Post #108 – Memoir Writing – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Women’s Memoirs welcomes Susan Wittig Albert back. In the second part of her discussion of the use of diaries and journals in memoir and fiction, she provides a valuable list of suggestions for working with this type of material. If you have a diary or journal you hope to use, this article is a must read.
Women’s Diaries: A Record of the Present, a Legacy for the Future — Part Two
By Susan Wittig Albert
In Part One of this two-part post, I described the two diaries of professional writer Rose Wilder Lane, which formed the basis of my novel, A Wilder Rose
. The diaries, held in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, allowed me to see in detail the writing projects that Rose worked on during the years 1928-1935, the extent of her contributions to her mother’s Little House books, and the things she did in her everyday life.
Here, for example, are two paragraphs from the novel, describing the construction of the modern retirement cottage Rose had built for her parents on their farm. The house had central heating and electricity (even an electric stove and a refrigerator), which the farmhouse did not, and would be easier for Laura (62 and suffering from diabetes and other ailments) to manage:
But after the work began on the house—the Rock House, Papa and I were calling it—I managed to get only one more story written, “Gypsy Trail,” which Carl [Rose’s current agent] sold to Ladies’ Home Journal. The house lured me away from the typewriter, and instead of producing stories, my creative energy went into conjuring walls and floors and windows and shingles and, yes, electricity. It turned out that we could get electricity and a telephone out to the new house, but only if I would agree to pay for the power poles and lines, which of course I did because I also wanted to wire the Rocky Ridge farmhouse, where Troub [a nickname for Rose’s housemate, Helen Boylston] and I would live.
And the construction brought dissatisfactions. I wasn’t entirely pleased with the stonework, which looked too much like a crazy quilt to suit me. But Papa declared that he liked it, and what was done couldn’t be easily undone. The chimney seemed out of plumb to me, although Mr. Johnson and the chimney man both pronounced it straight. Papa hated the rough texture of the plaster; I didn’t awfully like it, either, and the plasterers didn’t even try to get the color right until I made a fuss. I altered Mr. Johnson’s plan for the bathroom, which made the plumber scowl. The flooring was the wrong width and had to be returned—and when the right flooring was laid, the wrong finish was applied. Five men worked an extra four days, sanding and refinishing the floors. And Missouri Power and Electric dragged their feet about the power lines until I threatened to sic a lawyer on them. The electricity finally came on at four thirty on the afternoon of the day before Mama Bess and Papa moved in.
All the details in these paragraphs are drawn from Rose’s entries for September, October, November, and December, 1928—100-plus three- and four-line entries. They provide a remarkably detailed record of the challenges she faced in building (and paying for!) her parents’ home. The diary is so full of interesting specifics that I could have written an entire chapter about the construction of the Rock House, but since it is only a part of a much larger story, I had to move on. Overall, though, it is fair to say that if it weren’t for Rose’s diaries, my novel could not have been so richly—and so accurately—detailed.
But A Wilder Rose wasn’t my first use of a diary as the primary source for a book. A few years earlier, I wrote Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place
, about the two decades of my life on a 31-acre homestead in the Texas Hill Country with my husband, Bill. Before I wrote the book, I reread my journals from those years. It was a fascinating journey into my own personal past, as well my professional life. But it was more: a journey into the evolving life of our homestead, which has been the primary focus of our married life, and into the evolution of our marriage. As I read, I annotated the entries and marked those I thought I might want to use in the memoir. When I collected the marked entries, they fell into thematic patterns that I used to create the chapters of the books. All my material was there in the journals. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
A few years later, I wrote An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days
. This book is a journal written for publication, filled with the events of my ordinary life during the year 2008. As it turned out (although I certainly couldn’t have foreseen what happened), it was extraordinary year in the history of our country. It witnessed the near-collapse of the American financial system and the election of our first black president, as well as several very important changes in my personal and professional life.
