how to write autobiography

HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

When writing an autobiography, you focus on three major things: who you are in life, what life means to you and what your outlook on the future is.

"Autobiographies have been written since A.D. 400 when an early Christian leader, Saint Augustine, wrote his." An autobiography is information about one's own life written by that one person. In it, it tells what that person's life is all about. When writing your own autobiography, use interesting facts to explain as much about yourself as you can.

The first thing you do when writing an autobiography is start off with a lot of facts about your life; for example, when and where you were born, where you live (city and state), where you go to school and who you live with. You have to give a lot of information so your reader can clearly understand what is going on. Once you have written this introduction, you are ready to start your first paragraph of the autobiography.

Who you are in life?

The best way to start an autobiography is to state your name. When you are writing this paragraph, you usually explain the type of person you are; use facts about yourself such as: have you won any awards? What types of awards have you won? Did you finish school? Do you plan on going to college?

What life means to you?

This is now your second paragraph. In this paragraph you should state how you see life--what does life mean to you. Are you happy or sad? Do you have a lot of friends or just a few? How do you make your school days go by? Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend? What are your favorite places to go on dates? How long have you been dating? If you are involved in a relationship, do you think it will last forever?

What is your outlook on the future?

In this paragraph you should explain what you think the future will be like. Pick a year and explain how it will be but explain it through your eyes. Where will you be? How will you be living? Will you be married? Will there be any kids? Who will you be married to? What is he/she like? How long will you have been together?

Conclusion

The conclusion is the last paragraph of your autobiography and an important one, too. In the conclusion you usually try to re-word the introduction and add some type of closure to bring the whole autobiography together.

Steps

1. Understand your reasons for writing an autobiography. Your autobiography will turn out best if you write it simply because you want to, perhaps to share the experiences of your life with others, to give as a gift for your family, to try and understand your life and the forces that have shaped you, to preserve your legacy, or simply to exercise your desire to write. If money is your primary motivation, keep in mind that, unless you have some renown, your story will be a hard sell. While it's possible to sell a book about a relatively unknown person, the book really has to be something special. This means that you, the writer, need to care most about the story, not the money.
2. Read some autobiographies. The best way to get a feel for autobiographical writing is to read several good autobiographies. Ask friends, family, and your local bookseller for recommendations. The more you read, the more approaches you'll be exposed to, and while you don't need to copy any of these for your memoirs, you can get a lot of good ideas about how to organize your story and make it interesting.
3. Think about your audience. Your approach to writing will be a lot different depending on who your intended audience is. If you're just writing for yourself, and nobody will ever see your story, you can do whatever you want: take shortcuts, rant, ignore all the rules of grammar if you want. If you're writing for friends and family, you'll want to pay more attention to readability, but you can still take certain shortcuts because chances are your readers will already be familiar with many of the characters and stories. Writing for publication, however, requires a more thorough approach. Not only will you need to edit the manuscript to perfection, but you'll also need to constantly keep in mind that your readers may not know anything about the people or events in your autobiography.
4. Develop your theme. A story is generally more satisfying if it has a unifying theme or two. Rather than just reciting the events of your life like a timeline in a history book, think about what the main idea of your story -- the driving force of your life -- is. Maybe you're a rags-to-riches story, or maybe the central theme of your life has been the love of your spouse. Think about what's most important to you, and build your story around that. Having a theme in mind will make your story more compelling and help you weed out all those unimportant details.
5. Organize your autobiography. For obvious reasons, chronological order is the most popular style of autobiographical organization. It's pretty straightforward: start at the beginning, and when you come to the end, stop. A logical beginning would be your birth, but you may also want to start by giving an overview of your ancestors' stories. Conversely, sometimes it makes sense to skip over your early years and start sometime later in life. You needn't just go through your life year by year, however. You may want to organize your story more thematically. However you choose to organize your autobiography, it's a good idea to plan it out in an outline. You don't need to follow your outline when you start writing, but it can be a helpful guide.
6. Jog your memory. The best way to remember the past is to try and find things you have kept from that time, such as photos and letters. They may spark just one memory or a whole chain of them. Before you start to write about each stage in your life, try to find items you may have kept from each. Ask family and friends if they have saved anything of yours from that time.
7. Start writing. When you open the floodgates of memory, you will probably be eager to capture everything just right. Sit in a comfortable place, relax, and take it one page at a time. Be yourself: you’ll write faster and more naturally. Don’t spend too much time thinking about style and grammar, just write. You’re probably not trying to win any prizes, and even if you are, don't let the "art of writing" prevent you from telling your story. You can edit later.
8. Edit your completed work. Once you've hammered out your life story, let your manuscript sit for a few weeks before proceeding to edit it. You may find it helpful to ask others to read your story and comment on it. Take out the extraneous details, tie up the loose ends, and make sure your writing is crisp and readable throughout.
9. Preserve your work. Ensure you have at least one copy in a place which is safe from fire, flood or other damage – you don’t want such an important work to be lost. If your story is saved on your computer, make sure to print out a hard copy and save a backup copy. You may even want to back your autobiography up online. In most cases, you'll also want to have a plan for passing on your autobiography. You can do this either by trying to get the book published, publishing it yourself, or distributing copies to friends and relatives. Even if you decide not to distribute it right away, you are going to put lots of work into this project, and you should have a plan for passing on your story to your heirs.
10. Build a relationship using your autobiography. Children and grandchildren will learn many new things about you and other people, times, and places from your life story. As the writing process will remind you of these experiences, be sure to be intentional about sharing some stories with the next generation too. For example, these remembrances will make for interesting phone conversations with your family. Keep in mind that the way you grew up can be fascinating to your grandchildren (outhouses, one-room schoolhouses, and life before TV). They will have never met interesting people like your parents or grandparents. You have the power to bring these people to life through your memories, and you become a multi-dimensional person to them as they learn more about when you were a child, a teen, a young adult, a worker, a parent, and a grandparent. It's a legacy worth sharing.