Writing Your Life Story

So You Want to Write Your Life Story?

Have you had lots of interesting things happen in your life that you'd like to share? Do you want to hand on memories about your parents and your childhood to your own children and grandchildren? Do you want to share your life story with other people, even if it's only with your closest friends and relatives?

Wanting to tell one's life story is what motivates many people to begin writing. I've heard many hours of autobiographical writing over the last twenty or so years since I began to write and to go to writing classes and groups. It's been a fascinating experience.

The immediacy of the experience and the detail that the writer is able to include can really bring this sort of writing to life. If you're writing about your own life, then you obviously care about your subject and that shows. It makes it compelling.

Pitfalls of Writing Autobiographically

There are a few pitfalls that people can fall into though when writing about their own experiences. One of these is trying to stick rigidly to the truth. Things don't happen tidily in real life. In a story, what you want to hear are the main events that have a bearing on the plot in a way that grabs the reader and makes for good reading.

But in real life, there are often digressions, delays, complications. It's easy to become so hung up about sticking to the letter of the truth that the story gets lost in and amongst the morass of detail. Sometimes a writer will defend what they've written, by saying, 'But that's what happened!' That may be, but there's no point in telling it like that if you're going to lose your readers.

Another thing that happens in real life is that there are often more people involved than you would choose to include in a story. Too many characters, real or fictitious, can be confusing for the reader. This is a particular problem when a real life story is being dramatised for film or television. As one dramatist wrote, 'People always have too many sisters'.

A solution to this problem is to conflate a few characters into one - take some people who have minor roles in the story and combine their actions and functions in one character. Of course, how you square this with the cousins and aunties that you're leaving out is your problem!

But probably the biggest problem that affects the readability of autobiographical writing is that writers feel they need to start at the beginning and keep on going. But really, what you're trying to do is tell a story, so you need a hook for the start of your autobiography just as you would for the start of a novel.

Write to Make Your Readers Want to Read

That might mean you will have to start with one of the big moments in the story rather than with your birth - after all, everyone gets born. It's hardly a unique occurrence! In my biography of Cliff Richard, I began the story, not at his birth or even in his childhood but at the big Wembley concert to celebrate his thirty years in show business. It meant I could start the story at a high spot, then go back and trace how he came from his early life to his long and illustrious career in pop music.

So when you're writing about your life, tell it like it is. But don't forget that people have got to want to read it, so tell it like a story too.