I have just begun (finally) using the 2021 diary I bought for myself last year. I saw the diary, and thought, oh how cute, I’ll get that, and I’ll use it, the same way Marcus Aurelius did, and maybe one day a piece of thoughts and ideas as good as that man’s “Meditations” may result.
Obviously though, I am not, and never will be as important a person as he was, the Roman Emperor some 2000 years ago. My one attempt at gaining public office was unsuccessful, and I’m not going to bother doing that again. It was for the position of a councillor with Local Government, a good few years ago. I’m not unhappy I didn’t get the job, I already had other responsibilities with my volunteer role.
Being the President of my Writing Group is as high as I feel I’ll need to go … I love my writing group, and being the benign dictator there! Writers are wonderful, thinking, and creative people, and I love what group members do with their words!
But now that I have this diary, and have begun using it, I suspect it is going to be useful if I try to write neatly in it. I can remember being at primary school, in about grade five, or it may have been grade four, when we used to practice writing letters, trying to make the ‘o’ letter look like an almond shape. I think.
Any primary school teachers are welcome to comment on that!
Anyway, if I write neatly in my diary, then when I become famous, biographers will be able to understand what I actually wrote. And I’ll be able to understand what I wrote too, if I ever do actually begin to write things worth using for other things later on down the track. At the moment,the most important things I’ve written are numbers, when I write down the figures for my daily weigh ins.
I hope I’ll move beyond that, and have some of my wise words written down. At the moment I feel my wisest words come out as comments on Social Media, and while that is OK, I feel I’ll be better off saving them for myself, to put into a publication at a later stage … Or I may not write anything that worthy, but even so, writing neatly is a good thing to aim for. Doing then things I do, as well as I can do them is a good thing, surely?
So I write well on my keyboard, where technology makes it all neat and nice. But the words are the most important thing, for a writer, and if I love words so much I should do the right thing by them when I write them by hand! I’d love to know what other people think about this, neat or untidy, how much does it matter?
Carolyn Cordon - Creative 
This was interesting to read, Carolyn as my older son is learning handwriting (he’s in third grade). I remember being frustrated like him about being forced to write in a set way when we all have our own way. I think if we’re writing by hand, we should aim to make it legible, but I much prefer typing these days!
P.S. thank you for your lovely comment on Spillwords: I’m afraid I can’t get into my account at the moment in order to reply!
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Thanks Ingrid, best of luck to your son, wending his way into the wonderful world of writing by had, neatly! I was quite a neat writer at primary school, but now I do most of my writing on a keyboard, and my neatness is nonexistent! But I’m going to do my best with this little diary, to be neat, because you never know who may wish to read it after I’m gone!
Cheers to you!
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The words I’ve written in my diary so far today are neater than they were yesterday, so I am paying attention to what I’ve written in this blog post … I think I need to use a different pen though. The one I was using looks good, but it doesn’t feel comfortable to hold or write with, it feels ‘clumsy’, and the written words echo that … the tools a writer uses, from pen and paper, to keyboard and screen, that are important, as important in some ways, as the words they/we use.
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I’ve changed pens, so I hope I’m going to have much neater handwriting from now on!
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