Write Your History

WHY?

My granddad did this for me and it is wonderful to know him better.

WHEN?

Start today. It is a great sabbath activity. Work it a little more each Sunday.

WHAT?

I invite you to consider leaving a written record of your life for others so they know where they came from.

Whoa! Too big, scary or too hard? Although some of you may feel like publishing your own life story to your family is too big of a task, consider that like all worthwhile hard tasks it starts with step one, and then step two, and so on. Decide whether to now. This will show you the steps. Little steps aggregate into substantial works. Even mowing the lawn requires first mowing row 1, then row 2, …​ then adding gas, and then edging. The antidote to fear is knowledge.

De facto, this is a LIMITED-TIME OFFER: Consider doing this work while still having the full faculties it takes to do so.

Youth, start with writing a journal so you have recorded material for your life story later. Write about people or things you care about or that you learn. If you had an elementary school autobiography project, pull it out and review what you wrote back then. Add to it.

Adults, if you have decided not to write your story, STOP HERE. If you will later or are still considering, please continue.

Personal Aside: There is something about writing a journal in cursive with an great & inexpensive fountain pen that makes your story flow quicker and without hand cramping. For cursive basics, see https://www.wikihow.com/Write-in-Cursive. Youth may have to self-teach cursive skills if no longer taught in school. For me, after multiple failures with $9 fountain pens from China, my winner is the $31 TWSBI Echo. Your favorite may vary.

If you have kept a journal, that’s great. Now, you may want a life story that can be published to your entire family. My granddad did not know the impact his story would have on me when he wrote it. I will thank him when I see him again in eternity.

Adults, follow these steps. Or, contact me and I will help you make your plan. It can help to have a guide who has done it before. If you decide to wait, save these steps to do it later.

Remember to ask the Holy Ghost for help as you select which memories to pass along to your posterity or loved ones. Note how scripture authors did this too.

HOW? Five Steps

There are many ways to do this project. This way is just one way that worked for me. Search Google to find other ways. I added sub-steps so you would have a step-by-step guide of what’s involved.

Build it a little at a time. It is not realistic to try to eat this elephant in one bite.[1] Attempting so will yield frustration and a desire to abandon the project. This is a start-stop, here a little, there a little project. This project rewards patience and sticking-to-it.

  1. PLACE & MOTIVE

    1. Get clear why you want to do this. Write down your 'why' to help you start again later after the initial excitement has passed and you stumbled to a stop. Motivate your future self to finish.

    2. Identify a consistent place for this project (a folder in your computer, a bookshelf spot for your paper notebook, a place for the pictures, etc.). It helps over time to know where you keep the work in-progress.

  2. REMEMBER.

    1. Write an outline with a bullet for every year you have been alive. Years 0-5 may be fuzzy or empty. Perhaps just dates and places and what stories your Mom passed down about you sleeping in a drawer as a bassinet.

    2. Indented from that year, add sub-bullets of events you experienced that were significant to you. This is just a reminder outline. No pressure.

    3. Be patient and let this bullet outline percolate. It may take time for some memories to be recalled.

    4. Add more bullet or short summaries as you remember more. Dig into those memories and add bullet notes to further fill them in as recall comes (alas, or as recall goes—​See limited-time offer note above).

  3. COLLECT PHOTOS.

    • Photos help jog your memory releasing the stories you will write down.

    • There will not be room for every photograph you have (publication cost increases with book page-count), but you can pick out representative pictures for each year.

    • Pictures help posterity visualize what you write about.

      1. Determine what year the photo was taken.

      2. Digitize your photos with a camera or a scanner. Add the digital photo to a computer folder named that year.

      3. Add a text file of the same name that identifies people in the photo. For example. "Back row, LTR (left to right) John Doe, Jane Doe," etc. You will add this identifying information as a caption for each photo later. (i.e. FamilyReunion1975.jpg, FamilyReunion1975.txt)

  4. WRITE.

    1. Think about your AUDIENCE of future generations. Ponder what they might they want to know about you. Stuck? Think about what you would have liked to know about your great-great-grandmother so and so? Writing about problems as conflict makes it interesting to your audience to see how you overcame them. It may also provide them problem-solving patterns.

