For William Boyd’s book Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart, he wanted to portray a human’s life through each decade of the 20th century.
Rather than a memoir or autobiography, the book is written as a series of personal journal entries, because as a journal, the reader doesn’t know what will happen next, whereas in a memoir, the reader already knows the history behind the times.
The challenge in writing a journal that is not your own, and after the fact rather than through the duration of this character’s life, is that you have to completely get into the character’s mind, as though to write completely from someone else’s point of view.
