A writer friend called me once, suddenly worried about what would happen to her journals when she died. She was in her thirties at the time and healthy, so this wasn't an immediate problem. But she wrote in her journal only when she was really, really mad at her kids (teenagers), and she didn't want them to feel that they had been unloved if they read her journals after she was gone.

She got me worrying too. The happier I am, and the more I'm working on writing projects, the less I write in my journal. When I do write, it's just a lot of did-that-went-there, including weather data. But when I'm not writing, or I'm going through a bad time in my personal life, my journal turns into my therapist. There's much more energy in my journal writing then - things get really personal and detailed, and much more interesting. There's also a lot of whining.

So like my friend, I thought about the future of my journals. My first attempt at keeping a record of my life began at age thirteen with a pink leatherette diary that had a little silver key that didn't work. I only wrote about teenage boys in it - what they looked like, what they said, what they did - with each comment or observation followed by rows of exclamation points. It was a five-year diary - a tiny space for each day, but relentless in its march through days and months and years. (Beware of journals or diaries with dated spaces - the space will be either too large or small, and you'll feel guilty when you skip a day.)

A whole cabinet in my office is now filled with spiral notebooks, all the journals I have written since my first writing class. I have this vision of being very old, sitting by the fire, curling up with my cats, and rewriting hundreds of these notebooks. What a graceful, sane, productive life she led, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will say when they read them. What an organized, calm, and nonjudgmental person she was. They will say this because I'll leave out all my neurotic moments and bad behavior.

Then I wonder: Should I leave one rewritten version, neatly typed out, plus the stack of notebooks? Or maybe I should forget about rewriting, just burn the journals and depart this earth in dignified silence.

But then I think, Oh, if only I had my great-grandmother's day-by-day account of her life - her did-that-went-there, along with all the moments of high drama and bad behavior in her life - what a treasure that would be.

The fact is, one reason you write is to have ultimate control over your own reality, so someday I intend to rewrite every word, if not to whitewash my life, then to at least leave a well-written version of it.

Remember, you keep the journal, not the other way around. Consider what you'll do with yours. Burning or tearing it up is always an option, but don't be too hasty. When I reread my pink leatherette diary as an adult, I was so disgusted to realize that as a teenager, I apparently had the brain of a tadpole and was simply obsessed with boys that I threw the diary out. I regret it now, but on the other hand, I wanted to leave that ditzy teenager in the past. So you might say it was a cathartic move. But before you burn or tear up your journal, think about what it would be like to read the journal of one of your great-grandparents.

Excerpted with permission from the book Courage & Craft: Writing Your Life Into Story, copyright 2007 by Barbara Abercrombie. Printed here with the permission of New World Library, Novato, CA, 1-800-972-6657 ext. 52.