Memory journal prompts
Memory prompts should ask for sensory detail rather than significance, because significance is the part you can reconstruct later and detail is the part that goes. What the room smelled like is worth more in ten years than what it meant.
How to use these
Pick one memory and stay in it for the whole entry. Write it in the present tense if that helps you see it.
Where you came from
Start here if you do not know where to start. These are the memories with the most detail still attached, and detail is what makes an entry worth rereading.
- What is the first house you remember, room by room?
- What did your family sound like on an ordinary evening?
- What is a smell that puts you somewhere immediately?
- Who was your first real friend, and how did it start?
- What did the street or road you grew up on look like at dusk?
- What was always in the kitchen, and who made it?
- What did the adults argue about, as far as you understood it then?
- What music was playing in the house, whether you liked it or not?
The moments themselves
One memory per entry. Write it in order, including the boring parts, because the boring parts are where the detail hides.
- What was the best day of a year you would otherwise not remember?
- What is a thing someone said to you once that you never forgot?
- What did you want to be, and who told you about it?
- What was your first job actually like, hour by hour?
- What is a small kindness someone did for you that they have almost certainly forgotten?
- Where were you the first time you felt properly grown up?
- What is a day you would live again exactly as it was, with nothing changed?
- What did you get badly wrong, and what happened next?
The people, and what lasts
The ones worth doing while the details are still there. They take longer than the others and are the reason people keep this kind of journal.
- Who is gone that you would like to write down properly, while you still have the details?
- What was the last day of something, that you did not know was the last day?
- What do you want remembered about you, and by whom?
- What did their hands look like, and what were they usually doing?
- What story does your family tell every time, and what is the version you saw?
- Who taught you something you still use every week?
- What object would you keep out of the whole house, and whose was it?
- What would you want someone reading this in fifty years to know about now?
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