by This month I’m starting a personal project to compile over 47 years’ worth of journals into a single document. Working through the various notebooks, loose scraps, and old Word documents will be a challenge, but I’m looking forward to it.
The exercise will let me revisit events and my thoughts about them as they happened — and to reflect on people (for example, my Dad, who passed away 29 years ago) and relive a few stories that would have otherwise faded.
I know about Storyworth and appreciate its reach and popularity in recently compelling several people I know (including Mom) to use the service to answer questions, incrementally asked, in writing:
“What were you like in high school?”
“What’s your favorite memory of your grandparents?”
“Write about the places your family vacationed when you were young.”
Typically the service sends the user one question per week for an entire year. Questions that are well-designed to elicit specifics about long-ago (and recent) tales, for users to then assemble in a slim volume.
My project won’t exactly be like that. For one thing, I’m not sure how frequently I’ll get to dive deep here during February. Duty calls. The plan is simply to capture some bigger events — and re-tell a few of the better stories and moments within my journals —in a clean, nice format that I can eventually share. It won’t be a memoir, or anything like that; more like refining the raw material.
Stuart Wade 