How to Start an Autobiography When You Have No Idea Where to Begin
Nobody is stuck on chapter nine. Everybody is stuck on the first page, and the reason is that they are trying to open the wrong way.
Nobody abandons a life story at chapter nine. They abandon it on page one, and usually within the first fortnight, and it is almost always for the same reason: they opened with an introduction.
An introduction requires you to know what the whole book is about, which is something you cannot possibly know before writing it. So you sit there attempting to summarize a life you have not examined yet, produce three stiff paragraphs that sound like a form, and conclude that you cannot write.
You do not have a writing problem. You have an opening problem, and it is solved by starting somewhere that is not the beginning.
Five openings that work
Step 1Open on a single room
Pick one room you knew well and describe it. Your grandmother's kitchen, your first apartment, the shop floor. What was in it, what it sounded like, who was usually there. It is completely concrete, it requires no decisions about significance, and by the third paragraph you will be writing about people without having tried to.
Step 2Open on the day something changed
Not the whole event. The specific day. Where you were standing, what you were doing when you found out, what you did for the rest of that afternoon. Starting in motion is far easier than starting from stillness, and it drops the reader into a life already underway.
Step 3Open on somebody else
Write a full portrait of one person who shaped you. Describe them, not your feelings about them. You will find you have written yourself into the piece by the halfway point without any of the self-consciousness that comes from starting with I was born.
Step 4Open on an object
Something you still have, or something you lost. The tool, the ring, the car, the photograph. Objects carry dates, places and people, and describing one is a task with an obvious end, which is exactly what a first session needs.
Step 5Open by answering a question somebody asked you
The easiest of all, because it removes the authorship problem entirely. You are not writing a book, you are answering a question. Do that forty times and you have written a book, and at no point did you have to face a blank page.
Three rules for the first month
- Do not edit anything yet. Editing while drafting is the second most common way this dies. Write badly and quickly, and fix it in a year when there is something to fix.
- Do not decide the order. You are gathering material, not building a book. The order is an afternoon's work once you have forty pieces.
- Do not read anybody else's memoir while you start. Comparing an unwritten first draft to a published book has never once helped anybody.
If you do not think of yourself as a writer
Most people attempting this have not written anything longer than an email in decades, and they assume the resulting prose is the obstacle. It is not, and the belief that it is does more damage than any amount of clumsy sentences would.
Family histories are not read for their prose. They are read for their content by people who are related to the author, and those readers want detail and honesty and will forgive absolutely anything else. A plain sentence carrying a real fact beats an elegant one carrying nothing, every time.
- Write the way you talk. If a sentence would sound strange said aloud, it is wrong. Read a paragraph out loud and you will hear it immediately.
- Short sentences are not a weakness. They are the most reliable fix for almost every problem in unpractised writing.
- Do not reach for a bigger word. The plain one is nearly always better and it always sounds more like you.
- Dictate it if writing is genuinely uncomfortable. Speak it, have it transcribed, tidy it lightly. The result reads more like you than anything you would have typed.
How to keep going past week three
Week three is where these projects die. The novelty has gone, the easy material is used up, and nothing external is asking for the next piece.
Two things reliably get people through it. The first is a fixed slot rather than an intention: the same twenty minutes on the same day, so it does not require a decision each week. The second is a reader. Send each piece to one person as you finish it, a child, a sibling, a friend. Somebody waiting for the next one is worth more than any amount of resolve, and it is the closest thing to a guarantee that this gets finished.
About the introduction you wanted to write
Write it last. By then you will actually know what the book turned out to be about, and it will take twenty minutes instead of six weeks. Almost every good opening page in a memoir was written after the rest of it.