“In writing your journal give primary attention to detail; for it is detail which organizes and preserves experience for your future self or some other reader. General statements like ‘We had a wonderful time’ or ‘It was a dismal morning’ make a mockery of the whole procedure, for they evaluate experience without recreating it. I kept long journals from ages ten to twenty-two, chronicling events and describing emotional states, but again and again missing the physical immediacy of experience, the tiny hooks by which experience could have been caught and held. I failed to record how we looked, what we saw, the minor eccentricities of circumstance which gave special character to a day. I ignored these elements not only through lack of training but through misplaced priorities: I mistakingly assumed that one could discuss the heart of things without discussing the surface of things.”

Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 180)