Henry Mance on the trials and tribulations of writing a diary

I write a diary. Actually, last year - which was a) 2016, pretty busy for a political reporter, and b) a period in which I moved home, changed job and became a father - I only wrote in it eight times. So it's probably more accurate to say that I am trying to write a diary, and failing.

Diaries are amazing things. Once you've read one, it is painfully hard to get excited by people's Facebook updates and Christmas round-robin letters. Here is what people really think, and who they really are. Or who they were at a point in time.

Flicking through The Assassin's Cloak, An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists published in 2000, you only need to read one sentence by Noël Coward or Kenneth Williams to work out that both of them were completely unbearable. And that neither is as funny as Adrian Mole ("I have decided to keep a full journal, in the hope that my life will perhaps seem more interesting when it is written down," the fictional teenager declares).

But of course, in a world hooked on sharing opinions, diaries are really about privacy: I know mine will go no further than me and the 17-year-old Russian hacker who has guessed my laptop password. It's like performing karaoke in an almost perfectly soundproof room. Except with the vague hope it might produce a record worth revisiting. Part karaoke, part Desert Island Discs.

So what would make a better diary? My resolutions for this year are:

1. Forget the big questions

"I sometimes wonder why I keep a diary at all. Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? Or dazzle my descendants?" asked Henry 'Chips' Channon, the bon vivant. It's not actually worth wondering - although if you are trying to dazzle your descendants, you are probably delusional. I can't remember why I started a diary. Attempts to make it deliberately functional - for example, as a record of my child's early life - have only made it harder to write. As soon as I had a potential purpose or reader in mind, I started self-censoring. So I've decided to make it a repository of anything interesting - anecdotes, emotions, quotes, book notes. Without an explicit purpose, there seems less risk of it becoming a chore.

2. Find the time

It's the first week of January so, like all right-minded people, I already feel guilty about not spending five minutes each morning stretching, 10 minutes practising mindfulness and half an hour learning Mandarin. But even during the frenetic Blair years, Alastair Campbell managed to keep a diary ("usually late at night" - presumably not drinking helped). So there really isn't much excuse for the rest of us not to dive in every couple of weeks. We're never going to be able to touch our toes anyway.

3. Write immediately

Looking at my own diary, there's a clear difference between the bits written shortly after the event and those trying to revive emotions that have subsided. It's the raw reaction that counts; no one - even my Russian hacker - cares about views that have been shaped by hours trawling through other people's opinions on the internet. There are practical problems about writing things down immediately - as a journalist, the most interesting times are also my busiest - to which the answer in my case is probably: spend less time on Twitter. Otherwise the only diaries that will be written will be by people with lots of time on their hands, like Jeffrey Archer's three volumes of prison journals.

4. Include other people

Channon - who thought a discreet diary was as bad as a "discreet soul" - stopped asking his secretary to transcribe his diary when he realised his musings were becoming less scandalous as a result. But later diaries went too far in the other direction. They are filled with self-obsessed questions ("am I a young Nero, heartless and selfish?"): when he meets Proust and Mussolini, it's like he has been introduced to some curious domestic servants.

5. Be succinct

"She's a loser, now. Doomed," is how Alan Clark's diaries summed up Margaret Thatcher's predicament after she failed to win the 1990 Conservative leadership election in the first round. Diaries come alive through such punchy opinions.

6. Stick your neck out

Joseph Goebbels did not suffer from self-doubt. On April 24 1941 he wrote: "News of Churchill. He is said to be in a very depressed state, spending the entire day smoking and drinking. This is the kind of enemy we need." Twelve years later, journalist Drew Pearson had lunch with John Kennedy and said he had "the making of a first-class senator or a first-class fascist - probably depending on whether the right kind of people take the trouble to surround him." Kennedy turned out to be neither, which is why Pearson's opinion is worth reading.

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Perhaps our diaries won't be the most reliable records of our lives. A friend was recently asked by the Russian visa office to list the countries she had visited in the past 10 years. She decided the quickest way to find out would be to go through her photos.

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A day after writing this, I still haven't started my diary this year. Or done any stretching. I have a bad feeling about 2017.

Henry Mance is an FT political correspondent

Illustration by Shonagh Rae

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017