    2. Make a separate document for each year.

    3. If your family has moved, write the LOCATION you lived each year. Write what you liked about that location.

    4. Write a FAMILY section for each year. In it, list family members' names and age. It’s interesting to see how old each person was during that part of your life. For example (entering names instead of letters):

      • Grandmother AAAAA (76)

      • Dad BBBBB (54)

      • Mom CCCCC (52)

      • Child DDDDD (30)

      • Child EEEEE (28)

    5. Write an WORK section to describe what you did for school, business, work, rearing a family, or significant projects or achievements that year. Write about problems faced and how you felt about them, and how you overcame them.

    6. Write a SPIRITUAL section to describe your spiritual growth from baptism on, epiphanies, or callings that year, how you felt about it, what you pondered, revelations you had and applied. Be open.

    7. Write the best stories about the people in your life that year, what happened, the problems you overcame, what you felt, what you realized, why it mattered to you, how those people mattered to you, etc. This will interest future generations more than your birth and death dates.

      • Capture a sense of the times. For example, my dad did that by describing how they did laundry in a huge iron kettle over a fire as a kid. This fascinated me, because I’m from the world of washing machines and dryers.

      • Mention the impact mentors, coaches, etc. had on you.

      • Tell the story about how you fell in love.

      • Be yourself. The whole point is to share how you think and who you are. Your personality should come through.

      • Balance out the accomplishments with the challenges so your posterity sees the good you did and the difficulties doing it. Seeing how you demonstrated grit and resilience may help the.

      • Add what lessons you learned when you made big mistakes. Failures and getting up again is how we all learn.

      • Get permission from the living to include a story if it could be embarrassing to them.

  5. EDIT.

    1. Put the project aside long enough to forget what you wrote.

    2. Read it looking for clarity, spelling, etc. Revise to make it better.

    3. Ask others who were alive during those same years to help confirm you got the year right about the time you did XYZ. Fact check dates & names.

    4. Run spell check.

    5. Ask a loved one to proof it for grammar. If they are confused, you left out something or didn’t make it clear. Take the input in the spirit to make it better. Don’t take it personally.

    6. Review the stories. Did you add a sense of how it felt, how it smelled, what you saw?

    7. If editing is not for you, you can hire a copy-editor.

  6. PUBLISH.

    1. Use free tools. Learning to use them may take a little longer than paying others to do it for you, but it is less expensive in money. Yes, you can write the whole thing with a fountain pen on paper, but computers ease the task enough to recommend them as tools.

    2. If you do not want to write your story, then record the audio of your life story.

    3. Write in a separate document (chapter) for each year. Name it by the year (i.e. 2011).

    4. Aggregate the chapters. This is easier with some tools than with others.

    5. Create a title for your book. Create a cover (or hire someone on Fiverr for $5 to do it for you).

    6. Print to PDF (many tools do this). Printers require a PDF. If you want your book to be other than 8.5"X11", you will need to adjust for the desired size (i.e. 6X9). Check that all photos show up. Check page numbers, chapter headings, front matter, back matter.

    7. To make an eBook in epub format, contact me directly for free tool recommendations. It is not that hard, but will make this already too long email even longer if I add that here.

      Caution
      		 I do NOT recommend using a "free" service like Amazon CreateSpace to publish will make this kind of book public. Such services are only for publishing to the general public. This means showing names and ages of all loved ones to the world. Not a good idea today. Banks still ask for mothers maiden name as a "security" question. Consider that this much family information about the living should stay private in the hands of your loved ones, not the general public. Given today’s cybersecurity environment, I recommend using a one-time printing company for your life story. I have used, and can vouch for book1one.com. From them I successfully ordered thirteen 6"X9", perfect bound, glossy color cover, 400-page copies at $23 per book. If you only order one copy the cost is much higher ($100+). This is due to setup costs for the printing company. Finding such a printer means your book and all its personally identifiable information will still be private and just for your loved ones. For the same security reasons, I do not recommend re-purposing this content into a publicly viewable website.

This project may take you 1+ years. When you’re done, you will have performed a service that others will appreciate after you pass through the veil.

1. This is a phrase. Don’t really eat an elephant.

Updated on 01 Jan 0001

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