Writing Your Own Story by John Greeves

Writing Your Own Life Story

by John Greeves

Everyone has a story to tell and writing often comes from personal experience. Never think you’ve led a humdrum life and therefore you have nothing to say. My lifetime has witnessed presidential assassinations, the first moon landing and I’ve been part of the baby boomer generation of the swinging sixties. These events and other provide a backcloth to my life, just as succeeding generations have their own key events which shape and give context to their lives.

What everyone possesses is a rich nugget of possibility waiting to be mined. Themes such as childhood, family, dreams, journeys, love, tragedy, humour and obsession all spring to mind. I know my nephews, nieces and even grandchildren are always badgering me for stories about my life. If this is the same for you, then it’s time to write it down and put away the photo album.

Writing your own life story is a relatively cheap pastime and has many benefits which may propel you towards other interests such as research, family history, computing, writers’ groups, photography and meeting other people. Like everything else it’s where to start. The best advice is to cast away those nagging doubts and begin. All writers have different starting points, some prefer to be highly structured, drawing up lists, outlines and clear objectives for their writing (don’t let planning however, turn into avoidance activities). Such a typical outline might include birth, childhood memories, school days, teen years, young adult, marriage, career, middle years and retirement. Others may choose to avoid a linear approach, preferring instead to write about individual landmarks that focus on significant turning points, changing careers, grandparents, meeting your first love, making do and being happy; whatever is pivotal in your life. It might be later when you decide to fit these pieces together or it may be you decide to follow a single pathway.

Everyone has special memories in their life. Use the phrase ‘I remember’ to evoke those poignant times. If writing seems hard, then concentrate on those individuals, which have impacted on your life. Put the person into a well-known context or link them to an incident to show their particular strengths or weaknesses. Be sure to record all

those family stories, which often go back several generations. Research if need be. Look around you to see all those objects and photographs. It’s true, photographs tell a thousand words, but only if you write them down.

Remember to record, achievements and disappointments, moments of extreme happiness and joy, epiphanies, your fifteen minutes of fame and of course those deep emotional encounters, which seem even now, to be fading fast. Readers want more from your life story, than simple descriptions, they want to be able to inhabit your world, so you must give something of yourself. Facts and description won’t suffice alone, create that intimate world. Your writing doesn’t need to become self-indulgent, maudlin but try to make it meaningful and humanly engaging to draw the reader in.

I once lived with an uncle, as a young adolescent I wanted to be out on the town on a Friday night. He had other ideas (considering me too young), rather than telling me I couldn’t, he tackled a difficult situation in his own way. He told me I was free to go after I had stacked a very large field of hay bales. It seemed unattainable; especially with the late diminishing light. Obstinacy drove me on, the field was eventually stacked and my uncle conceded, I was now old enough to step outside my boyhood.

It’s your responsibility to reach out to your readers and bring the world you knew alive to them. Use all your senses to explore the context of each event and be honest and open in your appraisal. A temptation exists when writing to find events losing direction and pages becoming muddied and swamped. Maintain a single focus and avoid the overwhelming deluge on the page. Decide in advance what you really want to say and keep to it. Ensure your writing is clear and simple, devoid of purple prose, that uses a natural voice and gives full expression to a very special life.

John Greeves originally hails from Lincolnshire. He believes in the power of poetry and writing to change people’s lives and the need for language to move and connect people to the modern world. Since retiring from Cardiff University, Greeves works as a freelance journalist who's interested in an eclectic range of topics.