A Year of Weather Lines

Who you were with. Which way you walked. What was being discussed when the fog lifted and somebody remarked on it. None of that is written down, and all of it arrives anyway, in order, from a line that took eleven seconds and mentions only the sky.

This is the strangest and most reliable thing about journals, and it runs against the instruction everyone gets, which is to write about how you felt. Feelings are the part that doesn't keep. The weather keeps.

A record with nobody in it

Try the comparison honestly. Here are two entries from the same day, by the same person.

The first is about you and tells you nothing. You've written that sentence, or its cousin, on a hundred evenings, and they've compacted into one undifferentiated block that no longer separates one year from another. It isn't that the feeling was unreal. It's that the language for feelings is small and shared, and gets reused until it stops pointing at anything.

The second mentions no state of mind at all, and will bring one back with unnerving precision. An open window at the end of a rainy afternoon and a stranger's noise downstairs restores the whole texture of being there. The impersonal detail is the handle; the day is what's attached to it.

Write down how you felt and you get a word. Write down the weather and you get the afternoon, and the feeling comes with it.

Why weather holds so much

Partly because it's shared. Weather is the one variable that everybody in your day was inside at the same time — the person you argued with, the person on the next bench, the whole street. Recording it records the container everyone was standing in.

Partly because it moves. Almost nothing else in an ordinary day reliably changes and can be described in five words. Cleared by two has a before and an after built into it, and a before and an after is a story, minimally.

And partly because it's honest by accident. You can't perform the weather. Every other kind of entry has an audience problem — some part of you writes for the person who'll read it and shapes the day accordingly, which is the quiet censorship in The Things You Write Around. Nobody edits the sky to look better, so the weather line is the one sentence in a journal with no angle in it at all.

The shape of the line

Three parts, fifteen seconds, and the third part is doing most of the work.

1. 1

   The date

   Written out, not implied. This is the whole indexing system and it costs four characters. An undated observation about fog is worth almost nothing; a dated one can be put next to the same week last year.

2. 2

   Two observations about the air

   What it did, and roughly when it changed. Grey all day. Hot by nine, unbearable by two. Wind from the other direction. Rained twice. Two is the ceiling, deliberately — the point is not a meteorological record, and precision here adds nothing.

3. 3

   One concrete thing that isn't weather

   The hinge of the whole practice. Not a feeling: an object, an action, a sound. First jacketless day. Windows open for the first time since February. Wore the wrong shoes. Could smell the neighbours' cooking through the wall. It should be something you noticed rather than something you concluded.

So: 2 October — muggy, broke into rain around six. Left the washing out. Fifteen seconds, three clauses, and a year from now it will produce an entire evening including the argument about the washing that isn't recorded anywhere.

Fifteen seconds, and what fifteen seconds buys

The reason to recommend this over anything longer is not that it produces better writing. It's that it survives.

Every journal practice has a cost per night and an honest failure rate. Three pages fails in the second week for most people. Three lines, argued for at length in Three Lines Is Enough, survives for months. One weather line survives almost indefinitely, because it can be done badly, in the dark, half asleep, on a night when nothing happened — and it still comes out complete. Nobody is too tired to write cold, clear, walked home the long way.

That's the whole argument for the form. It's the lowest doorway in the building, and the only journal that ever tells you anything is the one still being written in month nine.

The compounding isn't linear either. Thirty weather lines are almost nothing. Three hundred begin to show the year's actual shape — when the light turned, how long the bad stretch lasted, the fact that you always start sleeping badly in the same fortnight. Patterns need comparable entries, and comparability is exactly what a fixed fifteen-second form gives you and a free-form journal doesn't.

What it doesn't do

Now the honest part, because this is being offered as an entrance and it would be a bad entrance if we oversold the room behind it.

Fifteen seconds does not do what a journal does. It won't help you work anything out, because that requires enough sentences to change your mind inside, and a weather line has no room for one. It won't hold a conversation, a decision, or the reasons behind it. If something significant is happening, the line will note the conditions and lose the event completely. That's a serious limitation and the form doesn't fix it.

And the recall isn't guaranteed. Some years you'll read the lines back and get nothing — just a list of grey afternoons belonging to nobody. This happens most often for stretches that were uniform: a long stable season, a period where every day genuinely was the same, a run of months you spent mostly indoors. The anchor only works if there was something to anchor. When there wasn't, the line is just weather, and it stays weather.

So: a starting form, not a complete practice. We think it's the best starting form there is, and we'd rather say what it can't do than have you conclude, in November, that you've been doing it wrong.

When the line wants to become three

You'll notice it happening. One evening the third clause won't stay one clause — there's something you want to say about why the shoes were wrong, and it needs a sentence of its own, and then it needs another.

Let it. That's the form working, not breaking. The weather line was never the destination; it was the thing small enough to keep the habit alive until you had something to put in it. Most people arrive at three lines this way rather than by deciding to, and those three lines tend to be better than ones written from a standing start, because the habit of noticing concrete things is already in place.

Then, on the flat nights, drop back to one line without treating it as a lapse. A year of mostly weather with fourteen real entries in it is a good year of journal-keeping. A year of nothing because three lines felt like too much is not.

In a year you'll have something no diary of feelings ever produces: three hundred and sixty-five sentences that aren't about you, arranged in order, each one holding a day it never mentions.

The evening is warm here.