How to Write Your Life Story Without Starting at Birth
The people who finish one almost never set out to write a book. Here is what they do differently, and it is mostly about the order.
The standard attempt goes like this. You buy a notebook or open a document, write a heading, and begin with where and when you were born. You get through childhood in reasonable detail, slow down around your twenties, and stop somewhere in the middle of a paragraph about a job you had in 1987. The notebook goes in a drawer.
This happens to almost everybody, and the cause is not discipline. It is chronology.
Why starting at birth kills it
Three reasons, and all three are structural rather than personal.
- Your childhood is the part you have already told. It is the most rehearsed material you have, so the first weeks of writing produce pages that feel like transcription rather than discovery, and interest drains away early.
- Chronology has no natural stopping points. Every session ends mid-life, so there is never a moment where something is finished, and nothing sustains a long project like finishing something.
- The interesting years are furthest away. The decades you have never described to anybody sit at the far end of a very long road, and the project almost always dies before it gets there.
What to do instead
Step 1Write in pieces, and let each one be finished
Not chapters. Pieces. Eight hundred words about one thing: the first apartment, the job you hated, the year everything changed, your grandmother's kitchen. Each is complete on its own, which means every session ends with something done rather than something abandoned mid-sentence.
Step 2Start with the decade nobody knows about
For most people that is the stretch between leaving home and settling down. You have never described it to your children, it is full of decisions and strangers, and it is the part that would actually surprise somebody. Starting there means the project is producing value from the first week.
Step 3Answer a question rather than face a page
The blank page is expensive because before you write anything you have to decide what this section is about. A specific question removes that cost entirely. What did you eat when there was no money is answerable in four minutes. Write about your twenties is not answerable at all.
Step 4Write about people, not periods
Portraits are easier to write than narrative, and they carry the events along with them anyway. Twenty people described properly is a life story. Twenty years described properly is a chore that nobody completes.
Step 5Put the hard parts in
The instinct is to leave out the divorce, the lost job, the years you were not proud of. An account with all of that removed is pleasant, short and of no use to anybody. Your grandchildren will get their own version of each of those, and knowing you had one is the single most useful thing you can hand them.
Step 6Order it at the end, not the beginning
Once you have forty pieces, arranging them takes an afternoon. Trying to know the shape before you have written anything is what stops most people from writing the first piece. Write first, arrange later.
What to do about the people who are still alive
The question that stops more life stories than any other is what to say about a difficult marriage, a sibling you do not speak to, or a parent who was not good to you. Left unresolved it usually produces one of two bad outcomes: an account with a large silence in the middle of it, or one that never gets finished at all.
Three positions are worth knowing about.
- Write it now, decide later. Get it down while you can, and mark those sections. Whether they are included is a separate decision from whether they exist, and conflating the two is what causes the paralysis.
- Describe behaviour, not character. What somebody did is far more defensible and far more useful to a reader than a verdict on who they were. It also ages better, because your verdict may change and the facts will not.
- Write the version you would be willing to read aloud to them. Restrictive, and it produces something you will never regret and that nobody in the family can be wounded by.
What does not work is leaving the difficult person out entirely. A childhood account with no father in it reads as though something has been removed, because it has, and the absence is louder than any description would have been.
How long it actually takes
A real life story runs somewhere between fifteen and forty thousand words. That sounds enormous and it is about eight hundred words a week for a year, which is fifteen or twenty minutes at a sitting.
Nobody fails at this because fifteen minutes a week was too much. They fail because there was no week in particular, and the thing that was always going to be done on some Sunday was never done on any Sunday.