How to Begin an Autobiography

Doing Your Research

Start documenting. It's very important for a budding autobiographer to document their life regularly. Journals, videos, photographs, and mementos of the past will be extremely helpful for you as you start walking down memory lane. We often remember things incorrectly, or struggle to remember specifics, but objects can't lie. Photos will tell you the truth. Your journal will always be honest. If you don't already, start keeping a detailed journal of your day-to-day life. The best way to give yourself a reliable record of what was going on in your world and in your head is to keep a journal every night before you go to bed. Take lots of pictures. Imagine what it would be like to have forgotten what your best friend from school looked like, and not have a picture of them. Pictures will help jog memories later and provide a helpful record of places and events. They're essential for autobiographers. Video can be especially moving to look back on. Seeing the way in which you've aged on camera, from youth to adulthood, or seeing an old family pet living and moving around can be a powerful experience. Take lots of video over the course of your life.

Interview your family and friends. To start collecting notes and start working on an autobiography or memoir, it can be instructive to talk with other people. You may feel like you've got a good sense of yourself and your "story," but other people may have a very different version of you than you think. Ask them for their sincere impressions by conducting one-on-one interviews and recording them, or even writing up a survey and letting others fill it out anonymously. Ask specific questions of your friends, family, and acquaintances: What is your strongest memory of me that i cannot forget? What is the most significant event, achievement, or moment of my life? What's a time you remember me being difficult? Have I been a good friend? Lover? Person? What object or place do you most associate with me? What would you want to say at my funeral?

Travel and talk to long-lost relatives. One excellent way of looking for meaning in a life and finding a motivation to start writing can be found in the past. Get in touch with distant relatives you might not have previously related with, and visit locations in your past that you might not have visited in a long time, if at all. See what's become of your childhood home. Go find the old park where you used to play, the church where you were baptized, the place your great-great-great-grandfather is buried. See it all. If you're the child of immigrants, it can be very moving for many people to visit the birthplace of your family, if you haven't already. Arrange a trip to the homeland of your ancestors and see if you identify with the place in a way you hadn't before. Try to get a sense not only of the story of your life, but the story of your family's life. Where did they come from? Who were they? Are you the child of cattle ranchers and steel workers, or the child of bankers and lawyers? On what side did your ancestors fight in an important war? Has anyone in your family been to prison? Are you the descendant of knights? Royalty? The answers to these questions can make for powerful discoveries.

Go to the family archives. Don't just look through your own documents and memorabilia, look through the leavings of your ancestors. Read their letters back and forth, written during wartime. Read their journals and diaries, making copies of everything to archive the objects safely, especially if you're dealing with delicate documents that are very old. At the very least, it's a great idea to look through old photographs. Nothing can jog stronger emotions and powerful nostalgia quicker than seeing your grandparents wedding day, or seeing your parents as children. Spend time with old photographs. Every family needs a reliable archivist, someone who takes charge of looking over the family's documents. If you've got an interest in digging around in the past, start taking on this responsibility. Learn everything you can about your family, your history, and yourself.

Consider planning an exciting project to write into your autobiography. Lots of nonfiction books are planned beforehand, plotting an exciting change in your life, travel, or project to document with a book. It can be a great way to generate material. If you're worried that not much exciting has happened to you in your life, consider making a big change and writing a proposal to get it funded. Try being a fish out of water. If you're a city-dweller, see what would happen if you moved to the country for a year and decided to eat only food that you could grow. Spend a year researching farming methods and homesteading skills, propose the project, and strap on your gardening gloves. You could also travel to a turbulent location, getting a gig teaching overseas, somewhere exciting and unfamiliar to you. Write about your experience being there. Try to give something up for a long period of time, like throwing away your garbage, or eating processed sugar, and document your experience of this experiment. If you have an exciting enough proposal, lots of publishers will advance you some money and a contract if you've got a good track record of publishing, or if you've gotten a really great idea for a non-fiction project.

