Writing things down

At the conference last week, I took a workshop on journaling. Now, I've never been good at keeping a journal. I will start one, keep at it for maybe a week, then get tired of it (the last thing I usually want to do at the end of the day is write some more!). And, despite the interesting workshop, I probably won't start one now. But I did find this great quote, from Joan Didion's essay "On Keeping a Notebook":

"The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself...Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant arrangers of things, malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss"