There is a force deep within human nature that compels people to share their life story. As far back as paintings on cave walls, people have felt a desire to share their own experiences with others. From children's diaries to adult journals to full-fledged autobiographies, true life stories must be told. This web page will give you resources and advice on how to write an autobiography on your life.
- Write Down the Main Highlights and Memories of Your Life. Let these highlights be reference points in your autobiography. Often this process helps you remember other related events and people.
- Outline Your Autobiography. There are different ways to approach the writing of your life story. You can write it in a linear, timeline fashion, starting from childhood, progressing through adulthood. Often, it is more interesting to organize it like a tapestry, winding its way through themes in your life.
- Become a Storyteller. Great autobiographies are not newspaper articles which include just the facts in chronological order; they are stories which have tone, dialogue, plot, character development, conflict, emotion, etc. Your autobiography will become better as you write it more like a story.
If you want to learn to write an autobiography, I highly recommend these outstanding books:
Your Life as Story: Writing the 'New Autobiography' and Writing Memoir as Literature. A complete and advanced book on writing your autobiography. This book demonstrates how to write character portraits, how to remember what you thought you had forgotten, how to unify a story with thematic conflict, how to write scenes with dialogue and employ other fictional devices, how to use humor and perspective, and how to move through time. The author shares her remarkable techniques for finding the essentials of story structure within your life's scattered experiences.
Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past. This book tells you how to write about the people and places and events in your life that have been important to you--whether you're writing a memoir, a family history or just a recollection of experiences you'd like to preserve or more fully understand. It gives you the tools to organize and recover your past and the confidence to believe in your life narrative.