Read other autobiographies. Before you get started on your own, see how other writers have approached the task of recording their lives in print. Some of the best writing comes from writers taking on the challenge of their own lives. Some classic autobiographies and memoirs include: Townie by Andre Dubus III I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Life" by Keith Richards Me by Katherine Hepburn Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

Finding a Starting Place

Find the emotional truth of your story. The hardest thing about writing an autobiography or memoir is in finding the core of your story. At the worst, an autobiography can be a rambling series of boring details, flying by whole months and years without any interesting or specific details to hold up the story for itself. Or, an autobiography can elevate mundane details to feel important, profound, and grave. It's all got to do with finding the emotional core of your story and keeping it at the forefront of your story. What is your story? What is the most significant part of your life that needs to be told? Picture your whole life, as you've lived it, like a beautiful mountain range off in the distance. If you want to give people a tour of your mountains, you could rent a helicopter and fly over it in 20 minutes, pointing to little things in the distance. Or you could take them on a hiking trip through the mountains, showing them the nitty-gritty, the up-close, and the personal. That's what people will want to read.

Name the way in which you've been changed. If you're struggling to find the relatable part of your life, start thinking of big changes in your life. What's the difference between the way you used to be and the way you are now? How have you grown up? What obstacles or struggles have you overcome? Quick exercise: Write up a short one-page portrait of yourself 5 years ago, 30 years ago, or even a couple of months ago, if necessary–however long you need to account for a significant change in yourself. What would you have been wearing? What would have been your major goal in life? What would you have been doing on an average Saturday night? In Dubus' Townie, the author recounts what it was like growing up in a college town, where his estranged father worked as a successful and famous novelist and professor. He, though, lived with his mother, doing drugs, getting into fights, and struggling with his identity. His transformation from being an out-of-control, anger-obsessed "townie" to a successful writer (like his father) forms the core of the story.

Write a list of the important characters in your story. Every good story needs a strong supporting cast of other characters to round out the narrative. Although it's your life that will form the main structure and focus of the autobiography, nobody wants to read a self-absorbed rant. Who are the most important other characters in your story? Quick exercise: Write up a one-page character sketch of each member of your family, focusing on questions you've asked of yourself, or asked others about yourself for research. What is your brother's most crowning achievement? Is your mother a happy person? Is your father a good friend? If your friends are more significant in your autobiography than your family, focus more on them. It's important to keep your list of main characters as small as possible, and "blend" characters, if necessary. While all the boys you used to hang out with at the bar, or all the people you used to work with may be important at some point in the story, throwing 10 new names at us every two pages will quickly overwhelm your reader. It's a common writer's technique to blend them into a single character to avoid burdening the reader with too many different names. Pick one main character per important setting.

Decide where most of the story will take place. What will the setting of your autobiography be? Where do the most important dramatic shifts, or events, or changes take place? In what way has that placed shaped you and your story? Think both in terms of the geography and in terms of the specifics–your country and your state might be just as important as your street, or your neighborhood. Quick exercise: Write down everything you associate with your hometown, or the region you're from. Do you identify as a Midwesterner, if you're from Iowa, or do you identify as an Iowan? When people ask you about where you're from, are you embarrassed to describe it? Proud? If you've moved around a lot, consider focusing on the most distinctive, memorable, or critical-to-the-story locations. Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart, which chronicles a life on the move and his tumultuous relationship with his brother, the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, involves dozens of moves and living spaces, but will often summarize them, rather than dramatizing them.

Limit the scope of the book. The difference between a successful and unsuccessful autobiography is whether or not you'll be able to limit the scope into a single, unifying idea, or whether the amount of different details will overwhelm the story. No one can include their entire life in a story. Some things will have to be left out. Deciding what those things will be can be just as important as deciding what will go in. An autobiography is a record of the entire life of the writer, while a memoir is a document that covers a very specific story, period of time, or aspect of the writer's life. Memoirs are more versatile, especially if you're young. An autobiography written at the age of 18 might be somewhat tedious, but a memoir could be great. If you want to write an autobiography, you need to pick a unifying theme to carry through the story. Maybe your relationship with your father is the most important part of your story, or your military experience, or your struggle with addictions, or your rock-solid faith and the difficulty in holding onto it.

