You write a journal to clarify your story for yourself, to understand your life better. But in a memoir you tell your story, in book length, to others. Both are forms of life-writing, but with two exceptions, only journaling works as therapy.

About six years into the endless rewriting of my first book, MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, A Memoir, people commented, “Well, at least it’s good therapy.” Well, no, I had to say. Therapy is therapy. Writing is writing.

It’s true that I needed to tell the story of my fifty-plus years of relationship with my mother. But this need came as much from my writer’s soul, to capture The Story, as to get the personal story out of myself. This writer’s need comprises one of the two exceptions to that fact that journal writing, not memoir, is the primary form of life-writing that works as therapy.

The quest of therapy is to learn about your feelings, needs, desires, and so on, in order to realize the meaning of your life and perhaps change accordingly. Journaling helps you achieve this. In a journal, you are concerned with telling yourself your story, clarifying it for yourself. Memoir, however, is a story form about some aspect of your life that you share with, and must interest, others.

In a journal you write, “I ran into John at the supermarket yesterday.” You don’t have to describe the special ambiance of that supermarket in that part of town. You don’t have to explain who John is because you already know. “John” is a kind of shorthand for a whole experience of this man.

Of course you might decide to jot down some salient details about John today and/or yesterday, either for yourself or for reference if you eventually do write a memoir. But in a journal, this is a choice, not a necessity. Moreover, you needn’t describe John in complete sentences. Phrases that make sense to you will work just fine in a journal. And you can choose not to write such details as well.

Then there’s dialogue. “We talked about – ” and, journaling, you can report what John and you talked about. Or you can choose to repeat the some or all of the actual exchange. I once had a conversation with someone who was making me crazy. The only way I could understand how he did it was to write every word either of us said after a particularly grueling chat. But if you do write down everything the two of you said, you do not have to edit it for a journal; whereas with a memoir you must shape the dialogue, including deleting everything that does not move the story along.

Chronology is yet another factor separating a journal from a memoir. In a journal, scenes flow onto the pages as you remember them. But a memoir requires deliberate story structure. The scenes need not follow a straight line; you can have flashbacks and other deviations. But you must decide on their order.

And, naturally, in a journal you can use cliches because, again, this material is only for yourself. “I remember when he broke my heart.” You know what you mean. You do not need to entice anyone else by depicting your singular experience of a broken heart.

Finally, in a journal, you can provide a lot of exposition. But a memoir is like fiction in that too much exposition bogs down your tale, and the tale is the thing you are pursuing. Taking on a memoir, you are a writer.

All the people in a memoir are characters. They are as three-dimensional, as fully portrayed, as in fiction, except that they are real. At the same time, you are totally focused on getting each scene exactly right, getting down the tone of voice of each character as well as their small, telling behaviors, presenting dialogue that reflects the characters and keeps the story moving, describing the setting so vividly that it becomes intrinsic to the story, and capturing the precise emotions of the moment in a way that entices or repels or otherwise affects the reader viscerally and emotionally – and linking all the scenes in the right way. This kind of attention to the story separates you the person, who would use writing as therapy, from you, the writer.

This kind of attention to the story separates you, the writer, from you, the person who would use writing as therapy.

However, as mentioned earlier, there is one other time when a memoir can be theraputic. In order to strip away the superficialities of an emotional scene and get to its core, in order to avoid cliches, it is often necessary to put away your writer self, go back in time and immerse yourself in your memory.

Feel everything in the moment you want to describe as intensely as possible. Feel it emotionally and in your body and how and where in your body it manifests itself. Become acutely aware of how you are feeling and what you are seeing, hearing, smelling; and notice how everything in the external world appears to you in the emotional state into which you’ve placed yourself. Pay attention until you can describe it all exactly.

But then return to your writer self and get it all down.

For ultimately the memoirist is always looking at their material with the writer’s objectivity, polishing each scene again and again, and rechecking the way the scenes are linked to build a story that will engage, if not compel, the reader, which is the primary goal of the story-teller.