Make sure your diary reflects your personality. Some of the ways people personalize diaries are: Adding scraps, like movie ticket stubs, receipts, flower petals, etc. Gluing in photographs Making sketches and drawings Writing poems Choosing a quotation or a goal of the day
Write in some basic information about yourself on the first page. You could include your name, your age, your best friend, your occupation or school grade, and a few of your hobbies and favorite things. Sometimes people include a "reward if found" note, just in case it gets lost.
Start your first entry by labeling the top with the weekday and date, the time, and possibly where you were when writing that entry. Write your entry as if you were talking to your best friend, or even to yourself, with enough detail to remind you what was going on at that time. Remember that things may be different in the future.
Don't be afraid to even give your diary a name. Pretend it is a real person, not a non-living object. This one day may become your best friend!
Write your frustrations and celebrations, but also write everyday things about your schedule, your friends, and the things you like to do. People forget things they think they will always remember, and these everyday things will be very meaningful to you later. Try to write positive in there too. Being positive can help you in the darkest of times. Use your diary to journal about changes in your emotion so you can work through them easier.
Start again if you have a break from writing. If you do skip a day, days, or even weeks, don't worry about it. Just start in again from the current day. Obsessively trying to catch up with all your past events is the quickest way to lose interest a diary. If you're still remembering something weeks later that you didn't write about, it will come up again in your mind later and you can write about it then. Don't worry if you skip a day, week, or even a month. No one's keeping score.
Read your old entries every so often and see what you think now in comparison to then. But do this when you are in an accepting mood of yourself! It does not help to be mean and judge your former self and then throw away your diary in disgust. Be nice to yourself and treat your old diaries like letters from your former self to your present self. More importantly, see how much you have grown and learned from your experiences. At the end of the day, that is the true beauty of a diary, of your own personal and emotional growth as you strive to better yourself every day.
Make sure you hide it too. It's a personal diary so it needs to be safe! A hollow book is a good place to hide a diary. You can also hide your diary in other places like between the mattress and the bed frame, stuck up under a table/chair, in a video case, in a shoe packet, or in your jacket.
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