Life Is a Book And It's Time to Write It! An A-to-Z Guide to Help Anyone Write Their Life Story

Your Life is a Book

Kevin Quirk

Copyright 2012 Kevin Quirk

Published on Smashwords

Formatted by eBooksMade4You

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Fist Stop: Mission Control

Second Stop: Story Sparks

Third Stop: Questions and Anchors

Fourth Stop: Memory Pegs

Fifth Stop: People’s Park

Sixth Stop: There Are Places I Remember

Seventh Stop: Holiday Fever

Eighth Stop: History Channel

Ninth Stop: Starry, Starry Nights

Tenth Stop: Taboo Island

Eleventh Stop: Choices & Challenges

Twelfth Stop: Law & Order

Snack Car Treats

Thirteenth Stop: One Theme Park

Fourteenth Stop: Joe Friday Station

Fifteenth Stop: Talk It Up

Sixteenth Stop: Writer’s Toll Box

Seventeenth Stop: Bi-Focal Vision

Eighteenth Stop: Truth or Consequences

Nineteenth Stop: All in the Family

Twentieth Stop: Follow the Map

Twenty-first Stop: Cleaning Out the Pistons

Twenty-second Stop: Allies in Waiting

Twenty-third Stop: Personal Historians’ Corner

Twenty-fourth Stop: Publishing Station

Twenty-fifth Stop: Author’s Circle

About the Author

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Author’s Note

Anecdotes and stories related to the author’s clients and life-writing students are all based on actual people and experiences. Some first names and/or other specific details have been changed to protect confidentiality.

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Introduction

We all have a story to tell. No, make that many stories, an endless stream of stories. In fact, we have at least one story to tell for every day of our life. Take today, for example. What’s the story behind you picking up this book right now?

Think about that for a second. Why has this book wound up in your hands at this very moment? Did you pick up this book because you want to capture a sense of what you’ve done, and how you’ve lived, to offer as a gift to your children and grandchildren? If so, the story you could tell right now is the answer to this question: Who is the one special person you are most doing this for, and why?

Do you yearn to write something about your life but you don’t have a clue how to go about it because you’re not a writer? If so, you’ve got two stories right there: 1) What was the specific moment when you first had an inkling that you might write about your life someday? 2) Who told you that you weren’t a writer and why did you believe them?

Have you begun to sift through old photo albums, scrapbooks, diaries and journals, or genealogy research? Then I bet you could tell a story about the most surprising discovery you’ve made so far.

Did you receive this book as a gift from a family member or friend who says you have to write a book about your life because the stories they’ve heard you tell are unforgettable? Okay, what was the last story you told them?

And if you are the one who bought this book as a gift for someone else, your story is this: when are you going to start writing about your life? Oh, and if you’re just browsing through this book, there will be a story behind your choice to go ahead and buy it, right?

Perhaps you’ve turned to this book because you want to write a tribute to a loved one who has passed away. What a wonderful way to honor that departed husband or wife, mother or father, son or daughter, or other person whose memory you cherish. I’m sure you could easily tell a story about one moment you shared with him or her that always makes you smile.

Maybe you’re reading this book not because you want to write about your entire life but because you have in mind one major life experience: overcoming a major illness or disease, rising above a tumultuous childhood, building a business, serving in a war, or having a great adventure like traveling around the world. Something happened that you just have to write about, to record all the essential moments for yourself and for others. You may be hoping to create a family keepsake while reaching out to others who have had a similar experience. So, right now, you could tell the story of the turning point of your major experience, that moment when you knew you’d make it.

See what I mean? No matter why you’ve opened this book, you have a story you could easily tell about it. That’s on top of countless stories already churning around in your mind, stories that you could recall and write about with just a little encouragement or guidance. Life, for all of us, is like that. Life is a book, and the chapters ahead will provide you the encouragement and guidance to help you create a book about your life.

I’m here to help you do it. I’ll offer what I’ve learned from 15 years of teaching classes on writing your life story to women and men of all ages and backgrounds. I’ll also call upon my experience as founder of Life Is a Book writing services, where I assist ordinary people from all over the country, and beyond, in sharing their life stories as their ghostwriter, biographer, or personal historian. I know this terrain, and I will be with you every step of the way.

The way I see it, my job is not just to tell you how to write your life story, though I will provide plenty of tips, strategies, and exercises designed to help you get your stories down, put them together, and make them sound like you. My job is also just to get you to do it! My experience tells me that the second job is often the tougher one. Why? Because we have so many good reasons why we can’t possibly write a book about our life, or go on if we get stuck.

