The One Thing You Need to Write Memorable Memoir — Perspective
The difference between journaling and craft
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Growing up, I read the journals of famous writers. Often their letters, too. It felt naughty, illicit, here I was peering into the secret lives of dead strangers. From Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf to Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, it was thrilling to know the people behind the prose, but also to gain insight in how they used journaling and letter-writing as an experimental space, a training ground for what would become their short stories, essays, and novels.
Journaling and letter-writing are an important part of a writer’s journey, but they aren’t the destination.
Plath is famed for her confessional poetry, which was avant-garde for the time, joining the likes of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, all of whom wrote boldly about mental illness. In “Wanting to Die” Sexton writes:
But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
Writing so personally, so plainly and publicly was once considered taboo. But now, it’s common, even demanded of us to perform our pain for the public. We are now all poets singing our siren songs for strangers on the internet. However, there’s a difference between sharing aspects of our lives and crafting powerful narrative non-fiction. In an 1962 interview with Peter Orr, Plath says it eloquently when asked about the direction of the Ariel poems that would become her most celebrated:
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate…
