There is only one valid reason for beginning a diary--namely, that you find pleasure in beginning it; and only one valid reason for continuing a diary--namely, that you find pleasure in continuing it. You may find profit in doing so, but that is not the main point--though it is a point. You will most positively experience pleasure in reading it after a long interval; but that is not the main point either--though it is an important point. A diary should find its sufficient justification in the writing of it. If the act of writing is not its own reward, then let the diary remain for ever unwritten. IV But beware of that word ‘writing’. Just as some persons are nervous when entering a drawing-room (or even a restaurant!), so some persons are nervous when taking up a pen. All persons, as I have tried to show, are nervous about the psychological effects of the written word, but some persons--indeed many--are additionally nervous about the mere business of writing the word. They begin to hanker, with awe, after a mysterious ideal known as ‘correct style.’ They are actually under the delusion that writing is essentially different from talking--a secret trade process!--and they are not aware that he who says or thinks interesting things can write interesting things, and that he who can make himself understood in speech can make himself understood in writing--if he goes the right way to work! I have known people, especially the young, who could discourse on themselves in the most attractive manner for hours, and yet who simply could not discover in their heads sufficient material for a short letter. They would bemoan: ‘I can’t think of anything to say.’ It was true. And, of course, they could not think of anything to _say_, the reason being that they were trying to think of something to _write_, and very wrongly assuming that writing is necessarily different from saying! Writing may be different from saying, but it need not be different, and for the diarist it should not be different. And, above all, it should not be superficially different. The inexperienced, when they use ink, have a pestilent notion that saying has to be translated or transmogrified into writing. They conceive an idea in spoken words, and then they subconsciously or consciously ask themselves: ‘I should say it like that--but how ought I to write it?’ They alter the forms of their sentences. They worry about grammar and phrase-construction and even spelling. As for grammar and spelling, in the greatest age of English literature neither subject was understood, and no writer could be trusted either in spelling or in grammar. To this day very few writers of genius are to be trusted either in spelling or in grammar. As for phrase-construction, the phrase that comes to your tongue is more likely to be well constructed than the phrase which you bring forcibly into being at the point of your pen.