How To-47: "How to Write an Autobiography"

How to Write an Autobiography

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Whether you have enjoyed a life well-lived or suffered through a life of hardships and mistakes, you probably have an interesting tale to tell. Writing an autobiography is an ideal way to capture the stories of your life and the times you’ve lived in, and unless you're famous, an autobiography or memoirs may be the only way those stories get preserved intact. If you are famous, an autobiography may be the only way to tell your side of the story and defend your legacy against those infamous "unauthorized biographies." Regardless of your situation, there's no time like the present to start writing about your past.

Steps

1. Understand your reasons for writing an autobiography. Your autobiography will turn out best if you write it simply because you want to, perhaps to share the experiences of your life with others, to give as a gift for your family, to try and understand your life and the forces that have shaped you, to preserve your legacy, or simply to exercise your desire to write. If money is your primary motivation, keep in mind that, unless you have some renown, your story will be a hard sell. While it's possible to sell a book about a relatively unknown person, the book really has to be something special. This means that you, the writer, need to care most about the story, not the money.
   
2. Read some autobiographies. The best way to get a feel for autobiographical writing is to read several good autobiographies. Ask friends, family, and your local bookseller for recommendations. The more you read, the more approaches you'll be exposed to, and while you don't need to copy any of these for your memoirs, you can get a lot of good ideas about how to organize your story and make it interesting.
   
3. Think about your audience. Your approach to writing will be a lot different depending on who your intended audience is. If you're just writing for yourself, and nobody will ever see your story, you can do whatever you want: take shortcuts, rant, ignore all the rules of grammar if you want. If you're writing for friends and family, you'll want to pay more attention to readability, but you can still take certain shortcuts because chances are your readers will already be familiar with many of the characters and stories. Writing for publication, however, requires a more thorough approach. Not only will you need to edit the manuscript to perfection, but you'll also need to constantly keep in mind that your readers may not know anything about the people or events in your autobiography.
   
4. Develop your theme. A story is generally more satisfying if it has a unifying theme or two. Rather than just reciting the events of your life like a timeline in a history book, think about what the main idea of your story -- the driving force of your life -- is. Maybe you're a rags-to-riches story, or maybe the central theme of your life has been the love of your spouse. Think about what's most important to you, and build your story around that. Having a theme in mind will make your story more compelling and help you weed out all those unimportant details.
   
5. Organize your autobiography. For obvious reasons, chronological order is the most popular style of autobiographical organization. It's pretty straightforward: start at the beginning, and when you come to the end, stop. A logical beginning would be your birth, but you may also want to start by giving an overview of your ancestors' stories. Conversely, sometimes it makes sense to skip over your early years and start sometime later in life. You needn't just go through your life year by year, however. You may want to organize your story more thematically. However you choose to organize your autobiography, it's a good idea to plan it out in an outline. You don't need to follow your outline when you start writing, but it can be a helpful guide.
   
6. Jog your memory. The best way to remember the past is to try and find things you have kept from that time, such as photos and letters. They may spark just one memory or a whole chain of them. Before you start to write about each stage in your life, try to find items you may have kept from each. Ask family and friends if they have saved anything of yours from that time.
   
7. Start writing. When you open the floodgates of memory, you will probably be eager to capture everything just right. Sit in a comfortable place, relax, and take it one page at a time. Be yourself: you’ll write faster and more naturally. Don’t spend too much time thinking about style and grammar, just write. You’re probably not trying to win any prizes, and even if you are, don't let the "art of writing" prevent you from telling your story. You can edit later.
   
8. Edit your completed work. Once you've hammered out your life story, let your manuscript sit for a few weeks before proceeding to edit it. You may find it helpful to ask others to read your story and comment on it. Take out the extraneous details, tie up the loose ends, and make sure your writing is crisp and readable throughout.
   
9. Preserve your work. Ensure you have at least one copy in a place which is safe from fire, flood or other damage – you don’t want such an important work to be lost. If your story is saved on your computer, make sure to print out a hard copy and save a backup copy. You may even want to back your autobiography up online. In most cases, you'll also want to have a plan for passing on your autobiography. You can do this either by trying to get the book published, publishing it yourself, or distributing copies to friends and relatives. Even if you decide not to distribute it right away, you are going to put lots of work into this project, and you should have a plan for passing on your story to your heirs.
   
10. Build a relationship using your autobiography. Children and grandchildren will learn many new things about you and other people, times, and places from your life story. As the writing process will remind you of these experiences, be sure to be intentional about sharing some stories with the next generation too. For example, these remembrances will make for interesting phone conversations with your family. Keep in mind that the way you grew up can be fascinating to your grandchildren (outhouses, one-room schoolhouses, and life before TV). They will have never met interesting people like your parents or grandparents. You have the power to bring these people to life through your memories, and you become a multi-dimensional person to them as they learn more about when you were a child, a teen, a young adult, a worker, a parent, and a grandparent. It's a legacy worth sharing.

Tips

• For many, scents are powerful memory joggers. If you want to remember details about your childhood home, for example, cook up one of your mom's old recipes that you haven't had in a long time. As the aroma fills the air you may feel like you're right back in your childhood home eating dinner with your family.
  
• Make your story vivid. Use descriptive words. Think about the Who, What, Where, When, How and Why of each memory. Use your senses to help describe your stories. Show, don't tell. At the same time, don't get bogged down in unimportant details. While you want your autobiography to be vivid, you don't want it to be boring. Too many details--listing everyone that was at a party or trying to include all the events of each day--will bog the story down. You also don't want to have to spend a lot of time researching every last detail, such as the exact dates of each event, or you'll never finish your story.
  
• If you are hand-writing your manuscript, make sure your writing is legible; you do want people to be able to read it. Consider having your written copy typed up when you finish it.
  
• Honesty is the best policy, but you don't have to include every horrid secret you may be hiding if you don't want to. Conversely, you may decide to spruce up your legacy a bit by embellishing your accomplishments just a little. After all, it's your story.
  
• Want to tell your story, but don't have a lot of time to write? There are a variety of shortcuts available for purchase, including fill-in-the-blanks books and fill-in-the-blanks binders.
  
• If your writing is atrocious, or if you just need some help getting your thoughts in order, consider hiring a ghost writer or a professional personal historian. Celebrities do it all the time.
  
• Oral and/or video personal histories can be fun, especially if you don't particularly enjoy writing, and they offer the advantage of preserving your image and voice. Audio/Video personal histories are somewhat more difficult to distribute, but you can fairly easily copy your video or audio yourself or find an audio or video duplication firm that can accommodate your duplication needs for a modest fee.
  
• Other things to include in your autobiography: Dedication, Foreword, Vital Statistics, Chronology Sheets, Family Tree, Epilogue.
  
• If the purpose of your autobiography is to pass on your story to your heirs, consider including memorabilia (e.g. pictures, heirlooms, medals, mementos, letters, etc.) and putting your story in a scrapbook format. Of course, you may not be able to copy the memorabilia that accompanies your autobiography, so you still have to think about what you intend to do with your original work and other items such as medals or bulky heirlooms.

Warnings

• An autobiography is different from a memoir. This wikihow combines the two; make sure you know which you want to write. An autobiography is like a self-written biography; it outlines the events and experiences of the author in a factual way. A memoir, however, is more intimate and focuses on emotion and perspective. Be sure you use the right term for your work, the different titles target different audiences.

Related wikiHows

• How to Write a Salable Life Story
  
• How to Make a Memorial Book
  
• How to Self Publish a Book
  
• How to Copyedit and Proofread Written Work
  
• How to Copyright a Book

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