By Nita Sweeney

Five of my books have been published. They are all memoirs. Two are easily recognizable as such while the other three are shaped like self-help or how-to.

After my fifth book and second “true” memoir launched in early June, more than one person asked, “How do you write more than one memoir?” They don’t say it, but what I hear is: You’re not famous. Is your life that interesting?

To answer those unspoken questions, let’s turn to the definition of “memoir.” 

Merriam-Webster says:

• a narrative composed from personal experience
• an account of something noteworthy

A memoir is a story worth telling that is based on someone’s experience.

“I’m going to write my memoirs when I’m old.” Nope. A memoir is not your entire life story. It’s a slice of your life or an angle on your life. But it is not your whole life. Memoir is not autobiography.

Memoir is also not biography. For many years, I referred to what became my fifth book as “The book about my dad.” His life may interest some people, especially our family but, (sorry, Dad) there was not much noteworthy about him. Only when I began to weave in my mental health crisis that occurred during the same time period as his illness, did I feel I had a story worth telling.

And, memoir does not have to be one and done. 

Two of my five books follow a narrative much like a novel. “Here. Sit down with me. Let me tell you what happened in my life.”

That first memoir, Depression Hates a Moving Target, begins in March of 2010 and ends in October of 2012. It follows the start of my running adventure when, at 48, I decided to begin jogging after a tough few years in which my mental health was, once again, at risk. But I do flash back a few times to give context to what’s going on during those years. It’s a tale with a story arc and “character” development as one would craft when writing a novel. The difference is that all the things actually happened. But that was only a slice of time. An important (to me) change occurred, one worthy of explaining. Lots of other things happened during the time period covered in the book, but they didn’t serve the story.

My fifth book and second “true” memoir, Memorial: The Year my Dad and I Stopped Keeping Score, begins in January of 1995 and ends in January of 1996, so literally a “year in the life” book. The book begins when I learn that something was wrong with my father. And, I was still recovering from a bout of near-fatal suicidal ideation when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was getting better. He might not. And, all he wanted to do was play golf. This braid of cancer, mental illness, and love, set on golf courses in central Ohio, made it a story worth telling.

Does the book include everything that occurred that year? Absolutely not. Again, other things happened to me and my family during that time. But unless these events related to my relationship with my father, his illness, or my mental health, they wound up on the cutting room floor.

My other three “memoirs” are thinly-veiled as self-help or how-to. These qualify as memoir because I use my experience as the examples. I structured Make Every Move a Meditation as a classic how-to by answering these questions: Why might a reader want this thing I’m suggesting? What is it? How do you do it? What might block the reader from doing it? How can they overcome those blocks? 

While the book follows that how-to formula and shows how anyone can meditate while doing any movement form, it does this using events from my life, primarily me meditating while I run.

The same is true of A Daily Dose of Now. That 365-page daily reader is structured like a classic “meditation book” with a quote, a micro-essay, and an exercise. In this case, all of the micro-essays are my reflections on the quote and how I use mindfulness in my daily life. Again, that’s memoir!

Even You Should Be Writing, the writing journal I coauthored with Brenda Knight, could be classified as memoir because I share my personal experience at the beginning of each chapter.

So, how do you write more than one memoir? I begin with a few questions:

What is an interesting aspect of my life?

If I can explain why I find it interesting, chances are, it will interest someone else.

Where does the story start? 

Is there a concrete “story” to tell, something with a narrative arc: this happened which made this happen which led to this and so on. When I think about where a story starts, there is usually a moment when “everything changed.” In Memorial, the moment Dad said, “It’s in my bones” set the story in motion.

Where does the story end? 

I need to know the ending before I begin. Since it’s nonfiction, the ending already happened, but I need to know what event, what “ending” I will choose. I need to find where the resolution happened for me. It’s a bit of a book end. In Memorial, the ending came several years after my father died when something shifted inside me. That leads to the next question.

What am I thinking, feeling, questioning (or not) throughout? 

In memoir, the interior story happening to the memoirist is as or more important than what happened outside their heart and mind. Memoir readers want cause and effect. They want a story, not a report.

Am I willing to dive as deep as it takes to tell the story?

While most people’s lives are interesting enough that they could write more than one memoir, not everyone is self-reflective enough to do that. You must be curious about yourself, willing to tackle hard questions, and able to craft answers that satisfy the reader.

Ultimately, memoir (a story worth telling that is based on your experience) is infinitely shapeable, like tofu. It takes on the flavor of whatever sauce you float it in. It’s up to you to decide which taste to share.

About the Author

Nita Sweeney is the best-selling author of five books including the award-winning running and mental health memoir, Depression Hates a Moving Target. She runs ridiculously long distances for fun, enjoys chatting about the Enneagram, and sits in silence daily. When Sweeney’s not doing those things, she helps people find their way in writing, life, business, and sport. She lives in central Ohio with her husband, Ed, and their yellow Labrador retriever, Scarlet.

By Lynda Monk, MSW, RSW, CPCC

Every writer knows the feeling when you sit down to work on the novel, the essay, the memoir, and instead of words, you get static or feel stuck. The inner critic shows up first. The doubt shows up second. It can feel like the actual writing that matters seems to wait somewhere just out of reach.

Here’s what twenty-five plus years of working with writers, creatives, coaches, and helping professionals has taught me …the way through that static isn’t more discipline or a better outline. It’s a private, unpolished, judgment-free page. It’s your journal.

Journaling and “real” writing are often treated as separate activities as if one is for feelings and the other is for craft. I believe that separation sells journaling short. Used intentionally, your journal isn’t a warm-up act before the writing begins. It is part of the writing. It’s where your voice gets expressed freely and where your truest draft might actually live.

