Writing your memoirs isn’t difficult as long as you remember one thing and avoid the biggest mistake made by those who want to write their own life story. I’ll combine the two in a few moments but first I want you to know just how important it is to write your own life story. Everyone who has ever walked this earth has a story and it’s usually a story that deserves to be told.
Even if the life they led was not an exemplary one, even if the life they led was about as boring and average as you con contemplate, their life’s story can be a true revlation to so many people.
First of all, let’s start with your own family. I can’t tell you how mqany times I’ve asked students or just average people on the street to give me the first names of any of their great grandparents. Not their grandparents, but their great grand parents. Usually I get quite few blank stares. Occasiionally, I’ll find someone who can give me one of the names. One out of the eight names. And if I follow uup and ask them if they can tell me anything, anything at all, about that person, well, that’s when the familiar blank stare appears.
It’s unfortunate because these very people lived, worked, danced, cried, and contemplated life, in most cases, less than 100 years ago. And as you get older, you start to realize how very short a time 100 years really is.
Yet, a few dozen years after their death, no one can even recall their first names, let alone what they thought, what they did, how they dealt with problems or how they faced life.
Well, in just 100 years, that’s going to be you!
Everything you’ve thought, everything you’ve done, everything you’ve accomplished, heck, even your first name, will be completely unknown. Unless you do something today, right now, time will become a giant eraser and your life will be little more than something that must have happened, but any of the details will have vanished.
Here’s the big mistake that everyone makes when they write their memoirs. They think that just because they’ve written something, everybody, or at least most people, will want to read it. Most people have lives that are, frankly, boring. Boring for the most part, but punctuated by events of excitement, or unusual occurances.
The boring day to day bits, nobody wants to read about. It’s the exciting elements that will hold a reader’s attention and those are the elements you should focus on when you write.
So what’s the one thing you’ve got to remember when you write your memoirs?
That’s easy. Your memoirs should directly or indirectly help someone achieve a goal, or overcome an obstacle. There has to be a purpose for what you’ve written, a purpose that will benefit the reader.
That purpose could be success in raising a child or getting a job, or becoming wealthy, or running a business, or overcoming adversity, or obtaining an education or kicking a bad habit.
And all of your memoir should be devoted to helping your reader achieve similar goals. Or at least give them hope that they, too, can achieve as you have.
The memoir you don’t want to write is one that simply begins at the beginning and tells the reader everything about your life no matter how small and insignificant. That only works if you’re a person who has achieved world-wide notoriety and recognition. And if that’s the case, someone else will be writing your life story.
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