How to write your life story, one story at a time

You don't need to be a writer to write your life story, and you don't need to start with the day you were born. Make a list of moments worth telling, pick one, tell it out loud, and write it down. Then do the next one.

The steps below work for a life story, a memoir or an autobiography. You can follow them with a notebook, a computer or a phone, and you can start this week.

Decide who it's for

Before you write anything, name the people you're writing for: your grandchildren, your son, your sister, great-grandchildren you haven't met yet.

This decides what you need to explain. Your brother knows who Aunt Ruth was and why nobody used the front room. A grandchild reading your stories in 30 years won't. Writing for that grandchild reminds you to explain what a party line was, what a gallon of gas cost, and why the family moved to Ohio.

Make a list of 10 to 20 story seeds

A story seed is one specific moment, written in a few words. It isn't a chapter like "My childhood" or "My career." It's a single day, place or event you could tell in five minutes.

Some examples:

• The night the barn caught fire
• Learning to drive in Dad's pickup
• My first paycheck, and what I bought with it
• Meeting your grandmother at the roller rink
• The spring the river flooded our basement
• Getting my draft notice
• Christmas the year Mom was in the hospital
• Why we left Pittsburgh
• The week the twins were born

Write seeds down as they come, in any order, on the back page of a notebook or in a note on your phone. Add to the list whenever something comes back to you. If you get stuck, work through a list of life story questions, or try these ways to remember more of your life.

Start with one story, not your whole life

Pick one seed and tell that story first. Choose the one you most want to tell, or the one your family always asks you to tell again.

You don't have to start at birth. Start with the story you remember most clearly. You'll put the stories in order later, once you have a few.

Tell it out loud first

Before you write a story, tell it to someone: a grandchild, a friend, or the voice memo app on your phone.

Out loud, you use your own words, you don't stop to fix spelling, and you remember the funny parts. A listener's questions also show you what needs explaining ("Wait, who was Earl?").

Then write down what you said, or play the recording back and type it up. If typing is hard for you, here's how to write a memoir without typing.

Write scenes with specific details

Write each story as a scene: one place, one time, what happened, and what people said. The details are the part only you can supply, so put them in.

Here's the difference:

Flat: We didn't have much money when I was a kid.

Specific: The winter I was nine, the gas company shut off our heat. Mom turned on the oven, left the door open, and we did our homework at the kitchen table in our coats.

To find details like these, ask yourself:

• Where exactly were you, and what could you see?
• What time of year was it?
• Who was there, and what did they actually say?
• What did it smell or sound like?
• What happened right after?

Use plain words. Write it the way you'd tell it at the kitchen table.

Introduce the people, places and objects

Your readers may never have met the people in your stories or seen the places, so introduce them.

• People. Give the full name and how the person is related the first time they appear: "my mother's older sister, Ruth Kowalski." Then add one thing they did or said that shows what they were like, such as how Ruth answered the phone with "Kowalski residence, who's calling?"
• Places. Say where and roughly when: "our second-floor apartment on Elm Street in Toledo, around 1962." Then describe what was there: the porch, the coal furnace, the bus stop on the corner.
• Objects. One object can carry a whole story: Dad's lunch pail, the sewing machine, the car you bought with your first paycheck. Say what it looked like, where it was kept and what happened to it.

Handle the hard parts your way

You decide what goes in. You can write about something painful and decide later whether anyone else reads it.

Some stories involve war, divorce, a death, illness or money trouble. You have choices:

• Write it for yourself first, put it away, and decide in a month whether it belongs.
• Say what happened in a sentence or two without every detail: "My first marriage ended in 1971. We were too young."
• Leave it out. Nobody's life story includes everything.
• Think about the living people in it. You can leave out names, or ask them before you share.

You can stop any story partway through and come back another day, or not at all.

Set a pace you can keep

Aim for one story a week. Do that for a year and you'll have 52 stories. One every two weeks gives you 26.

Pick a regular time, such as Tuesday mornings after breakfast, and give it 30 to 60 minutes. A story can be one page or five. If you'd like a question to answer each week, FamilySearch's free #52Stories list gives you one question a week for a year.

Sort the stories into chapters later

Don't plan the structure before you start. Once you have 15 or 20 stories, lay them out and group them.

You can group them two ways:

• By time: growing up, school, the service, marriage, raising kids, work, retirement.
• By theme: places we lived, work, food and holidays, faith, the people who raised me.

Spread the printed pages on a table, or write each title on an index card, and move them around until the order makes sense. Add a title page and, if you like, a dedication.

Keep copies in more than one place

Make at least two copies of everything and keep them in different places. That's what the Library of Congress advises for personal digital records: store the copies as far apart as practical, so one fire or flood can't destroy them all.

• If you write by hand, photocopy the pages or take a photo of each one with your phone.
• If you type, save the file on your computer and email a copy to a family member.
• Give a printed copy to a relative who lives in another town.

Get it to your family

Don't wait until the whole book is done. Share stories as you finish them, and put them all together at the end.

• Read a story aloud at a family dinner, or email one to the grandchildren each month.
• Save the collection as a PDF and send it to everyone. A PDF opens on almost any phone or computer.
• Print copies at a copy shop and put them in binders.
• Have it printed and bound as a book. Here's how to print your life story.

Three ways to do it

You can write it yourself, talk and have it typed up, or have Biographer interview you and write each story.

1. Write it yourself. Use a notebook or a computer and follow the steps above. This suits people who like to write and have the time.
2. Talk, then transcribe. Record yourself on your phone, then type it up or ask a family member to. Your phone's keyboard also has a microphone button that turns what you say into text.
3. Use Biographer. Biographer is an AI interviewer and writer that works in the web browser on a phone, tablet or computer. You talk or type, and it asks follow-up questions about what you just said.

With Biographer, you press Write Story when you're ready, and it writes the story from your conversation in first person ("I") or third person ("he" or "she"). Read each story before you share it, because it can get a name or a date wrong. Tell it what to fix, or edit the text yourself.

Your stories go into a book you can download as a PDF for free. Once you have 30 or more stories, you can order it as a printed hardcover from $39 plus shipping and tax, shipped within the US.