Are you writing your holiday diary?

Having just spent a wonderful three weeks in Texas and Mexico I have returned home with a diary full of memories. After years of writing entries like the following:

Got up, had breakfast, went to the beach

I have now learned that a diary can conjure up memories that are more vivid and multilayered than any photograph. Being relaxed my mind is more receptive and I see more clearly than usual, and I am careful to record everything that matters in detail. The conversations, the way people look, dress and walk, their body language. The sunset, the sunrise, the feel of the thick hot air on my face when I open the balcony door, how it really feels to swing in a blue hammock in the shade.

This reminds me of the students I have known who have written about ‘the indescribable view’ or the ‘amazingly beautiful trees’. Neither of these descriptions give the imagination any hint as to what the writer really saw that day.

Write your diaries, make them live again in your mind, so that one day in the future you can enjoy the experience all over again, or use it in one of your books.