How to write your own life story

Most advice about this is written for the person who wants *your* stories — their children, usually, who mean it kindly and have handed you a book with My Life Story on the cover. Almost none of it is written for you, sitting with the thing, wondering how anyone is supposed to begin. So: a few things that make it easier, from people who have actually got one finished.

Don't start at the beginning

The single most common reason these books stay empty is that page one says *childhood*, and childhood is eighty years ago and enormous. You are being asked to summarise, and summarising a life is genuinely difficult — it's a job for a biographer with an index.

Start with whatever you can already picture. The back green. The first Monday in a job you hated. A particular Christmas. It doesn't matter where it sits in the order, because nobody reads these straight through like a novel, and anything that collects your answers can put them in order afterwards. The order is the easy part. Starting is the hard part, so start where it's easy.

Write it the way you'd say it

• Say the answer out loud first, then write down what you said. Almost everyone writes more stiffly than they speak, and it's the spoken version your family wants — they know what you sound like.
• Three sentences is a real answer. It doesn't have to fill a page. A short, specific answer beats a long, general one every time, and "I don't remember much about that" followed by the one thing you do remember is worth keeping.
• Don't tidy the grammar. Nobody has ever reread a parent's memoir and wished the punctuation were better.
• Put the detail in, especially the ordinary ones. What things cost, what was on the radio, what your mother called the front room, how far you walked to school. The specifics are what people can't get anywhere else — the big events are usually already family knowledge.
• If you're not sure of a date, say roughly and move on. "Some time after the war, maybe '48" is fine. Stopping to check a date is how an afternoon of writing turns into an afternoon of not writing.

What to do about the things you'd rather not write down

This is the question people rarely ask out loud, and it stops more of these books than the blank page does. A life has divorces, fallings-out, things that were nobody's business at the time and may still be nobody's business. If the book is going to your children, you may not want all of it in there.

• You are allowed to skip a question. Not answering something isn't a gap in the record; it's an editorial decision, and it's yours.
• Decide before you write, not after. It's far easier not to write a thing down than to take it out once it's on the page — and if somebody else is compiling the book, harder still.
• Answer the feeling without the facts, if you want the fact of it known. "That was the worst year of my life and I'd rather not go into why" tells your family something true and keeps the rest to yourself.
• Consider who's living. The rule most people settle on is that their own story is theirs to tell, and other people's stories mostly aren't — particularly anyone still around to mind.
• Write the private version separately if you want it recorded but not read yet. A sealed envelope with a name on it is a perfectly ordinary thing to leave.

Finishing it

A life story doesn't get finished; it gets stopped at a reasonable place. Nobody in your family is waiting for completeness — they're waiting for your voice. Thirty answered questions that sound like you are worth more than a hundred that were filled in dutifully, and far more than an empty book with good intentions in it.

If it helps to have a deadline that isn't yours, give a copy to somebody for a birthday or Christmas. A date in the diary does more for this than any amount of resolve.

If one question a week would suit you better than a book

That's what StoryPrompt is, and it exists because the blank book defeats most people. One question arrives by email each week for a year — specific ones, written for a British life rather than an American one — and you type as much or as little as you like. The answers collect into a typeset book you can download whenever you want.

• Skipping is genuinely fine. A question you never answer simply isn't in the book — there's no blank page where it would have been, and nothing waits for it.
• You can rewrite any answer at any time, and the next download has the new version. Nothing is fixed once it's sent.
• One honest limitation: once a question is answered, there's no way to remove that single entry from the book while keeping the rest. So if something shouldn't be in a keepsake, the reliable move is not to answer that question in the first place.
• It's £25 once, not a subscription — and it's a PDF you download and keep, not a printed book that arrives in the post. You can take a year's worth to a print shop and have it bound, and it's laid out at A5 for that, but you'd be arranging that part.

If you'd rather do it without paying anyone, the hundred questions to ask a parent or grandparent works just as well pointed at yourself — print it, answer one a week in a notebook, and you'll have done the same thing.