I have been an avid journal writer, and at times a sporadic journaler (which is also fine), all my adult life. Journaling has helped me write books, prevent burnout as a social worker, explore issues related to my identity as an adoptee, and so much more. The transformative power of journaling is also at the heart of my work as leader of the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW.org).

Why Every Writer Needs a Private Page

Published writing is, by necessity, shaped for an audience. You’re thinking about structure, pacing, what the reader needs to know and when. That’s valuable work but it’s also work that happens under observation, even if the observer is only the version of you that imagines future readers.

A journal removes the audience. There’s no one to please, impress, or explain yourself to and that absence of an audience is exactly what makes it powerful. When you’re not performing on the page, you write differently. You write truer and freer. You stop reaching for the clever phrase and start reaching for the honest one and honest is almost always more interesting.

This is why so many working writers keep a journal alongside their "real" writing, not instead of it. It’s not a lesser cousin to the manuscript. It’s the foundation that both you as the writer, and the project you are working on, can grow out of. Journaling can be a powerful practice for both your personal and professional growth as a writer.

How Journaling Sharpens Your Writing Craft

The reality is journaling is writing. It is using the written word to express your thoughts, feelings and experiences in your life. It is a meaning making practice. The more we write the better we get at writing. This simple truth is part of the reason journaling can help you sharpen your writing craft and skills.

I believe, and have witnessed in my own writing and that of others, many concrete benefits of journaling for writers including the following:

Journaling builds fluency. Writing regularly, even badly, even in fragments, keeps your writing muscle warm. Writers who journal daily report far less friction when they sit down to their "real" work, because they haven't neglected the act of writing in their lives.

Journaling trains observation. A journal is a place to practice noticing. For example, you might notice the exact color of a sky, the specific thing someone said, the small detail that reveals character. That noticing transfers directly into scene-building, dialogue, and description in other writing projects. Journaling creates distance from perfectionism. Because a journal entry was never meant to be shown to anyone, it lowers the stakes. When the stakes are lower, our nervous system can calm and the internal editor quiets down. Many writers discover their strongest, most alive sentences not in a polished chapter but in a scrawled journal entry they never intended anyone to see. Journaling is about the process and not about the product or perfectionism!

Journaling helps you metabolize what happens to you. Writing is fed by lived experience, and unprocessed experience tends to stay stuck rather than becoming material. A journal gives you a place to move difficult or complicated experiences through you and, often, into your work. It is a place to write to know, grow, and care for yourself. This not only supports your other writing, it supports you as an individual.

How Journaling Helps You Know What You Want to Say

Many writers don’t struggle with how to write. They struggle with knowing what they want to say. This is where journaling does some of its most important work.

A journal is a discovery tool, not just a record-keeping one. When you write without an agenda, without trying to be right, consistent, or profound, you often surprise yourself. Themes you didn’t know you cared about start repeating. Questions you didn’t realize you were asking start showing up on the page, again and again, until they’re impossible to ignore and you start to see what they have to offer you.

This is how a journal becomes a compass. It won’t hand you a finished thesis or a tidy premise but it will show you, over time, what keeps pulling at you and that pull is usually the real material. The book, the essay, the story you’re actually meant to write is rarely the one you planned. It’s the one that keeps showing up in the private pages of your journal, insisting on your attention.

5 Simple Journaling Practices to Try

You don’t need a special approach to start or benefit from journaling. A few reliable practices can keep you going, for example:

• Mindful moments. Sometimes people don’t know where to start with journaling. My favorite place to start is in the present moment. You can use simple mindful prompts such as “Right now, I feel …” or “Right now, I notice …” and use these sentence starters to begin your journaling.
• The unsent letter. Write to someone, living, gone, real, or imagined, saying the thing you’d never actually send. This is a powerful way to practice self-expression and access new material that might be sitting just beneath the surface of your awareness.
• Follow the repetition. Re-read a few weeks of journal entries and circle any word, image, or worry that keeps reappearing. That repetition is often pointing you toward your real subject.
• Five-minute free writes. Set a timer, pick a single prompt or image, and write without stopping or editing until the timer ends. Momentum matters more than quality here.
• The “what I’m not writing about” entry. Ask yourself directly, what am I avoiding putting on the page? Or what is that I don’t want to write about? Then write towards it, even briefly, and see where the journaling takes you.

None of these writing activities needs to be elegant. The goal isn’t a good journal entry. The goal is an honest one. The purpose is to put pen to page as freely, openly and honestly as you can. The benefits of doing such will begin to appear.

Bring the Page with You

Journaling won’t replace the discipline of drafting, revising, and finishing a piece of work. As writers, we all know nothing replaces that. However, journaling does something very important that drafting alone can’t – it keeps you connected to your own voice while you do the harder, more public work of shaping something for readers

If you take one thing from this, let it be this … your journal isn’t separate from your writing life. It’s the root system underneath it. The more you tend it, the more it can support everything else you write. The more it can nourish you as a writer!

I’ll be exploring how journaling can help you unlock the writer within along with a set of practices you can start using immediately — in my upcoming workshop for WNBA on the power of journaling for authors. I hope you’ll join me there.

Visit the event page to register today!

About the Author

Lynda Monk, MSW, RSW, CPCC is an author, speaker, registered social worker, certified professional coach, and Director of the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW.org). For more than 30 years, she has helped people harness the power of writing for self-discovery, healing, creativity, and personal growth. Lynda is a recognized leader in the field of journaling and co-editor of The Great Book of Journaling and Transformational Journaling for Coaches, Therapists, and Clients. She is also the author of The Adoptee’s Guide to Healing, Wholeness & Growth. Through her workshops, courses, and global journaling community, Lynda inspires people to connect more deeply with themselves, their stories, and their creative potential.