How to Keep a Journal

It doesn’t have to be a journal. But you need something to aid your memory.

Memory and journal writing

As a memoirist, I want to be as faithful to my lived experience as possible. That means leaning heavily on my memories. Many writers rely on artifacts, mostly journals, to help with their writing. However, I am a lousy journal writer.

I have a love/hate relationship with keeping a journal. I’ll go through phases where I’m determined to develop a journal writing habit. I’ll buy a nice leather-bound journal or even a traditional cheap black and white composition book. And I love the feel of a good pen in my hand. After all, I’m a writer.

But my resolve to keep a journal will last a page, maybe two. As a left-hander, my script is awful, and I’m a more practised keyboardist than pen and paper writer. The journal will gather dust on my nightstand. And recently, I’ve discovered that my excellent memory is enormously faulty. Such is the nature of human memory. So I need some method to capture the salient details of my writer’s life.

The big fish story

Memories change over time. For instance, fishermen have a habit of overstating their catches. Over time, their stories change. What was once a 10” to 12” bass grows into a 50-pound catch that takes hours to land.

The fisherman doesn’t change these facts maliciously. On the contrary, these innocent exaggerations are perhaps first included to enhance the stories. But through telling and retelling the storyteller actually believes the enhancements. Instead of remembering the core event that prompted the memory, we remember retelling the memory, and that’s where the trouble starts. The memory becomes vulnerable to change, by a process that will be explained below. People will often swear by their memories in ways that lead to arguments, even when knowing memories are extremely malleable.

Our perspectives change as we grow. If we live in a house when we’re growing up, it’s our large kingdom, no matter the size of the house. When we return to the house after we’ve grown up, we see it as much smaller than we once imagined. The house is the same size, but our perspective has changed. We are physically bigger and also have more worldly experience. It doesn’t mean our memories are faulty. It just means our perspective has changed.

Faulty memory in action: I got drunk and saw The Shining. Except I didn’t.

Apart from disease and brain accidents, normal memories can be faulty, even with personal experiences that we swear are absolutely true. In 1980, when I was 16 years old, I sailed to Hawaii with 11 other people on a 42-foot Trimaran. This adventure included many iconic episodes that I have retold throughout my life. Fortunately, I kept a journal of the entire trip. A couple of firsts happened on this trip: 1) I got drunk on a 6-pack of Heineken on a Hawaiian beach; and 2) I saw The Shining, one of my favourite all-time movies, in a theatre with my shipmates.

Most people will remember the first time they got drunk. My experience was better than most. I didn’t get sick, but I was underage and inebriated enough that I needed a chaperone. As I sat on that warm beach on a summer night under bright stars, I turned to see my chaperones, the captain’s daughter and the 2nd mate, frantically making out on the beach. Ah, the power of teenage hormones after living in close quarters while crossing the world’s biggest ocean for our almost 30-day voyage. This memory has stuck with me.

During that trip, a handful of the crew and I saw The Shining at a movie theatre. I was a fan of horror movies even though as a teenager I hid behind my hands, watching through spread fingers. But I loved this movie so much that the next day, I bought a red t-shirt with white crooked letters on the shirt that said “R E D R U M.” Movies are a major part of my artistic life, and I’m now somewhat of an expert regarding Stanley Kubrick movies. This, too, is a memory that has stuck with me.

Over the years, when telling people about my Hawaii trip, I recalled getting drunk on a beach with the captain’s daughter and 2nd mate, and then with their help, staggering to the movie theatre to meet up with our shipmates to see The Shining. I’ve told that story dozens of times through the years. These are major events in my life. Except, that’s not what happened at all.

About a decade ago, I found my journal from this sailing voyage. It was packed away in a keepsakes box at my parents’ house. Once they passed away, I got my journal back. I kept that journal faithfully and thus have a reliable record of my Hawaii trip against which to check my memory.

Now, 40 years later, I have recently written about this Hawaii trip for the first time. As it turns out, I’ve been lying (misremembering) about these events for years. These two episodes happened on different days and on different islands. I got some of the details correct for each event, but through retelling the stories so many times, the details got merged into consecutive episodes of the same larger event at the same place and on the same night. The way my memory twisted the actual events is a good example of how fallible human memory is. The fallibility is entirely consistent with the neuroscience of how humans create memories and the processes by which we encode and then recall them.

Famous misheard song lyrics

Another experience happened that convinced me of the unreliability of my own memory. When I was a precocious child, I learned the lyrics to “Loves Me Like a Rock” by Paul Simon. My sister was driving and wanted me to recite the lyrics for her friends. I obliged, proudly. I sang “When I was just a boy / and the devil called my name. / I’d say “Who do, who do you think you’re fooling?” / I’m a constipated boy.” My sister and her friends howled with laughter. I was completely embarrassed, not understanding that the keyword in the lyrics was “consecrated,” a word I didn’t know. For years, I retold this story as an embarrassing moment. I told about how I was 4 years old and I made this mistake. Except, recently I found out that couldn’t be true. As I wrote about this embarrassing moment, I discovered that the song wasn’t released until 1973. I was not a precocious 4-year old at all. I was 9 years old — and embarrassed all over again for a different reason. A 4-year old could be forgiven for not knowing the word “consecrated.” A precocious 9-year old probably knows the word “constipated.”

