Finding Pennebaker

When topics are really heavy – my dad’s death, my son’s near death, or my own medical missteps – I transcribe relevant journal entries into a word document then try to somehow carve out a cohesive narrative.

So, for me, sometimes essay writing means piecing together entries from my journal. Like putting together a puzzle, I dump out all of the pieces and then start with the corners (in this case, the beginning and end). I often don’t even know what the big picture is until I’m done.

I realize this is a horribly inefficient way to craft an essay. In fact, Joyce Maynard specifically advises against this strategy in her Creative Live classes on personal essay and memoir writing. But I have found that reading through my journal entries, and then transcribing the most poignant snippets, helps bring me back to that place of raw feeling. Perhaps, most important, it’s a fantastic way to process big emotions.

Finding Pennebaker
A few years ago, I discovered James Pennebaker’s work about the healing power of narrative writing. Ever since, I’ve been doing his four-day exercise to purge everything on the page as part of my writing process. On the last day, I write a letter to the one character who featured most prominently in that writing (there’s always one!).

When I wrote about my son’s heart defect, I did the Pennebaker exercise at least three times. The letters I wrote as part of that exercise were to my son, Jack, and to Barbie, the woman who saved his life. And I published two essays – one about navigating his illness and a second about the night we almost lost him. The exercise helps me find an anchor with light-hearted stories, too, including this one about reconnecting with my ex-fiancé.

So this “purging content on a page” approach seems to work for me. While I can’t promise it will work for you, I can say it will be worth the effort. Just last week, Anne Lamott tweeted this: How to write: Stop not writing. Get and keep your butt in chair. Write really bad small sections of the whole—passages, moments, episodes, memories—til you have an incredibly shitty 1st draft. Then take out the boring parts, the lies and pretensions. Then write a better 2nd draft.

If you really think about her advice, it’s not all that different from transcribing journal entries into a Word doc.

Getting to Work
Whether you choose to work from your journals to write an essay or not, no one can dispute the power of putting words on a page to make sense of your mind – and then reading them after some time goes by. In fact, one of my favorite ways to mine my life for essay ideas is to read through the year’s journal entries every December.

Give it a shot, then ask yourself some tough questions: What did you learn over the past year? What would you like to change? What gifts of self-knowledge did you receive? What would you like to share with other people who may find themselves filling similar shoes?

Happy writing,
a