Why tell your story?
Documenting your life story to share with your family and friends can be a great way to preserve precious memories. Memoirs provide a way for family members to connect with each other. It serves to communicate and provide insight into family stories and culture. Everyone’s story is interesting.
Writing your story is also a good way to exercise your brain. Reminiscing and reflecting on your life invites you to think with complex thoughts and ideas and memories. With the help of the written word, your story telling keeps your brain active as you write and complete the story.
Writing is more forgiving than speech. It does not demand perfect grammar. It can transcend memory troubles that make oral communication difficult and embarrassing. Writing supports learning and growth.
Writing is a form of self-expression. It can be done in your time. For some, it helps to foster remembering, find meaning, and develop insight about coping. It is a way to communicate feelings and reinforce positive experiences.
It can be a powerful emotional outlet. Storytelling can be a powerful tool of self-discovery, healing and reconciliation. Writing about emotional experiences can have therapeutic value.
Through this writing you assume a new role as a writer, storyteller or teacher. It is about sharing your journey, your wisdom and your achievements.
You can complete interviews with other family members and friends about various life events.
Go on a “treasure hunt” looking for pictures or other memorabilia to accompany the stories you uncover.
Writing Your Life Story
Writing about life can seem daunting. What do I write about? Where do I start? Where do I stop? How do I shape my story?
Start with the story you want to tell. Think about your audience. Who are you writing this story for?
You need a beginning and an ending but you don’t have to tell your entire life story. You can have self contained stories or chapters.
Importantly, have fun with your story.
Some suggestions:
Begin by writing small stories of 5-10 minutes on specific topics that are important to you such as a favorite holiday; your first job; your military service; how you met your spouse; your children, your pets; or a memorable world event. Look for self-contained incidents that are alive in your memory.
Writing your story is not so much about what you did or did not do. Rather, it is about the significance or meaning of that event to you. How did the situation impact you? What were you thinking and feeling?
In communicating life challenges, deal with the adversity and move on. Concentrate on what life lessons emerged and how this event contributed to your growth?Engage family members in the process. Invite correspondence, or ask nearby relatives to scribe, writing down or recording everything that is said, in your exact words.
Tell the stories of how you participated in world history. Where were you when you heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor? How did you and your family spend the Great Depression years? Where were you when President Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated?
Write your "ethical will." What life learning, personal philosophies, mottos, and core values do you want to leave as a legacy to your descendants? How did you learn these lessons or acquire these philosophies? What are the 10 things I want my loved ones to know?
Use your computer skills or ask a family member with computer skills to compile your stories into a self-published memoir. Scan in family photos and memorabilia for illustration.
Think creatively in constructing your memoir. You may use aids in storytelling such as:
Photographs
Recordings – visual or voice
Music
Poetry
Excerpts from journals/diaries
Cards and letters
Illustrations
Comics
Art work
Craft/wood work
Pictures from magazines, newspapers
Awards/medals
Other mementos that are important to your story
You may also enjoy keeping a daily journal.
