How to start writing your life story: a gesture, not a project

A lot of people carry, for years, the wish to write down what they’ve lived. For their children, for their grandchildren, or simply for themselves. And then they don’t write. Not because they have nothing to say. Because they don’t know where to begin.

The blank page is more intimidating than memory. You sit in front of a notebook, you tell yourself I’ve lived a lot, here’s seventy years, and everything blurs. You’d want to be chronological, you’d want to be complete, you’d want to be well written. By trying to do everything, you do nothing.

This article doesn’t try to give you a full method. It tries to give you one gesture, doable tonight, that opens the door.

The project trap#

The most common mistake is to think of the story of your life as a project. With a plan, a title, a promise to keep. The project discourages you before the first word, because it forces you to imagine the end before the beginning.

Nobody starts telling their life knowing what it’ll tell. You begin by following what rises, and the meaning comes after. Often long after. Sometimes never: you keep a collection of fragments that don’t form a book, but form something more precious, a true deposit.

Giving up the project frees the gesture. You aren’t writing your autobiography. You’re writing one page, tonight.

Not from birth, from what rises#

You don’t have to begin with your birth. No one, really, remembers being born. And starting with childhood, in order, almost always produces flat sentences: I was born in, my father was, we lived in. Curriculum-vitae prose.

Memory doesn’t work like a chronology. It works by association. A smell brings back a summer. A face passed in the street brings back a forgotten neighbour. A word said by a grandchild brings back a scene from fifty years ago. Follow what rises, not the order of the years.

The first gesture is therefore a question: what’s coming back to me right now? Not what should I tell?

Three concrete entry doors#

Three angles work almost always, because they give memory a material anchor.

An object. Look around you. Pick an object you hold to: an inherited watch, a book you’ve reread twenty times, a chair in the living room, a chipped plate. Describe it. Then tell where it comes from, who it belonged to, why it’s here. In one page, you’ve told a story, and with it an era, a person, a place.

A place. Think of a place you carry inside you: your grandmother’s kitchen, the primary school yard, a beach from your adolescence, your parents’ first flat. Describe it as if someone had to step into it for the first time: the light, the sounds, the smells, what was on the walls. A place described with precision contains a whole life.

A person. Pick someone who has counted: your father, your first teacher, the neighbour who taught you something, a friend you lost track of. Describe their face, their voice, a gesture that defined them. Then tell one precise scene where they were there. A person is told better through a scene than through an abstract portrait.

Pick one of the three. Not all three tonight.

Fifteen minutes tonight#

Now, the practical gesture. Not tomorrow. Not next week.

Find a quiet place, any quiet place. A table, your armchair, the corner of the bed. Take what’s within reach: a notebook, a sheet of paper, a document on your computer, the notes app on your phone. The tool doesn’t matter for the first page. You’ll really choose later.

Set a timer for fifteen minutes. No more.

Write without rereading. Short sentences, simple words. If a sentence blocks you, skip it and move on. If an image rises while you’re writing about something else, jot it down in parentheses to come back to. The point isn’t to write well. The point is to not stop for fifteen minutes.

When the timer rings, stop, even if you were in the flow. Put the text down. Don’t reread it right away.

When fear of writing poorly stops you#

That’s the most common obstacle. You write three lines, you reread, you find them flat, you stop.

Your pages don’t have to be well written. They have to be true, that is, faithful to what you saw, heard, felt. A short, sincere sentence will always do better than a polished paragraph that rings hollow.

The practical rule fits in one line: write the way you’d speak to someone who loves you. Not an editor, not an English teacher. Your daughter, your brother, a friend. The voice gets clear at once, because you know who you’re talking to.

And if you really can’t stand your own style, speak it out loud and have it transcribed. Many beautiful family stories are, at the source, dictations.

Don’t decide anything else right now#

When the moment comes to write your first page, you don’t have to decide:

• what you’ll write next,
• how long this will last,
• what final form all of this will take,
• who’ll read it, and when.

All those questions matter. All of them can wait. They’ll find their answer once you have twenty or thirty pages in front of you. Before that, they’re project questions, and the project, as we’ve seen, paralyses.

The only thing to decide tonight is to put down the first page. The rest, you’ll see along the way. Some choose a fine leather-bound notebook they keep close. Others choose a digital book like Carnely, which asks one question at a time and keeps the pages warm. The form isn’t the subject today.

A question to begin with#

Before closing this article, take two minutes and answer, in writing, one single question:

Which memory came back to you while you were reading this?

That image, that face, that scene: that’s where you begin.

Going further#

Once the first page is down, here’s how to write your memoirs at your own pace, without making a book. If you’d like to explore memory through the senses, smells, sounds, tastes, this article offers another entry door. And if you’d rather first gather your parents’ story, here’s a list of questions to ask them.