Start with a rough outline. When you start getting some sense of what you think your autobiography or memoir might include and where you might go with it, it's helpful for many writers to write up a rough outline of where the story will go. Unlike in fiction, where you've got to invent the plot, you already will have some sense of where your story might end, or what will come next. Outlining can be a helpful way of looking at the major plot points all at once and deciding what to emphasize and what to summarize. Chronological autobiographies work from birth to adulthood, following closely to the order of events as they occurred in your life, while thematic and anecdotal autobiographies will jump around, telling stories based around particular themes. Some writers prefer to let whim drive the car, and not a complicated outlined plan for the plot. Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash wanders around his story, starting at his home in Jamaica, then going back in time, constantly shifting around like a good late-night conversation on the front porch with an old timer. It's a wonderful and familiar way of structuring an autobiography, impossible to outline.

Drafting Your Autobiography

Just start writing. The biggest secret that successful writers, novelists, and memoirists have about the process? There is no secret. You just sit down and start working. Every day, Try to write some more of your autobiography. Get some more out on the page. Treat it like you're mining raw material out of the earth. Get everything out, as much as possible. Worry about whether or not it's good later. Try to surprise yourself before your work is done. Ron Carlson, a novelist and story writer, calls this commitment "staying in the room." While you might want to get up and grab a cup of coffee, or fiddle with your record player, or take the dog for a walk, the writer stays in the room and sticks with the difficult part of the story. That's where the writing happens. Stay in the room and write.

Write up a production schedule. Many a writing project has faltered due to lack of production. It's hard to sit down at the desk every day and actually get some words on the page, but it can be a lot easier for some people to write up a schedule and try to stick to it. Decide how much you'd like to produce on a daily basis and Try to meet that level every day. 200 words? 1200 words? 20 pages? It's up to you and your work habits. You might also decide on a set amount of time you can commit to the project every day and not worry about a number of words or pages. If you've got a solid 45 minutes of quiet after you get home from work, or before you go to bed at night, set aside that time to work on your autobiography undisturbed. Stay focused and do as much as you can.

Consider recording your story and transcribing it later. If you want to write an autobiography but aren't thrilled about the idea of actually writing, or if you struggle with things like vocabulary and grammar, it might be more appropriate to record yourself "talking" your story, and transcribe it later. Get yourself a good drink, a quiet room, and a digital recorder and hit the green button. Let the stories flow. It might be helpful to have someone to talk to, treating the recording process more like an interview. It can be weird to just talk into a microphone by yourself, but if you're a great raconteur with lots of hilarious stories to tell, it might put you in your own element to have a close friend or relative to talk with and lob questions at you. Most rockstar autobiographies, or memoirs written by people who aren't professional writers, are "written" this way. They'll record interviews, telling stories and anecdotes from their lives, and then put it together with a ghostwriter who oversees the actual writing of the book. It may seem like cheating, but it works.

Let yourself remember incorrectly. Memories are unreliable. Most real-life stories don't fit together with the simplicity and the elegance of fiction, but writers have a tendency to let narrative guidelines and rules affect memories, polishing them and fitting them into the story. Don't worry so much about whether or not the story you're telling is 100% accurate, worry about whether or not it rings true in the emotional sense of the story. Sometimes, you might remember two important conversations with your friend Craig, both times over pizza at your favorite place. Maybe they happened on two separate nights two years apart, but for the purposes of the story it'd be a lot easier to make it all one conversation. Is there any harm in doing so, if it tidies up the narrative? Probably not. There's a difference between cleaning up the messy details in your memory and straight-up making stuff up. Don't invent people, places, or problems. No outright lies.

Tell off the "cool police." Every writer has an internal critic perched on their shoulder. That critic complains, finds everything too cliché, shouting insults into the writers ear. Tell that critic to can it. When you're first getting started, it's important to uncensor yourself as much as possible. Just write. Don't worry about whether or not what you're writing is perfect, whether each sentence is immaculate, whether or not people are going to be interested. Just write. Do the important work of cleaning it up in revision. At the end of each writing period, look back at what you've written and then make changes, or better yet let your writing sit on the shelf for a while before you do anything to make changes.

