Autobiography Workshop

Much has been written about the Benjamin Franklin autobiography. With good reason, it stands as a stellar example of autobiography writing. In fact, the autobiography of Ben Franklin is widely praised for both its contribution to literature and its...

I see writing my autobiography (or you writing yours) as a chance to reflect on my life AND to see where I’m headed. It may seem weird, but I write this to hopefully motivate others to write/record their stories and to encourage them to live their...

Write For Heaven's Sake! I have just finished writing three articles on helps for writing an autobiography: Getting Started, Autobiography Characteristics, and the importance of writing your autobiography. I failed to mention the most important...

All right. So, it looks like you’re serious about how to make an autobiography. Fantastic. The truth is that there are a lot of websites on how to start an autobiography. Many of them are great. Some are not so great. One really cool thing about...

Autobiography Characteristics can be a little difficult to nail down. The best way to think about autobiography characteristics is to figure out what gives your story character. The number of ways of constructing an autobiography are about as diverse...

Earlier this year, my family and I traveled Philadelphia to visit the birthplace of the Constitution. Naturally, the visit inspired us. We witnessed the long conveyor belts of newly minted coins at the U.S. Mint; we saw the Liberty Bell's crack (which,...

OK. So it's weird but almost as soon as I finished the last post I knew that it was wrong. By wrong I mean that it felt a little forced. It felt forced for a couple of reasons: I don't actually think that the high school play Bye Bye Birdie was a...

I have wondered about the shape my autobiography should take. Should I lay out the stories and let people decide? Should I lead the reader to certain conclusions? Actually, I plan on doing both. By laying out my stories here, I am giving the reader...

I've started a list of people in my life. I'm surprised at how long the list is. Not everyone plays a significant role but it's interesting just how many people I remember. With my off-line list, I track first and last names. At first, I thought...

Three months ago, I made a list of all of the people I could remember in my life. I wrote the list on a loose leaf piece of paper. Thinking that I wouldn't lose it, I left it loose. Yep. It's gone. A couple of things: Don't write on...