At Page & Podium, we love a good journal. Of course, there’s something lovely about the feel of a journal itself–whether you like dotted pages or lined, lay-flat or spiral, gel roller ink or felt-tip. Even if you’re a digital journaler, there’s a beautiful freedom in sitting down to express your thoughts just as they come to you. The act of expression is cathartic and turning it into a regular practice can also build a body of work that reveals how you’ve learned and changed over time. As we discussed last week, journaling can also be a powerful tool in healing from trauma and painful periods of your life. Part of what makes journaling special is that it’s just for us. We can write our thoughts without fear of judgement and shutting down the internal editor. But how do you then take those entries and turn that journal into a memoir that other people would actually want to read?
If you’ve been diligently documenting your life experiences, there’s undoubtedly gold in those pages. In the video below, Amanda walks through how to shape those personal narratives into a cohesive and engaging story. If you prefer to read the advice, continue to the text below.
Hello there! I’m Emily Thrash. You might have noticed my name appearing in these blogs over the past month. After working alongside Amanda on various projects, I’m thrilled to join Page & Podium full time to support our talented authors. This also means we’re now more available for new coaching clients. If you’re sure you have a book inside you but aren’t sure how to finish it in a timely manner, I’m here to help! From August 6 to September 13, if you sign up for our Editor in Your Pocket package, you will get 50% off any one of our ala carte publishing services. This means not only will you have a dedicated book coach to help you reach that fully finished draft, but also a significant saving on one of the essential steps to bringing your book to market.
Realistic Expectations for Turning a Journal into a Memoir
There are amazing benefits to starting the memoir process with a journal in hand, but it’s important to understand that you’ll still be starting the process. Having a journal–even years’ worth of entries–doesn’t mean there are steps you can skip or that you have a semi-rough draft. The benefits of having those memories recording means that you will have a physical way to look for clarity and insights. You will also have the enormous benefit of details that reference points that other memoirists may have to fish out of their memory or try to reverse-engineer timelines from communication, social media or other records. But at the end of the day, memoirists who start with journals often struggle with the same things everyone else does.
Journaling offers detailed insights into your life, but turning those insights into a memoir is a different challenge. It’s easy to assume that the bulk of the work is done since the events are already documented. However, the real task lies in shaping those entries into a narrative that resonates with readers. A journal’s chronological, unfiltered entries must be distilled into a coherent story arc, a process that requires time and careful consideration. Understand that despite your extensive journaling, writing a memoir will still demand significant effort and patience.
If you want to get a better idea of how long you can expect to spend working on writing a memoir from start to finish, we have a free tool to help! Click here to access our writing plan calculator!
How to Curate your Journal Content for your Memoir
The abundance of material in your journals can be both a blessing and a curse. To craft a memoir that holds the reader’s attention, you must curate your content thoughtfully. Start by reviewing your journals and highlighting entries that are pivotal to your story. Be prepared to leave out certain details and anecdotes, even if they hold personal significance. The goal is to weave a narrative that flows logically and emotionally, rather than a chronological compilation of every recorded event. A memoir is not an autobiography, so you want to choose carefully what to include and what to keep to yourself in your journal pages.
When choosing which events and entries to include, keep in mind that you will want to find a cohesive thread that runs through your whole memoir. Often we refer to this thread as your “key message” and it can take some time and consideration to really find what this key message is and how you want to present it. Be patient with yourself at this stage of the process.
Be Prepared to Kill you Darlings
One of the most periennial pieces of writing advice is to kill your darlings. It originates from William Faulkner, but it can apply to writing a memoir from a journal (and any form of writing or artistic expression, really!). What it boils down to is that as you review your journal, you are going to find wonderful things. You will find sparkly metaphors, brilliant turns of phrase, epiphanies that helped you so much on the days that you wrote them, and simply just lots of lovely moments. But not all of them are going to be helpful in sharing your message or find a place in your story. This is different than the events and time periods that you will leave out because it will feel a bit harder to let go of things you’ve actually written exactly as you want to express them. But if it’s not going to serve your cohesive story and binding message, then it’s got to go.
Your Journal is More like Research than First Draft
If you try to simply edit your journal into a memoir, it’s going to still read like a journal. Even if you have years and hundreds of pages of writing your experiences, you’re still going to have to do a lot of writing to turn it into a memoir.
Treat your journal not like a first draft, but like a collection of research. When you sit down to write your memoir, the process is totally different as you will be incorporating scenes, showing over telling, and dialogue. This kind of writing is so different from journal writing, that you will save yourself headache by remembering your are starting to write something new and your journal represents a point of reference, not a draft to work from.
Focus on Structure First
A successful memoir requires more than just a collection of events; it needs a clear, cohesive narrative. Begin by identifying the core topic of your memoir—what is the primary story you want to tell? Then, organize your journal entries to support this central theme, ensuring each scene contributes to the overarching message. This process involves creating a timeline, pinpointing key moments, and arranging them to build a compelling narrative arc. By focusing on structure, you’ll transform your raw journal material into an engaging and meaningful memoir.
Take your inventory and rank your options
When you first start building your structure, you’ll take an inventory of the raw material from your journal that can be the seeds of scenes for your memoir. This may be a good point in the process to start moving from paper to computer if you’re using a paper journal. If you have a digital journal, use a different program for your inventory–even moving from word into excel can change your thought process enough to help you remember that you are culling through this process. Put your scenes in list form using as few words as possible to identify them. You want a bird’s eye view.
Once you have that birds eye view, you can start moving them around or even assigning a score to each–5 for must have to 1 for take or leave. Our goal in this part of the process is finding that big picture thread. Other than you and your life, what is your book about?
Lives are complicated. In truth, there may be two or three books worth of messages and life lessons in those journal pages, but you need to find that key message you want to share through your experiences.
This is not a one-sitting task. Keep in mind that you will want to work on developing and shaping this inventory over several sittings. This process often takes two weeks to a month, so be patient with yourself.
Find the major turns
When you start to feel you have an idea of what part of your life your book is going to focus on and what message you want your reader to go away with, you can then start culling down to the scenes that are going to serve that central theme. During this process, you can also assign general dates to the scenes that are placed in time. This will help you resort them chronologically to help keep a timeline for the scenes. Note that this isn’t necessarily the order they will appear, but that is a decision for later.
You can then start outlining the major key points of your structure and create the skeleton for your book. The first thing to decide is when does it begin and when does it end? Remember–this is a memoir, not an autobiography, so the beginning is probably not your birth or even your childhood. When did you start on the path that lead you to understanding what you want to share with your readers? When did you finally gain that understanding fully for yourself? That is the beginning and end we’re looking for.
When you have your beginning and ending, you can then start diving the story into sections. In our Memoir Method System, we recommend four quadrants, because at the 25%, 50%, and 75% points through your book, your reader is going to be looking for something that really moves the story forward. Finding those major turning points can create the base structure for your book, and then you can begin filling in your outline.
If you’d like to hear more about the Memoir Method or if you feel like you could benefit from weekly support as you go through the process of developing a journal into a memoir, check out our Memoir Method Program.
