Your journal doesn’t have to be pretty. It has to be honest. Honest pages become good stories later.

Honesty and presentation pull in opposite directions. A journal written to look good becomes a performance, and performed pages hold nothing you can use later, while the ugly unedited ones keep the exact words and details you could never invent. Nobody is grading the handwriting. The value is entirely in whether you told yourself the truth.

Write tonight without rereading or tidying anything, including the parts that embarrass you. Date it and close the book. Read a few months of it in one sitting later and mark the lines that still have heat in them.