Writing an Autobiography

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura from youngwritersworkshops.com. I'm going to talk about writing an autobiography. An autobiography is the story of your life, but keep in mind that it doesn't have to be the entire story of your life starting from the day you were born. I think one of the most important things to remember when you are writing an autobiography or approaching this project is to step back a little bit and to think about what some of the big events that changed your life were, what are some of the important milestones. And also ask - and maybe ask some other people as well, what do they think are some of the important events of your life or the meaningful events. Once you have an idea of what some of those main points are, you can start to build stories around them, build sort of a vignette for each of them, and then make connections among them so that you'll be able to have a cohesive story of your life, or you'll come to some conclusion or some kind of point that illustrates what your life has been about. Now when you're writing an autobiography, you'll need some good readers, you'll need people to read and give you feedback, tell you where you need to add more, or maybe where you've gone into too much detail and slowed down the flow of the work. So be sure to enlist some readers who will give you constructive, helpful feedback and not just tell you that they really like it. Work through drafts, write chapters at a time and get feedback on them. And begin to build your autobiography until you have a finished project that you'll be able to seek a publisher. And those are some ideas about writing an autobiography."