From Private Journal Entry to Public Essay

Most journal entries should stay where they are. They were written to get through a bad Tuesday or to settle an argument with yourself, and they finished their work the moment the pen stopped. Every so often, though, you reread a page months later and notice something in it that might matter to somebody else. That is the beginning of an essay, and only the beginning.

The entry and the essay look like relatives, which causes most of the trouble. Both are in the first person, and both may describe the same afternoon. Their readers are nothing alike. A journal is read by someone who already knows everything. An essay is read by a stranger who owes you nothing and can leave at any line. Here is how we would move a page from one to the other.

Wait until the entry has stopped being about today

A journal entry is written from inside the event. An essay needs a view from somewhere further along the road, because the reader has come for what you can see now that you could not see then.

We would not put a number of months on this. A better test is to ask what you want from the reader. If you want them to understand something, you may be ready. If you want them to agree that you were right, or to forgive you, the page is still doing a journal’s work. Leave it in the drawer for now.

Find the question underneath the diary

An entry records what happened. An essay asks what it meant, and the two can be surprisingly far apart. Before drafting anything, try finishing this sentence: this is an essay about ___, and what I did not understand at the time is ___.

Say your journal has twelve pages on clearing out a late aunt’s flat, to take an invented example. Reading them back, you notice you mention three times that you could not throw away her shopping receipts. The essay may have very little to do with the flat. It may be about what counts as a record of a life, and everything else now has to earn its place in that argument. Your best scene may not belong.

Expect to find more than one question, and keep only one. The others can go back in the notebook.

Write it again for someone who wasn’t there

Resist the urge to edit the entry into shape. Close the notebook and write the scene fresh, from memory, as if explaining it to an intelligent stranger across a table. Editing tends to keep the original’s private logic, which is exactly what a new reader cannot follow. An imagined entry might read:

Saw M. again. Same as the lake. Said nothing, obviously.

To the person who wrote it, that is a complete thought. A reader needs something more like this:

My brother and I have had one argument for eleven years. It started on a jetty the summer our father sold the house, and we have conducted it ever since by not mentioning it, which is what we did again that evening over dinner.

Nearly all of the extra words are ones you never needed to write for yourself. Other things usually change in the rewrite too:

• The order. A journal runs in the order things happened. An essay runs in the order the reader needs them, which may mean starting at the end.
• The self. On a private page you can be the victim or the villain as the mood takes you. Readers tend to trust a narrator who is fair to everyone, and that includes being fair to themselves.
• The ending. Entries simply stop. An essay has to arrive somewhere, even if where it arrives is a better question.

Keep the notebook open for one job, which is checking. Memory improves a story with each telling, and the entry may disagree with what you now recall. Where the two differ, the difference is sometimes the most interesting thing you have. If you quote your younger self, quote the words as written. Tidying them and presenting the result as the original is a small dishonesty the reader cannot catch.

Look after the people who never agreed to be in it

A journal has a cast, and none of them signed up. Your sister and your old manager appear there as you saw them on your worst days, with no chance to reply. Our community guidelines rule out sharing someone else’s private information without their consent, and we would ask a little more of you than the rule does. For each person in the draft, ask:

• Would they recognise themselves, and would anyone who knows them?
• Is this detail yours to tell? A friend’s diagnosis or a relative’s debt belongs to them, however much it affected you.
• What does the essay lose without this detail, and what would keeping it cost them?
• Could you show them this paragraph? If not, be clear with yourself about why.

Then you can ask them, cut the detail, or wait. You can also change a name or a job, and we would suggest saying that you have. What you should not change is any fact your argument rests on. If the piece accuses a named person of something serious, it may be worth getting proper advice before you go any further.

Decide what stays in the notebook

You are in the cast as well, and you are allowed privacy too. A personal essay does not owe the reader everything that happened to you. It owes them the truth about the part it chooses to discuss. You can write honestly about a divorce without saying why it happened.

Two checks can help here. Imagine the sentence being read by a colleague, a parent, or your own child in fifteen years, and notice which of those you flinch at. Flinching does not settle it, but the choice should be made awake. Then sleep on any passage you wrote in a rush of relief. A post can be taken down later, but you cannot be sure nobody has already copied it.

IvoryPen’s guidelines allow a consistent pen name. That can give you room, though it protects you less than it seems to if the people in the story could work out who wrote it.

Read it once more as a stranger

Our note on the last read before you publish covers distance and reading aloud, and both matter more here, since you are the person least able to see which sentences only make sense to you. If you can, ask someone who was not there to tell you what they think the essay is about. If their answer surprises you, believe it over your own.

Then think about what comes after. Personal writing tends to draw personal replies, and readers may answer with stories of their own. Responses here are read by a moderator before they appear, but it is still worth deciding in advance how much of the conversation you want to join. It is fine to thank someone and leave it there. Our note on thoughtful responses describes what you might hope to receive.

And the notebook goes back in the drawer with the original page in it, unedited. The essay is the part you decided to share with a stranger. The entry remains a record kept for nobody else.