The fallibility of human memory

Memory is highly suggestible. We have all heard about eyewitness testimonies in which witnesses have made mistakes in identifying crime suspects and end up sending innocent people to jail. For instance, according to Rachel Barclay’s essay “Your Memory is Unreliable, and Science Could Make it More So,” when a police officer asks a witness, “What colour hat was the bank robber wearing?” a typical response might be “Red, no black, definitely black,” even though the question has “prompted the witness to vividly remember a black hat, when in fact the robber wore no hat at all.”

For a more extreme example, most of us vividly remember the traumatic events of 9/11 and the fall of the World Trade Center towers in New York. In Greg Miller’s article, “How Our Brains Make Memories,” he refers to Karim Nadler, a memory expert who was a post-doctoral researcher as NYU at the time. You would think that a memory expert would have a sound recollection of this iconic event. As it turns out, Nadler recalled “seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn’t alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.”

Memories are vulnerable to change through the way they get encoded in the brain. When we make a memory, the memory is “consolidated.” That is, we record a memory of the event. When we retrieve that memory, the record is “reconsolidated.” At this point, memory is vulnerable to change. Mark Fischetti’s article “Why Do Our Memories Change?” suggests that “every time we subsequently recall that memory . . . . new information can interfere with the old information and alter the memory.” Your perspective has changed, and through remembering a memory and retelling, changes are introduced into the memory. Thus, the little fish you caught as a child turns into a record-breaking monster fish that takes hours to catch.

Alternatives to a journal

So what can a writer do who doesn’t like to keep a journal and yet recognizes the fallibility of human memory?

I take a lot of notes. I have a paper file of story ideas going back 30 years, scraps of paper with notes I have jotted down to remind me of the genesis of a story idea, just enough details to keep the story alive. I have converted many of them into an Excel file with the kind of writing (story, essay, poem), the approximate date of the idea, and suggestions for places to submit. It’s rare that I’m without a pen or paper, but in our increasingly electronic world, I’ve found that sometimes I don’t have a pen handy. Thank goodness for my smartphone.

I use the notepad application on my smartphone to keep lists of story ideas or to write paragraphs as they come to me. I know that if I wait, I will forget the idea. Memory is highly interruptible. If I have a great idea in the shower or while driving (the places where more ideas are born and die than anywhere else), if I don’t record it quickly, I know I will lose it. If someone talks to me, or if I start in on another task, the idea is lost for all time. It’s frustrating when you recognize a good idea and then it’s gone before you get a chance to jot it down, whisked away as if by wind, never to be recovered.

I use the voice memo application or I’ll ask Siri to take note using the talk-to-text feature on my iPhone while I’m driving. Driving requires a lot of attention and brainpower. I have learned that if I wait to park to record an idea, I may lose an excellent idea forever.

I use the Pocket application to save and categorize articles for later reading. As a writer, I also read mountains of information. I consume hundreds of articles a day, reading news incessantly and saving interesting articles that I may want to refer to in my writing. Having a single electronic place where I can find and retrieve the voluminous amounts of information I encounter daily is enormously helpful.

Also, I keep all my email, which is a great resource from which to retrieve life facts. I have not deleted any emails since the early 2000s. As I am working on my memoir, I can go back in my emails and uncover facts, especially events that happened to other people that I may have forgotten or misremembered or correct an erroneous timeline.

Sensory memory is a specific kind of memory and a bit safer from change than episodic memory. We all have memories in which a particular scent or sound plays a prominent role. I can safely reconstruct my feelings and impressions of an important event in my life. Those details provide the emotional texture of events that I’m writing about and are true for all time. But getting the place and time details of an event as accurate as possible requires a little help for my fallible memory.

I still regard my memory as stronger than average, and I’m still a good teammate for a trivia competition. But I am now humble with respect to the limitations of memory. I will no longer bet on my memory as 100% correct. Rather, when pressed about a fact, I will say “I’m pretty sure,” or that “I’m 99% sure,” especially if I feel I know something beyond a shadow of a doubt. That’s usually a sure sign that I’m wrong.

I know I’m not alone. Everyone struggles with the fallibility of human memory. All of us who use our memories for a living are trying to be as accurate as possible with our life’s details, but we’re also making it up as we go. So we do the best we can within the limits of human memory. What other options do we have? Except of course to tell about that one time when my skinny 6-year-old self caught an enormous 75-pound catfish!

Lee G. Hornbrook is a writer and 33-year higher education professional, including 22 years as an Adjunct Professor of college English in every time zone in the continental United States. He has traded teaching for working at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library and writing as much as possible. He is on Twitter @awordpleaseblog and has a personal blog A Word, Please.