How I Turned My 35-Year-Old Journals Into a Memoir

When it comes to honest, reflective first-person writing, there’s nothing more valuable than your own in-the-moment thoughts.

Later this month, Rebecca Evans is teaching From Journal to Memoir: How to Turn Your Side Scrawls Into Literary Gold, a fun class in which she guides writers through how to get your journals organized so they can serve as a source for memoir. For today’s StoryCraft piece, we asked Rebecca to share a little about how she first turned her own journals into productive writing tools.

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Keeping a journal means writing down vulnerable insights about yourself. This practice is often accompanied by fear. Fear that you will open up painful things you’ve been avoiding. Fear that someone else might violate your privacy and read your sacred ponderings. Or fear that when you die, someone will find and publish your journals, then turn your life story into a blockbuster hit, showcasing your most embarrassing and humiliating reactions to life. (OK, maybe some of us secretly want that posthumous movie part to happen.) Yet despite all these things to fear, maintaining a personal journal is such a vital process because you discover and re-discover aspects — many often hidden, even from you — about yourself. By keeping a journal, you can return to and refresh your memories. Journaling becomes a personal archive that — if organized in a productive way — can be incredibly helpful for memoir writers.

Thirty-five years had elapsed when I came across my journals from my days in the military. At the time, I’d just returned to my home base following a stint in the Gulf War and the humanitarian effort that followed, Operation Provide Comfort. I was devastated and destroyed. Back then, I would’ve eaten those journals before allowing anyone else to read them.

But as I reread my entries, I chuckled and imagined hugging my 20-something-year-old self. These reflections became a major basis for the memoir I recently completed, Navigation, which details the time period when I weaved my way out of war and suicidal ideation, into a sense of self-acceptance.

What I realized when reading my journals is that each of us carries our own psychological blueprint — and staying true to our emotional narrative arc by memory alone would be impossible. Personal journals offer a map of how you feel and respond at a given moment in time and across time, much like a narrative arc of a story. A journal offers you a guide, a blueprint to who you were in a given moment. Much as the narrator of a novel may interject and retell details of the story with enhanced perspective, a journal allows you to dialogue with the younger you — perhaps with even more compassion and peace than you gave yourself at the time.

Today, I’m grateful that I did not burn those journals or throw them away. I’m even more grateful that I tried to sort through my challenges via writing. These journals bore witness to my life. At one point, I worried that I did not have sufficient documentation to write about one particularly crucial event that took place during the war, but the journals had so many details and stories I had locked away since then (along with citations and awards from the military), offering the “proof” that I felt I needed to tell my story in full.

Whether your journals are from 35 years or 35 minutes ago, revisiting them with perspective can be such a vital tool for memoir writing.

I’m super excited to be teaching From Journal to Memoir: How to Turn Your Side Scrawls Into Literary Gold at Narratively Academy in a few weeks. This is an intensive four-week online seminar with classes held via Zoom on Sundays, from October 19 through November 9. We’ll explore easy, doable techniques for how to pull ideas from your journals to utilize in your memoir and personal essays — while preserving your voice, your feelings and your ideas. The course also covers concepts for how to notate and maintain multiple journals so that you can resource them for a variety of projects and processes in the future.

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