Post #51
Memoir Writing, Journaling
by Amber Lea Starfire
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Memoir Writing, Journaling
by Amber Lea Starfire
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“A careful first draft is a failed first draft.”
~Patricia Hampl
~Patricia Hampl
The journal memoir approach is also fun to read. Retirement may be different for each of us but the purpose of a happy retirement is to have a retirement with purpose. Memoir Magazine features artwork, as well as essay, interviews, and book reviews, and aims to support storytellers through publication, education, and advocacy.
If you’re a memoir writer, your journals are goldmines in which the precious details of memory lie buried and waiting for excavation. But, once you’ve dug up the entries you need for your memoir, what then? Those words and phrases are diamonds in the rough—not useful without the cleaning, cutting, and polishing that will make them shine. You’ll need to uncover the truths hidden within your original, unpolished entries—truths that lie beneath the surface of your writing and reveal the heart of your story. How rough those memory jewels are depends on what and how much you included when you created those entries.
I’ve written previously about what to include in your journals on a regular basis to help future memoir writing efforts. If you’re lucky, and you’ve been a journal writer for some time, your past journal entries outline major events with concrete, sensory details, bits of setting and dialogue, and your emotional responses. But even if you didn’t write fill in all those details, your journal entries contain the kernels of your memories, and they will energize the memoir-writing process. It is by combining what you’ve written with what you remember that you arrive at a deeper, richer story. It is by listening to what your story wants to tell you, that you are doing the real work of writing memoir.
The following seven steps will help you unearth and polish the gem of your story. Remember: no one ever said this was easy! But satisfying? Oh, yes!
Step One: Read journal entries written during the period of time or event you want to write about. Focus on a short period of time surrounding a particular memory—no more than six months. As you read, highlight passages that give you solid physical or emotional details, and make notes about any thoughts and responses you have while reading.
Step Two: Transcribe those highlighted journal entries and notes into your writing journal or computer program, adding additional memories and reflections as you work—make note of any images that come to you. Think of this as an unstructured, brainstorming type of activity that serves to awaken body memory of events and prime the memory pump, so to speak.
Step Three: With your notes in front of you, but without working directly from them, write a first draft of your story. Do not stop, do not edit, do not censor. The point is to write from the heart, from that part of you that simply needs to tell this story.
Step Four: Put this first draft of your story away for three days. Why three? Because that’s just long enough to give some perspective to your work. While your story is gestating, consider these words by Patricia Hampl, author of Stories I Could Tell You: “For the memoirist, more than for the fiction writer, the story seems already there, already accomplished and fully achieved in history (‘in reality,’ as we naively say). For the memoirist, the writing of the story is a matter of transcription. … That, anyway, is the myth. But no memoirist writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief abut the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.”
Step five: Three or more days later, print out and read your story, highlighting images, descriptions, and phrases that evoke strong emotional reactions.
Step six: Ask yourself the following open-ended questions about your story.
- What do you know for sure, and what do you only think happened? Include descriptions of people, dialogue, and actions in this analysis. If it’s helpful, draw a line down the middle of a fresh journal page; title the left column “What I know” and title the right column “What I think.”
- Make a list of images that appear in the “What I think” column. For each of these images ask, “What hidden emotion is tied to this image?” Note that it is perfectly normal to struggle with this prompt. There’s a reason it’s hidden. Your job is to help yourself feel safe enough to reveal buried emotion. Be patient and kind with yourself. Close your eyes, take deep breaths, and allow the emotion to surface as you hold the image in your mind. Think about each image as a symbol for something: perhaps a longing, a fear, or a hope.
- Write down anything and everything that comes to you during your musing, without judgment. What details surface? What emotional truths reveal themselves?
- Freewrite for as long as it takes, but at least ten minutes, asking yourself, “What is this story really about?”
Step seven: Rewrite the story with your new insights in mind.
Like mining for gems, uncovering the heart of your story is not an easy process; it takes guts, persistence, and desire. These seven steps, however, will help you work through the process of revealing and making your memoir the jewel you know it to be.
I invite you to leave a comment. What do you think?
![Memoir Memoir](https://trada.herokuapp.com/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBdFJ2IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--79189736461ce686f5317571114d55428ffe0411/my-story-memoir-journal-183.jpg)
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Image Credit: QThomas Bower
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Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Amber Lea Starfire/@writingthrulife
“To me, reading through old letters and journals is like treasure hunting. Somewhere in those faded, handwritten lines there is a story that has been packed away in a dusty old box for years.”~ Sara Sheridan, Picture Quotes
I am very pleased to feature Amber Lea Starfire in this guest post about using journals and letters in your memoir writing as a way of retrieving memory and deepening the narrative. Amber is a writing coach, an editor and the author of several books, including two memoirs. I met Amber online when I first started writing my memoir in 2009 and count her among my most valued resources for journaling and writing.
My reviews of Not the Mother I Remember can be found on Amazon, Goodreads,LibraryThings and Riffle.
My Reviews of Accidental Jesus Freak can also be found on Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThings and Riffle.
Memoir Journal
Welcome, Amber!
When and How to Use Journals and Letters in Your Memoir
Writing a memoir is hard work. Having to rely solely on memory makes it even harder, which is why it’s important to research and verify the events of your life as much as possible. There are many ways to accomplish this, such as interviewing family members and researching political and cultural events to give context to your life events.
If you’re lucky enough to have source materials, such as journals and letters — either your own or belonging to key characters in your memoir — you possess treasure. Yet having these materials can also cause confusion. For example, should you include excerpts of these materials in your memoir or just to use them to verify details and solidify your recollections? And then, if you do decide to include excerpts, which ones do you choose?
How do you keep the right balance of excerpt and narrative?