Incorporate as many other elements into your autobiography as possible. If you're going along and writing your story, you might eventually get stuck and find yourself at a loss for where to go next. Time to get creative. Use all your research and the documents you've collected to wrestle something out of yourself onto the page. Treat it like a collage, or an art project, more than a "book." Dig out a picture of your family from the era yore writing about and write about what you imagine each character was thinking at the moment the picture was taken? Write it. Let someone else talk for a while. If you've done some interviews with family members, write in one of their voices for a while. Transcribe an interview you conducted and get their input on the page. Imagine the life of an important object. Make your grandfather's brass knuckles he brought back from WWII be the point-of-view character for an argument between him and your father. Sit with your father's coin collection and imagine his collecting them, his feeling them, his looking through them. What did he see?

Understand the difference between scene and summary. When you're writing narrative prose, it's important to learn to distinguish between writing scenes and writing summaries. Good writing is paced according to its ability to summarize periods of time in narration and at a distance, and to slow down certain important moments and display them in scenes. Think of summary like montage in a movie, and scenes like particular exchanges of dialog. Example of summary: "We moved around a lot that summer. It was all scraped knees and gas station hot dogs, the hot leather in the back of dad's '88 Suburban. We fished at Raccoon Lake, got leeches at Diamond Lake, and visited grandma in Kankakee. She gave us kids a jar of pickles to split while dad got drunk in the backyard, fell asleep, and ended up with the god of all sunburns lobstering across his back." Example of scene: "We heard the dog whine and Grandma opened the screen door a crack to look out at him, but we could see she held her foot against the bottom of it, like she was scared of something she saw. Her hands were still covered in globs of pie dough and her face was like a mask. She said, 'Bill Jr. you touch that dog again and I'm calling the police.' We stopped eating pickles. The pickles seemed ridiculous, suddenly. We waited to hear what she would say next."

Write small and write specifically. Good writing is made of luminous particulars and specific details. Bad writing is made of abstractions. The more specific and detail-oriented you can make your writing, the better off your autobiography will be. Try to make each important scene as long as possible, get everything out of it that you possibly can. If it ends up being too much, you can always cut it back later. If the emotional core of your story revolves around your relationship with your father, you could give us 50 pages of a systematic takedown of his worldview, railing against his small-mindedness, or misogyny, or tyrannical ranting, but you might lose a lot of us three pages in. Instead, focus on things that we can see. Describe his after-work routine. Describe the way he said things to your mother. Describe the way he ate his steak. Give us particular details.

Use dialog sparingly. Most inexperienced writers over-use dialog, writing whole pages of exchanges between characters. Writing dialog is very difficult, especially in an autobiographical project. Only use dialog when characters absolutely need to speak, and summarize all other spoken language. Aim for no more than one exchange of dialog for every 200 words of summary and narration. When you're writing a scene, the dialog should be used to move the scene forward, and should also be used to show us something about how the character is experiencing the scene. Maybe it's important for the grandmother character that she be the one to stand up to Jay Jr. and tell him to stop. Maybe that's a big important change in the drama.

Be generous. There are no "good guys" and "bad guys" in real life, and they shouldn't show up in good writing. Memory has a tendency to colonize our opinions, and it can be easy to erase the good qualities of an ex-girlfriend, or only remember the good parts of college friends. Try to paint an even-handed portrait though, and your writing will be better off for it. There should be no straight-up evil characters that show up in autobiography, they need to have motivations and attributes all their own. If Bill Jr. is a drunken dog-beater, there needs to be a good reason why, not just because he's Satan reincarnate. Let "good" characters have moments of embarrassment, or failures of character. Show them in failure so we can see them in success and appreciate them more for it.

Stick with it. Keep to your production schedule as much as possible. There'll probably be days that you won't feel like writing much, but try to keep going. Find the next scene, the next chapter, the next story. Jump around if you need to, or go back to the research well to jog something else loose. If you have to put your writing aside for a while, so be it. You can always live a little more, gain some more perspective, and return to the book with fresh eyes. An autobiography can be an ever-changing thing. Keep living your life and writing new chapters.