You don’t have to have gone to space or become a billionaire to have had a life worth commenting on. And there’s nothing wrong with autobiographies about regular people! Plenty of people, myself included, lead relatively normal and uneventful lives that still have their moments of extreme beauty and significance. It’s true that there’s beauty in the mundane. Now that we know what sorts of things you should include in your autobiography, let’s talk about some things you should avoid. What to Avoid When Writing an Autobiography If the mother in an autobiography, for example, is just plain absolute evil, it’s going to read flat, even if that mother really was cruel to the subject. While an autobiography should absolutely not edit people to make them more pleasing or more suited to an easy reading experience, it should make the characters in the story realistic, and it should portray them with nuance and balance. Real people can be boring, inconsistent, random, and difficult. Much in the way we don’t write dialogue exactly how people talk, because it would be nonsense, we also don’t write people to be exactly like real people. Now, I know what you may be thinking: real people are a hot mess. Balanced CharactersĪn autobiography should also include balanced characters! It shouldn’t feel like a string of unrelated events-it should feel like a story.Ī few common narratives: rags-to-riches, voyage and return, person vs. While they might not follow conventional fictional storytelling methods, there should still be a common narrative to thread all of these events together. When it comes to autobiography, it’s important to remember that these are still books. We have plenty of spiritual awakenings, moments of clarity, or points that feel like culminations in our personal character arcs, but if we mapped these out over the course of our lives, we wouldn’t find a solid Freytag’s Pyramid structure. People’s lives are messy, complicated, and, not to get all existential, sort of without a climax or summit point. If I pick up another biography and find out that he actually went to college at Stanford and graduated at the top of his class, but didn’t end up using that degree in his later work, I would think the first biography was poorly researched and incomplete. I’ll put it like this: say I read a biography about Joe Smith, a man I just invented. But an autobiography can’t afford the same exemptions. In a memoir, someone might skip over some parts of their life because it’s not what they’re there to talk about. Where did they go to school, for example, and what did they study? What was their first job out of college? After all, we came to read this book to learn about the author’s super interesting life-we want interesting details, and we want lots of ‘em!
Again, it’s fine if there are some sections that are more eventful than others, but an autobiography shouldn’t fail to include entire decades of someone’s life.Īdditionally, autobiographies should dig into detail. Since autobiographies are about chronicling their subject’s life, it makes sense that it should be in chronological order.Ī well-written autobiography should go from birth to the present-day. Attention to Detail and Chronological Order
USE SHORT STORIES TO WRITE AUTOBIOG FULL
So even if we skim some parts, we should still be getting the full picture. The purpose of an autobiography is, at its core, to document the subject’s life. It might not spend an equal amount of time on each of these areas-for example, if an astronaut who went to space in her thirties wrote an autobiography, she might not spend quite as much time on her uneventful childhood in midwestern suburbia as she does on, say, her space adventures. It’ll cover upbringing, schooling, lack of schooling, teenage years, the whole thing. An Entire LifetimeĪn autobiography will cover the entire life of the subject. In an autobiography, here’s what you’re looking for: 1. It’s going to read a little more like a traditional novel, usually, and it’s going to take a little more creative liberty. Namely that a memoir is a more artistic take on a specific period in a person’s life. So first, what are the key components of an autobiography? A lot of people conflate ‘autobiography’ with ‘memoir,’ but there are a few differences between memoirs and autobiographies. Publish Your Book! What to Include in Writing an Autobiography
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