If you’ve kept a journal for any considerable amount of time, you may have wondered whether somewhere in all those notebooks there’s a book waiting to be discovered. If that sounds like you, this blog post can help you learn a bit about how to turn your journals into a memoir.
Journaling vs. Memoir
Journaling and memoir are similar—sort of. They’re both ways of writing about your own life, but they serve different purposes. You write your journal for yourself. It’s where you think out loud, work through a hard week, or capture a feeling before it slips away. Nobody else needs to understand what you’ve written because nobody else is going to read it. That creates a freedom no other writing offers.
On the other hand, a memoir is meant to be read by others. Writing a memoir asks you to consider the needs of those readers. These are (mostly) people who weren’t there, who don’t know your history, and who want to engage with your story, but have to be drawn in by your literary skill.
Where your journal might say “Rough day with Mom again,” in recounting that day for readers, you’ll need to show what happened: the kitchen, the tone of your mom’s voice, what you didn’t say back.
Journaling records that something happened. Memoir has to make a stranger feel it.
How to turn your journals into a memoir
We keep our journals in a different way than we shape our memoirs. Our journals unfold in real time, day by day. When we’re writing on Monday, we don’t know what will happen on Tuesday until we live it.
Memoirist Patricia Hampl has written about this, the difference between dumping raw, undigested material into our journals and the memoir writer’s job of finding the pattern in the events that have concluded.
In a memoir, we’re looking back and choosing a throughline, finding the story that took shape over time. When we write about those moments in our journal, we don’t yet know what larger story each experience is part of.
So how do you actually get from a shelf of notebooks to a manuscript? Author Louisa Deasey wrote two memoirs from years of keeping a daily journal. Once you have a sense of the story you’re telling, Deasey suggests going back through your journal entries for moments—specific days, scenes, conversations—that still have heat when you read them back. Develop those moments into full scenes, she says, and they become the bones of your memoir.
Mine your journals for gold
As Deasey shows, your journals are gold! They’re your raw material, an emotional record you’ve kept perhaps for decades. They’re also proof that you can stay the course of a long writing project—because you’ve already been showing up on the page for years.
What will help is to think about which story (among the many you’ve lived) you want to tell—what you’re writing about. And also who you’re writing for—the particular reader you want to engage. Then mine your journals for scenes, and shape what may feel like a sprawl into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Try this: turn one journal entry into a scene. Pull out an old journal entry. Then rewrite it in three rounds:
- Ground it. Add the physical details you may have skipped when recording the situation: capture the room, the weather, what you were wearing, what time of day it was.
- What happened? Who was there? If anyone else was there, what did they say or do? If no one else was part of that moment, what happened? And how did you react?
- Step back and ask how it fits the story you’re creating. When you made your journal entry, you just needed to get down the truth. But to turn that truth into a scene, you’ll want to understand how that moment works in your larger story. Is it revealing something? Shifting something? Costing you something? What does that moment change?
Here’s what this might look like in practice. Say your journal entry reads:
Rough day with Mom again.
After Round 1, grounded in the physical world:
Rough day with Mom again. That stuffy kitchen, radio turned up too loud so we wouldn’t have to talk.
After Round 3, once you’ve asked how the moment fits the story you’re writing:
You realize this isn’t just a hard afternoon. It’s the pattern the whole book is circling: the volume of the radio as a stand-in for everything neither of you would say.
That’s the shift. A journal entry records what happened. A scene gives the readers an immediate experience of what happened—and tells them why it matters.
Foundations
If you’ve been journaling for years, congratulations. You have much of the material you need. Of course, there’s more to memoir writing than creating scenes. But this technique will be a foundational one. Now, if you’re ready, go forth and turn those journals into a memoir!
You can turn your journals into a memoir!
I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Digging through your old personal writing is exciting. I can help you understand how to turn your journals into a memoir. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.
If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.