Fiction is my forte, but when I taught Creative Writing, many of my students wanted to write life stories about their own lives or those of a family member or friend whose life they wanted to honor.
Excavating personal history is not so different than researching for a historical novel, so I put together courses for Writing Your Life and for Journaling. If you are a journaler, you’re going to make life much easier for someone to write your life story or for yourself when you tackle the job one day.
Helping my students develop the craft and skills for writing personal stories was the easy part. The barrier they met was getting their work published. Meaningful events and people in our lives may not have the wide appeal publishers are looking for in memoirs, biographies or autobiographies. Those doing shorter pieces met the same barrier with periodical publishers for their essays and profiles. If these devoted writers and chroniclers wanted more than spiral bound copies of their work and could not afford self-publishing costs with hard or soft bindings, they were out of luck.
Not so today. Epublishing sites like Smashwords.com offers writers of family histories, personal stories short or long, the opportunity to make their precious memories available to friends, relatives and others with wide distribution in ebook form and the choice of also offering print on demand.
If you have always wanted to preserve or share a family history or transmit your cultural heritage to younger generations, start interviewing your elders or writing down your own memories. Include family legends and family folklore. Smart phone apps and digital recorders can make that task easier and some even put your words directly into a print file.
If technology mystifies you, draft a son, daughter, grandchild or friend into scanning your work into a Word file. Gather photographs and copies of any documents you might want to include in your book and note where they belong in the account you are writing.
12 tips for writing a personal story:
- Decide on the person or event to write about.
- Decide on the format and whether to do a factual account or reminiscence.
- Collect photographs and documents to include.
- Decide what point of view to use to capture the essence of the person you are writing about.
- Outline the book or piece and write a fast first draft.
- Research supporting details and re-interview if needed.
- Revise and add dialogue, humor when called for, and accurate setting descriptions to make the story live.
- Have the subject read and check for accuracy and a qualified editor check the manuscript for needed edits.
- Design or have designed an appropriate cover.
- Write a long and a short description of your book.
- Format according to the publishing venue you have chosen.
- Upload to the epublisher according to guidelines.
Spread the word! Family members and others will treasure your work in years to come.