Writing from diaries

During the past year, I’ve been working on four new projects: 

• a memoir in verse
• a historical young-adult novel
• a time-slip adult novel
• a memory book for my brother’s milestone birthday

As you can see, each project is unique. But they all have one thing in common: a diary. Each one either includes actual diary entries or is fully or partially written as a diary.

• The memoir in verse quotes and references entries from my diary and my great-grandmother’s (Gramma Clark). I wouldn’t have been able to re-create the timeline of events and my emotional response to them without reading through my 2011 diary.
• The young-adult novel is written as the diary of a girl living in 1918. While living through a pandemic, a global war, institutional racism, and the Suffrage movement, she had more than enough to write about.
• One protagonist (of two) in the adult novel tells her story in a diary. What better way to record a secret love affair, while confined to a “home for unwed mothers” than in a diary?
• The memory book includes scanned pages from Gramma Clark’s diary that reference events in my brother’s life. The witnesses to our lives, especially our youngest selves, give a treasure when they mention us in their diaries.

Why am I so enamored of using diaries as a tool and a form for creating fiction and nonfiction work? Here are a few reasons:

• Diaries provide a template for stories that cover a specific period of time, showing patterns and growth in a character’s life.
• Diaries mark important events in history, especially the history of a person’s life, which might not have appeared in newspapers and by other public means.
• Diary entries can deeply explore and reveal the innermost heart of their author, whether fictional or actual.
• A diary reveals to the reader what’s important and unimportant to its author, by what the author chose to include and omit from the entries.
• When you have a diary, you hold history—as it was made, as it was perceived and analyzed, as it was preserved.

Btw, recently I came into possession of a few diaries from another family member. You can imagine the hours I’ve spent with them! I’m already thinking of stories they will lead to.

Happy writing!