You have decided to tell the stories of your life in a memoir or in a family history. What next? You may feel you have a thousand stories you might include, or you may imagine you can't remember enough. In fact, you'll need to generate a big list, then whittle it down. Trust that with a little effort, you'll have more than enough stories. The question then becomes, which ones will make the best book?
The answer is found through the process of prewriting. Prewriting is everything that a storyteller does before she begins telling her story. It is a process of remembering, gathering and organizing ideas and details that you want to include in your memoir, whether you in fact type it up, or record your stories.
What you do in the prewriting process shapes the memoir you eventually create. In our guide, Stories to Tell: Your Guide to Creating a Personal History Book, we provide authors with a wide variety of prewriting activities to help you generate ideas for stories you want to include in your memoirs.
Let’s look at just a few of the many activities you might use:
Top ten lists get David Letterman a lot of laughs. They will also get you a lot of ideas. All you need to do is select any potential topic and make a list of the top ten memories you associate with that topic:
- The ten most important turning points in your life
- The ten family stories you would most like to see preserved
- The ten most influential people in your life and how they influenced you
- Your ten greatest accomplishments and why they are important
- Ten things you value most in your life
There are almost unlimited possibilities for lists. Those above are only examples of how the process works. Think of as many details as you can remember of each of the events, things or people on your list. Before long you have plenty of stories for your memoir.
You’ve probably written a resume. A life resume is a great way to generate ideas for a memoir. Some of the things you might want to include in your life resume are:
- Work experiences
- Relationships
- Health history
- Places you have lived
- Travel
- Hobbies
- Successes
- Failures
- Favorites (books, movies, music, recipes)
- Lessons (insights you have gained about life)
Look at the items you have included in your resume and think of a story associated with it or illustrating it. You’ll be amazed at how many ideas you will generate for stories to include in your memoir.
These are just two of the ways you can mine your memories. We also help you to develop a historical timeline and guide you in how to interview friends and family, how to use family photographs and documents to generate ideas and many other ways to generate stories you’ll want to tell. If you take the time to prewrite, you will find yourself with more fascinating stories than you can possibly use in one memoir.