If you plan to write a memoir at some point in the future, I suggest that you start keeping a journal now. When it’s time to write, you’ll appreciate the reminders of what your life was like, and the details you find on those pages will be especially precious. And if you already have a journal, you have the raw material for a memoir, right there in those pages.
But perhaps you have someone else’s personal writing—your grandmother’s journal, for instance, or your mother’s diary—and you would like to use it as the basis for a piece of writing. Here are some suggestions of ways you might handle this kind of personal material.
Make a photocopy of the original (being careful not to damage a fragile document), and then put the original away in a safe place.
Transcribe the diary to a computer file. To see how the pros do it, read this document from the Minnesota Historical Society: http://www.mnhs.org/about/departments/processing/transcribing_manuscripts.pdf
Make a second computer copy of the diary, under a different file name, that you can use as a working document. Annotate this copy by cross-referencing entries and adding references to other documents you have discovered, your family’s history, your own interpretations of events and relationships, books you have read about the period, and so on. Your annotations will help you expand the material and see connections that may not be visible at first glance.
Find out as much as you can about how, when, and why the journal or diary was written. People often keep diaries during especially difficult periods in their lives. What was the life situation of the person who kept the diary you have? What compelled her to write it? For me, the answers to this question (there were several!) were crucial to my understanding of Rose’s diary—and of Rose herself.
No diary is written in a vacuum. Rose kept her diary during an important economic era (the Great Depression), a rapidly changing political environment (the New Deal, to which she became increasingly opposed), and a challenging climatological period (terrible heat waves and, in neighboring states, the Dust Bowl). In my annotations to the diary, I included as much of this material as I could—and I’m still adding to it, even though the novel has already been published. You may want to enlarge the diary you’re working with by doing research into the time and place it was written. The more context you can provide, the better you will understand the diary and the person who wrote it.
Add photos, drawings, mementos, and other memorabilia related to your diary. For various good reasons, I couldn’t include this material in the novel, but I’ve created a Pinterest board for my collection of photos. You might choose to print out excerpts from the diary and use them to create a family scrapbook, along with photos and other illustrative materials.
Once you have a clear idea about the scope and range of the material you have, it’s time to decide how you would like to use it. For instance, I chose to write a novel based on Rose’s diary. Someone else, using the same diary, might write an article for a scholarly journal, or turn it into a dramatic performance. You might like to make a simple transcript of your grandmother’s diary, or you might use it to write a factual history of her life. Or you might want to fictionalize her life, using the diary as a major resource.
Some diaries contain significant historical material. Rose’s diary, for instance, documents the building of the Rock House, among other things. I have donated my transcript of the diary to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum at Rocky Ridge Farm, where it is being studied as a source of information about the furnishings, portraits, and other items that Rose brought into the house during her years there.
History often seems like an abstract collection of people, places, and events. But once we start working with documents created by real people and describing real and compelling events, we find that the past is an infinitely rich field of exploration. Once you begin your investigation into it, you just might not want to stop.
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Note from Susan: If you don’t have any documents of your own you’d like to work with, consider joining the team at the University of Iowa Library, which has opened up its treasure-trove of digital documents, produced by real people and recording real events. You’re invited to help transcribe them. In the process, you’ll learn some valuable techniques, gain some invaluable experience, and contribute to a very worthy project.
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Susan Wittig Albert is the author of A WILDER ROSE, as well as over fifty novels, two memoirs, and several other books. Her series work includes the China Bayles mysteries, the Darling Dahlias, the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter, and the Robin Paige Victorian-Edwardian mysteries, co-authored with her husband, Bill Albert. Her website: www.susanalbert.com
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[NOTE: Women’s Memoirs suggests that with the holiday season approaching, A Wilder Roseis the perfect gift for yourself or a special friend. It is available both in print and for ebook readers.]
“Nuanced, moving and resonant… an absolute pleasure.” Kirkus Reviews
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diary/journal use in memoir and fiction
