LIFE STORY WRITING 6: find the pivot

You find out that you're going to have your first child, and your life pivots, turning in a whole new direction.

You lose a parent or mate, and your life pivots too.

You have a car accident. Win the lottery. Transfer to Seattle. Get diagnosed with diabetes. Decide to get divorced. Decide to get married. Fall in love with watercolor painting. Lose your house in a hurricane.

Each of these moments is what I call a "pivot," a time when your life takes a different and perhaps surprising turn.

If you want to try writing life stories but aren't sure where to start, find a pivot and write about that.

It doesn't matter which one. Any will do. With your pivot in mind you can write about a myriad of things. What you hoped. What you feared. How it happened. What you thought. Where you went. Who went with you. What you learned.

Everyone has pivots in their life. They will enjoy, and be educated by, reading about yours.

LIFE STORY WRITING 5: undoing the lessons of the past

Some more thoughts on writing life story as a part of building your personal legacy...this time, musings on the things we have to undo, rather than those we must do.

Most of us are taught writing in school—with mixed results. Hopefully, we end up with a working knowledge of English and its forms at the end of our schooling. But many of us also leave our years of English classes with less helpful lessons as well.

We learn to expect others to judge the small points of our writing, sometimes quite harshly. We learn to prize organization and logic over feeling and grammatical correctness over expression. We learn to write more easily in response to external pressure than in reaction to our own needs and preferences. We learn to admire "great" writers, but also to discount our own voices.

It's not surprising that as adults, we may find it more comfortable to avoid writing entirely than to take the risk of "failing." If we want to do any creative or legacy writing as adults, we must actually unlearn those lessons. This can be a slow process, and almost always requires some patience.

It may help to think consciously about your readers as you begin to write. Replace the mental image of that high-school teacher who picked on your grammar with a vision of your children, grandchildren, friends, colleagues: whoever it is you feel you are writing for. Seeing those loving faces in your mind's eye will help remind you that these days, there are no grades and no demerits.

To pass this "test," all you need to do is sit down and share a little of your heart.

LIFE STORY WRITING 3: five simple story starters

Following up on my last post, here are some easy but effective starting points for life story writing. You might want to try a few of these, and then continue on with whichever one or ones feels the easiest and most rich.


With all of these starters, the keys are the same. First, start small. Define your task as completing one paragraph, two paragraphs, or a single page at most, but try to write regularly. Second, don't judge or censor. Your writing doesn't have to be elegant, skilled, or even neat. As I said in my last post, whatever you write will be a treasure to those who come. Finally, be sure to store whatever you have written safely. If you created your text on a computer, back up the files and print a copy out as well.

1. Choose a single photograph from any point in your past and write a really detailed caption for it. Let yourself capture the people, place, and time it depicts in a full paragraph or even two. Place your text in the album or box in which you keep the photo. Tomorrow, consider writing a caption for another picture. As you go on to write about other images, you can stick to a particular time period or theme, or jump around in whatever way feels right.

2. Choose a single recipe you like to cook. (Or, if you're not a cook, a single recipe you like to eat!) Write a paragraph or two about it. Consider describing what you like about it, when and/or from whom you first learned it, when it is or was eaten, what other memories it inspires, what period of your life it reminds you of. Don't worry if your writing strays from the subject of food; the recipe is just a starting point.

3. If you want to write down memories for your children (adult or still young), start small. Choose one child; write down a single great memory of time with him or her. If you enjoy this, add a second memory about that child tomorrow, or move on to a memory about a different child (or sibling, or grandchild). Don't strain to choose an "important" memory; anything that is meaningful to you will be meaningful to that child, however simple or apparently trivial it seems. On the occasion of my fiftieth birthday, my dad wrote a a note to me with the memory of taking naps with me on his chest when I was an infant. I treasure that note all the more because it reminds me of such a small and tender moment.

4. Use place as a starting point for some memory writing. Each day, choose a single place and do some writing about it. The place you choose could be a home, a city, or a vacation spot. It could be as small as a single spot in your yard or house, or as big as your home town. Let your writing roam as it will, whether what comes up are memories of people, pastimes, landscapes...whatever comes up is just fine.

5. Do some writing about the people from your past. For example, you might make a list of five people who influenced you powerfully, then write about one of them each day. At the end of the five day period, decide where to go next. Do you want to write additional material about one or more of those people? Write about five new folks? Move on to a different starting point?