Using Letters and Diaries as Source Material

Letters and diaries do something memory cannot

Ask anyone over seventy to describe their childhood kitchen and they will give you a tidy, well-lit room. The letters they wrote from it in 1958 tell a messier story: the price of coal, a neighbour's illness, the weather on a Tuesday in March, a phrase of dialect nobody uses any more. Memory edits. Documents don't. That is precisely why they are so valuable to a memoir, and precisely why they need careful handling. Used well, a single sentence from a diary can carry more weight than a page of reconstructed reflection.

This is written for mature writers who already have the shoebox, the tin trunk or the file of scanned pages, and who are wondering how to turn it all into something publishable without turning the book into a transcript.

Begin with an inventory, not a chapter

Resist the urge to start writing while the material is still in a heap. Spend a fortnight cataloguing instead. It is dull work, and it saves months later.

• Give every item a number and record the date, sender, recipient, place of writing and current location.
• Note condition, and whether anything is fragile, water-damaged or fading.
• Photograph or scan each piece before you handle it repeatedly. For print reproduction, scan at 300 to 600 dpi, front and back, and keep the files in more than one place.
• Store originals flat, out of sunlight and away from damp, in acid-free sleeves or boxes.
• Write down the gaps. Missing years are narrative opportunities, not failures.

An inventory also tells you what you do not have. Plenty of memoirs are built convincingly around a period where nothing survives, as long as you are honest about the reconstruction.

Transcribing: decide your rules before you start

Do you preserve original spelling, punctuation and dialect, or quietly modernise? Both are defensible; changing your mind halfway through is not. Most family histories work best with lightly modernised transcription used for reading, and faithful transcription kept for the quotations that appear in the book. Keep two versions of each document if it helps.

Adopt a small set of conventions and stick to them. Square brackets for words you have supplied to make sense of a gap. [illegible] where you genuinely cannot read a word, and a question mark inside brackets where you are guessing. Use [sic] sparingly; a page studded with it looks like a scolding. If a writer's grammar or spelling is part of their voice, let it stand in the short quotations and mention it once, kindly, in the narrative.

Quote briefly; explain generously

The commonest mistake in memoir editing is letting documents take over. A two-page letter reproduced in full stops a chapter dead. Instead, treat the quotation as a small bright object and do the work around it.

• Quote a sentence or two — the liveliest, strangest or most revealing line.
• Attribute it plainly every time: Elsie to her sister, 14 March 1943. Readers should never have to hunt back for who is speaking.
• Explain the context the reader cannot supply: the rationing, the conscription, the family argument, the fact that the letter was never posted.
• Then say what it means to you now, and why you chose that line over the other fifty.

Set quotations in italics or as an indented block, consistently. If you are quoting across several documents, vary the length — a single clause in one place, three lines in another — so the page keeps its rhythm.

What documents reveal that memory overlooks

Read your letters and diaries chronologically once, straight through, before you write a word. Watch the tone rather than the facts. A breezy letter from 1939 and a careful, hedging letter from 1942 by the same hand tell you something about what was happening in between, even if neither mentions it. Letters that grow shorter. Gaps of months. A postscript about a cousin who is never mentioned again.

Dates are the other gift. Family legend often compresses or reorders events, and a postmark can gently correct it. Where your memory and the document disagree, say so on the page. Memoir is not a courtroom, but you owe your reader the difference between what you remember and what you can prove.

Noticing what a writer does not say is where the subtlety lies. A mother's diary that records the weather and the meals but not the son who has gone away is not empty; it is full of a particular kind of silence. You are allowed to interpret that, as long as you present it as your interpretation.

Copyright, permissions and publishing practicalities

Copyright in a letter or diary belongs to the person who wrote it, not to whoever owns the paper. In the UK this usually lasts for seventy years from the end of the year of the writer's death, and unpublished work can still be in copyright. If you are quoting at any length from someone else's writing, get written permission from the estate or copyright holder, and print a credit line where you use it. Quoting your own parents' letters is normally straightforward, but check who inherited the rights if there are siblings or other heirs.

For reproduction, scan images at 300 dpi minimum for print and convert to greyscale unless colour genuinely adds something. Tidy a scan, but do not over-restore it; readers want the handwriting, the ink stain, the creases. Images increase page count and print cost, so group them into a plate section if the budget is tight, and reduce the resolution for an ebook.

Finally, think about where the originals will live. A county record office or local archive may take them, which is a gift to future researchers — but ask before you publish, because some deposits carry conditions. Then place your documents on the shelf beside the book, catalogued, labelled and preserved, and go back to writing. The pages are yours now; you have done the listening.