Here they are, short and sweet. Three do-able tips to write your life story:
1: If you want to take the stress away from writing your life story, for heaven’s sake, DON’T think of it as writing your “autobiography.” When you think of an autobiography, you may picture thick volumes on library shelves. Scary! However,you can write by hand, type on computer, or record on a tape recorder, your “life story” in small chunks.
2: Doing it a little at a time is the key, and you do NOT have to do it in sequential order.
It is also the natural way to write. Some days, you may think of a story, event, or something that happened in the past. Write it down.
Nothing can be more grueling than think that you have to start from childhood and go forward from there. Write down whatever the heck you feel like writing at the time.
We all have our own timeline. You can pick out any and everything from ANY POINT in your timeline and write about it. You can put it in a notebook, in order, later.
Just make sure that you start writing something, anything, that has to do with your life story down on some sort of schedule. How about once a week? Even once a month is much better than nothing.
3: When was the last time you look at your SENT e-mail? It would be great to have the letters that we have written to people over the years. Especially from years long past. Some people, smarter than me, kept copies of letters they sent, say, back in 1968.
Um, I never did. How about you?
What we DO have is email. Many times, I have looked over personal email that I’ve sent to family and friends and realized that there is valuable treasure to be found.
For example: If nothing else, if I can copy and paste parts of my email in the file/documents where I keep my life story stuff (I do it on computer), and put the date on it, I have something special.
You have an e-mail IN box and an e-mail SENT box. Start digging around in there and copy and paste things that may fit into your life story.
See? Three tips that you can handle.
Your life matters. You say, “It’s not interesting.”
I say, “How did you feel when _ happened?” and “How do you feel about your children and grandchildren?”
Your life story IS interesting to your loved ones and will be cherished by unborn generations yetto come into your family.
You really can easily create a personal and priceless treasure. Just get going!
