How to write your life story.
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How to write your life story.
Click here to find out how to organize your family history paperwork.
Have you ever wanted to tell your life story? Telling your life story can be an excellent way to preserve your own history while adding something unique to your family history legacy at the same time. Writing your life story—whether you intend to publish it with a glossy cover with old family photographs on the front or keep it circulated amongst your family only—is an overwhelming task. However, you can make the process much easier by using the following tips that will help you get started.
To learn how to back up your old photos click here.
Create a basic timeline of your life
The first thing you should do is create a basic timeline of your life. Start at the beginning, of course, and mark down key moments in your life that have defined it so far. The milestones you choose may differ depending on your current age or how much importance you place on certain time periods in your life. The most important thing to remember is that this timeline is going to help guide you on your journey to tell your life story.
To learn how to convert old family slides click here.
Convert your timeline into a sectioned book outline
Now that you have your timeline, it’s time to convert it from a simple personal family history timeline into a book outline. This is much easier than it looks! Simply take the milestones you’ve jotted down on your timeline and convert them into chapter sections. If you want, you can keep your outline as simple as this, or you can start jotting down notes for each chapter that will help guide you as you write about the different time periods in your life. (For instance, under “Childhood,” you may want to note: talk about moving to different houses, talk about grandfather dying, and so on.)
If this is the first time you’ve tried writing a book, it may help to keep it simple at first; if you find that after writing a section or two that writing down notes will help you, then go back to your outline and add them in.
Begin writing a memory from one section
Now comes the part of the process that is both the simplest and the most difficult: starting to write. The best way to start writing is to pick a section of your life (such as childhood, your high school years, the year your first child was born, etc.) and start writing about it. Make sure you start “early on” in the section so that you can write in chronological order as your thoughts come to you. At this point, don’t worry about grammar or spelling or wording everything perfectly: just write!
To learn which is the best software for doing a family tree click here.
Before you know it, you will have a few thousand words already written out. From here, continue writing until you reach the end of the timeline section before moving on to another one. Soon you will find that your first draft of your personal life story is written!
Remember to keep the above tips in mind when you start writing about your own personal family history.
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