First, the idea of writing a whole book can sound so intimidating. Aren’t life story books supposed to be long? Do you really have enough to say? Well, Bill Clinton’s My Life might have run 957 pages, but your book can be fully complete at 57 pages, or even 17 pages. And if I sat down with my digital tape recorder and began asking you questions about your life today, you’d be amazed at how much you really have to say. If you follow the exercises and suggestions in this book, you’ll come up with plenty of material.

Yes, but what about time, you ask? You don’t have the time to hunker down in your office, den, or local coffee shop and stare at a blank notebook or laptop for hours a day for a whole year, or even several years, right? Well, I’m here to tell you that writing a book about your life need not wear you down or keep you up at night. As we go along, you will find that you can finish your book in a few months, or even a matter of weeks. Of course, if you want to spend a year or more on your life book because of what you are getting out of it, that’s your choice too. And I can almost guarantee you that when you’re done, when you’re holding the book about your life in your hands or looking at it on your favorite reading device, you’re not going to feel drained. You’ll be too excited about showing your new baby around!

Okay, you say, even if I do sit down to write this book about my life, how on earth will I ever get it published? Don’t you have to rich or famous to do that? Well, it’s true that most memoirs or autobiographies you find in your bookstore are written by celebrities, although a growing number of no-name folks are maneuvering their way into the club. But those are just the life stories published by commercial publishers, the corporate giants who dominate one side of the industry. The good news for the rest of us is that they’re not the only game in town. Did you know that the vast majority of all books published every year are self-published or independently published? And thanks to modern technology and limitless new options, common folks like you and me can publish a book that looks as good as anything in Barnes for Noble for around the cost of a new computer. Your book will last a lot longer too. And now we have all these other new options to create eBooks, with many more ways sure to come.

Maybe you haven’t thought nearly that far ahead. Maybe your stumbling block sounds something like this: I don’t have anything really interesting to write about. My life has actually been pretty ordinary. Oh really? Try telling that to your family members who heard about this idea of yours (or theirs) to write a book about your life. They know what interests them, and they’re your target audience. They’re eagerly awaiting all those ordinary stories, from why you always got good (or bad) grades at school, to your decision to start a family (or not to). Natalie Goldberg, author of an excellent guidebook on writing memoirs called Old Friend from Far Away, has been inspiring ordinary people to write about their simple memories for decades. In her groundbreaking book Writing Down the Bones she tells us that We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded… {We are} the carrier of details that make up history.

So now you may be saying to yourself, Well, maybe I do have some of those life details to record, but I’m just too young to tell my life story. You can’t write your life story until you’re at least 70 or 80, right? That’s what a young mother of two young children believed when she signed up for one of my Autobiographical Writing classes at the University of Virginia School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Then she looked around the classroom and took in the wide spectrum of ages. I hope no one is offended, she said, but I thought I was going to be surrounded by, you know, old people. But the median age here must be closer to me than my grandmother. Everyone laughed, especially the grandmothers. You don’t need to have lived a long life to have something important to write about; you only need the desire to share something important about the life you’re living.

And to those who think they’re too old to start writing their life story, because you just can’t remember what happened when you were young, I’ll just say that I’ve worked with clients from 19 to 94. And that 94 year old, who still worked 30 hours a week at her government job, amazed herself at what she was able to recall about her childhood, with some gentle prodding. My students in their 70s and 80s who fill up my Writing Your Life Story classes at OLLI at UVA are often the most passionate and dedicated life story chroniclers I meet.

The truth is, the desire to write the story of our lives cuts across all ages, geographic regions, and socioeconomic levels. It’s a universal urge, and it goes back at least to the days of Native Americans gathering in sacred circles to share their stories. Somewhere inside us we know that writing a book about our life will bring real value to those we love, and to others who may read it, while enriching our own lives. And today, with our families often spread out across the country and our cell phone-laptop lifestyle keeping us hopping, the need to slow down and tell our stories is stronger than ever. We hunger to find meaning, to make connections, to feel known. Email and social networks just don’t replace the warmth and closeness of gathering in the living room with loved ones to recount and savor the everyday stories of our lives.

Everywhere we look, some new forum reminds us that the phenomenon of telling our everyday stories is reaching a tipping point. My favorite radio program is NPR’s The Story because it simply relates the experiences of ordinary people. There is a growing Write Your Life movement out there, and people from New Hampshire to New Mexico are finding themselves part of it. And now, so are you. You’re going to write the book of your life. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written a lot, a little, or not at all. Even if you’d never call yourself a writer, you are. My Random House Webster’s College Dictionary defines a writer as: a person engaged in writing books or a person who commits thoughts to writing. If you recognize that life is a book, you are fully qualified to begin writing yours, today!

If you still don’t feel right calling yourself a writer, call yourself a delivery person. You are going to take the stories that paint a simple portrait of who you are and deliver them to those who care about you. You are doing something important, and you deserve to give yourself full permission to do it. And while you certainly want to do