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The raw material of your personal story
childhood home and environment; your favorite places ~ Personal heroes ~ School days ~ Challenges and struggles ~ Victories and accomplishments ~ Travel ~ Lessons learned ~ Goals achieved ~ Summer adventures ~ Songs you sang, music you listened to ~ Dances you danced ~ Your earliest memories ~ Daily life and how it has changed ~ Issues and events—how they affected you, how you felt about them ~ Photos, scrapbooks, newspapers, and magazines |
When you're ready to put it together...
 | Decide on a format: Book, audio, video, or a combination | |
| Organize your process and materials | |
| Record your memories via audio, manuscript, or interviews: impressions, events, pivotal | |
| experiences, lessons learned... all the puzzle pieces that will be assembled into a living portrait of you | ||
| Transcribe the recordings or interviews | |
| Do historical research and consult family records | |
| Confer with other sources — friends, family, others | |
| Revise your draft into a clear and compelling story, with appropriate pacing, rhythm, and | |
| narrative flow | ||
| Add graphic elements—photographs, letters, and genealogical charts, for example—that | |
| can be scanned and integrated with the text | ||
| Design the final document | |
| Determine printing options and their costs |
| Write in the conversational style and tone you might use if you were telling the story off | |
| Do not (a) prepare an outline, (b) try to preach or teach, or (c) manipulate the | |
| story in any way to fit an objective or make it a lesson. Your first draft should be as spontaneous as possible. | ||
| You don't have to include everything you ever did, thought, or said. Start with anecdotes | |
| and vivid memories. Then connect these with the information needed to make them cohesive. | ||
| Put the vital statistics on a single page—when and where you were born, educated, | |
| married; when and where your children were born; and so forth. |
