about to make his debut--edited, polished, tweaked and slimmed down to make a good impression.  I'm not sure what color paper clip he will be wearing.