Your decisions will rest upon what voices — points of view — you are portraying in your story and how well the voices within your source materials can work to move your story forward.
My first memoir, Not the Mother I Remember, began when I found boxes of my mother’s journals and letters. My purpose in writing that memoir was to explore our complicated relationship through the ways we each perceived and responded to the shared events of our lives, how our experiences did and didn’t mesh. My mother’s voice was essential to the story, so it was a natural choice to weave together and contrast our points of view using excerpts from her writing.
In my newest memoir, Accidental Jesus Freak, I also chose to use excerpts from my own journals and letters (my mother’s letters also make a brief appearance here) to illustrate some of the conflict I was experiencing. But for this memoir, I used these materials in a much more limited way.
What about your memoir?Let’s return to my original questions: how do you choose whether to use excerpts from existing material? And once that decision is made, how do you choose which portions to use? And when to use them?
Here are some questions to consider when making the decision to include excerpts from letters or journals:
- In what ways will inserting this excerpt add to my story?
- Does the excerpt convey a viewpoint or memory more succinctly and effectively than I could write it myself in scene or reflection?
- Does the writing uniquely illustrate a mindset or point of view or add to a characterization?
- Can it be added to the narrative as part of and without disrupting the narrative flow?
- Do I have the copyrights to the materials?
Things to keep in mind:
- You’re the editor — you can and should correct spelling and punctuation errors in the original material, UNLESS those errors are an important part of your character’s personality. For example, you may want to keep errors in excerpts taken from your childhood diary, because they illustrate the development of your character at that age. Otherwise, those kinds of errors are distracting and may jolt your readers out of the narrative.
For example, in Not the Mother I Remember, as Alzheimer’s began to take over my mother’s mind, her sentence syntax and choice of words became confused. However, in telling my story, I wanted to convey my mother’s intended message (which was clear) rather than have readers focus on her disease, so I corrected the errors in her writing. If I wanted readers to focus on the progression of her disease, I would have let those errors remain.
- It’s okay to remove portions and quote just the bits you need — as long as the meaning remains the same. You don’t want to distort the message of the original material. Whether you choose to use ellipses or not to indicate missing portions is up to you. It’s not required (no one will know otherwise), and too many ellipses may distract your readers.
- Choose your excerpts carefully and with purpose. You should be able to answer positively all of the five bulleted questions listed above.
- Avoid redundancy. Make your point with one or, at most, two excerpts that have the same core message. Readers will get bored quickly with reading the same types of entries over and over.
If you’re questioning whether to use an excerpt or not, try writing your passage both ways. In the first, include the excerpt. In the second, include a scene that portrays the same message or event. Which one is stronger and works better for your purpose? Not sure? Get some feedback from your critique group or a friend who can be trusted to tell you the unvarnished truth.
Don’t be afraid to experiment.
![Memoir Memoir](/uploads/1/1/9/8/119875885/109188058.jpg)
When used well and with purpose, including excerpts of journals, letters, and other original source materials can provide rich context and meaning in your memoir.
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Synopsis of Amber’s latest memoir, Accidental Jesus Freak:
From the author of the award-winning memoir Not the Mother I Remember, comes an extraordinary story of love and faith and a unique window into the Jesus Movement in the 1970s.
In 1973, Linda was a flute player and music major at a California community college, until she met and fell madly in love with a charismatic piano player, plunging into his world of music-making and drug-fueled parties. When, just three weeks after their wedding, he reveals that he’s been “born again,” Linda makes the spontaneous decision to follow him into his new religion and, unwittingly, into a life of communal living, male domination, and magical thinking.
With unflinching candor, Amber Starfire chronicles her journey as Linda Carr into the evangelical church culture, where she gives up everything for her husband and their music ministry. But in the process, she loses her most valuable assets: her identity and sense of self-worth. It is only when Linda returns to live with her birth family and faces her complicated relationship with her mother that she finds new purpose and the courage to begin to extricating herself from the limiting beliefs of her past.
Accidental Jesus Freak is the story of one woman, one marriage, and one kind of fundamentalism, but it is also the story of the healing that is possible when we are true to ourselves. Both a cautionary tale and celebration of personal empowerment, Accidental Jesus Freak is a powerful reminder for anyone who seeks to live a life authentic to who they truly are.
Author Bio:
Amber Lea Starfire is an award-winning author, editor, and writing coach in Napa, California.
Amber’s newest memoir, Accidental Jesus Freak: One Woman’s Journey from Fundamentalism to Freedomwill be released in February, 2018. Her first memoir, Not the Mother I Remember was a finalist for the Indie Book Awards for 2015 and the Sarton Memoir Awards in 2016. She also co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the ’60s & ’70s.
In addition to memoir, she has authored books on journaling and self-publishing — Week by Week: A Year’s Worth of Journaling Prompts & Meditations, Journaling the Chakras, and Publish Your Chaptbook.
Amber Lea Starfire’s passion is helping others tell their stories, make meaning of their lives, and access their inner wisdom and creativity through the act of writing. She offers courses and workshops in journaling and creative writing.
Visit her website at http://www.writingthroughlife.com.
Twitter @writingthrulife
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Thank you Amber for sharing your words of wisdom about memoir writing and for showing us how you used letters and journals in your two memoirs. I have excerpted letters and journal entries in both my first memoir and now in my work-in-progress second memoir and feel they add a deeper dimension to the narrative.
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How about you? Do you feel letters and journal excerpts add to the story?
Memoir Journal Magazine
We’d love to hear from you. Please join in the conversation below~
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Memoir Magazine
Next Week:
Monday, 2/26/18:
“Finding the Theme for Your Memoir and Why It’s Important”
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February 2018 Newsletter: Monthly Updates, Memoir Musings, Max Moments
Best Memoir Journals
“A Lenten Reflection “