Saturday, February 17, 2007

Are Diaries good or dangerous?!?

Hey, long time, happy Valentine's and all that...

So, I've begun a project that is maybe long overdue (or that will never be finished).
I've started typing up my diary from my RTW (round-the-world) trip from 2000-2001. It's weird, after writing the entries, I haven't looked at them until now, 7 years later.
The questions is what to do with it? My primary reason for typing them into a word document is to preserve them in some kinda data format, in case I in the future plan to do something with them.
(personal note: writing as process, writing as sharing information)
So while reading through them I can only think: "who would I ever let read these things?", "why would anybody want to read them?". At the time of writing them, they were partially my log book, so a lot of the information is tedious bus numbers or where i stayed. At the same time some of it is like a letter to a friend, and a lot of it is me going through emotions and feelings.
What is this information I could think of sharing? Do I want to share all of it? ...maybe not... :-)
Maybe some day you will see it published in some way, and let's just hope it has undergone serious editing by that time. ON THE OTHER HAND, I feel like the manuscript is valuable in the sense that it horribly honestly presents a lot of what happened. But as with everything it is "aikaan sidottu" i.e. tied to the temporal setting where it was created.

The other point I wanted to bring up was this process of writing and reading through the material. It is amazing, the things we've forgotten, the people we remember once we read about them later. And also how our view of things change over the years. 7 years later I notice I maybe think of issues in a completely different way from September 2000, when I set out on my journey. But, I guess that is part of the beauty of life.

I will not claim to have developed since that time, but I've surely changed. :-)

All good comments and ideas about what to do with the material will be considered. And the best one may be awarded with a free copy.

MUAH!

No comments: