Just Write: Journaling as a Stepping Stone to Becoming a Writer
Award-winning journalist Maura Casey shares how an 8th grade writing assignment led her down a path to becoming a lifelong writer.
The assignment was unlike any I had ever gotten in elementary school. Our teacher, Mr. Paolini told our eighth grade English class to write regularly in a journal. He would check it once every few weeks, mostly to make sure we were doing the assignment, he said. But we didn’t need to worry about spelling or grammar. Write about your feelings, he said, what you see around you or what your day was like. Write about your family; write about your hopes.
“Write. Just write,” my teacher said.
Until that day, I viewed school writing assignments like a diabolical game of Chutes and Ladders. Any move was a potential setback; you lost points if you wrote the date in the wrong corner of the page, or didn’t include an outline, complete with Roman numerals. And heaven help you if you misspelled anything.
Writing was an afterthought. The assignments seemed designed to see if we could follow directions. Rules ruled, and I hated it.
But all that changed when I, at 13, first opened a blank composition notebook and gazed at the empty page. I felt an unexpected sense of freedom as I began to write, filling page after page.
When I handed in my journal along with the rest of the classmates after several weeks, I wondered what the teacher would say. Did he really mean it when he said not to pay attention to spelling and grammar? When he passed back our journals the next day, I turned to his written comments in nervous anticipation. “These pages are a joy to read. Keep writing!” Mr. Paolini wrote.
“Keep writing.” Those two words began a lifelong habit of keeping journals. From mundane details of the weather, studying for exams or typical teenage angst, the entries grew to include my worries about my sister Ellen, then struggling with kidney disease; my place as the youngest of six kids; my father’s alcoholic tirades and my mother’s attempts to keep our family steady, despite the tension, through her tenacity and wisecracks. Journals became the way I was able to navigate my world and understand not only who I was and what I thought, but my hopes and dreams. Soon, I was rarely without a notebook under my arm.
History is replete with famous people who have kept journals or diaries, from Samuel Pepys, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Marie Curie, and Anais Nin, Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl,” articulated not only her own terrors and longing, but became a symbol for 6 million slain during the Holocaust. Mary Boykin Chesnut’s diary gave us a vivid account of the Civil War from the wife of a U.S. senator and Confederate general as well as life on her South Carolina plantation.
Let me assure you: History will record very little if anything of import from my journals. And yet, they were crucial to processing the good and bad events that swirled around me as a child, and as I grew older, particularly important to my becoming a writer. The practice lays a solid foundation for becoming a professional writer. Journal-keeping is like finger exercises for a pianist. For writers, instead of playing scales and arpeggios, it’s the repeated search for just the right word, constant honing powers of observation and, always, seeking for the meaning of it all.
That was evident to me when I began to read my journals on one boring day during the Covid-19 lockdown. I had already begun to write a memoir a few weeks before the pandemic started, yet I had never re-read the journals I had kept as a teenager. I would finish a notebook, set it aside, and start a new one without ever reviewing the events that so shaped me.
It was time to go back and do that.
My son Tim lugged three crates of notebooks from the attic to my second-floor office in our barn and I started reading. I was stunned at the detail of the entries, how often I had recorded long conversations and transcribed my father’s rants. The entries also reminded me of the many sweet summer days I spent at our cottage on Lake Ontario, my sister’s refusal to whine during repeated hospitalizations and my mother’s long-forgotten wisecracks: “So, dinner isn’t up to your standards? Go to another hotel!” “I am going to die in a motorcycle accident at 93 with my fourth husband.” “If you damn kids weren’t holding me back, I’d be a high class streetwalker in Miami by now.”
Fifty years later, they still made me laugh. I ended up being grateful to my teenage self for writing down so much with such care—and for giving me back my mother. The entries also gave me a solid narrative arc for my memoir. Almost exactly five years after I began writing, it has become a book, Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery (Skyhorse, April 2025).
But the journals came first. What a gift that eighth grade assignment turned out to be, and the wise admonition, “Write. Just write,” still rings true.
Check out Maura Casey's Saving Ellen here:
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