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How To Start Autobiography About Yourself? (9 Easy Steps)

Last Updated on July 20, 2022 by Dr Sharon Baisil MD

Introduction

Do you want to write your autobiography but don’t know where to start? Well, this article is for you! In it, we’ll share ten tips on how to start writing your autobiography. From developing a plan to finding a publisher, these tips will help you get started on the project and make the process as smooth and easy as possible. So put down the book club novel and start writing your life story today!

What to Consider When Writing an Autobiography?

Writing your autobiography can be a daunting task, but with the help of the right approach and tools, the process can be a lot easier. To get started, make sure you have a clear goal in mind. This could be anything from writing a memoir that highlights your life story to share your wisdom with the world. Once you have a good idea of the direction you want to take, develop an outline. This will help you stay organized and focused while you write. It’s also important to determine the tone you want your autobiography to have. Is it serious or light-hearted? Finally, research different bio-writing software programs so that you can produce high-quality material. With the help of these programs, you’ll be able to write your autobiography professionally and concisely.

How to Write an Autobiography in 9 Easy Steps

Writing an autobiography can be a life-changing experience, and it can help you reflect on your journey and share your story with the world. With the right step-by-step guide , writing your autobiography can be a breeze. This blog post will outline the nine simple steps you need to write a successful autobiography. So, let’s get started!

Step #1 Start by Brainstorming.

Autobiographies are a wonderful way for people to reflect on their lives and share their stories with the world. Whether you want to write a memoir for personal reasons or give your readers a behind-the-scenes look at your life, the first step is always brainstorming. This process helps you identify the key points of your life story, the events that have shaped you, and the emotions you have experienced.

Once you know what your autobiography will be about, it’s time to develop some ideas. Write in short, concise sentences that are easy to follow and understand. Remember to keep a diary of your progress so that you can reflect on the journey and improve upon any aspects as needed. Writing an autobiography is a rewarding experience that will allow you to share your story with the world and connect with people from all over the globe.

Step #2 Plan Your Outline and Structure

The second step in writing an autobiography is to plan it out. You will want a strong foundation for your story, which starts with character development. You will be instructing the reader on how to feel. Some key moments and people that are significant in your life need to be introduced. These will expand upon, help connect your thoughts and feelings, bring emotion into the story, and keep things interesting for the audience!

You will also want to consider how you would like to structure your autobiography. There are many ways to do this, but typically, people choose chronological order or theme-based structure. Chronological order is when you go through the events of your life in the order that they happened. This can be helpful if you want to share your story chronologically and show how your life has progressed over time. A theme-based structure is when you organize your story around a certain theme or lessons learned. This could be anything from love to lose, family to career, or betrayal to redemption.

Once you have decided on the structure of your autobiography, it is time to start planning the outline. This will help you organize your thoughts and ensure that your story includes important details. Begin by brainstorming a list of topics you would like to cover in your autobiography. Then, break these down into smaller, more manageable sections. For each section, identify the main points you would like to cover. These should be the key events or lessons you want to share with your audience.

As you are brainstorming and planning, keep in mind the overall tone of your autobiography. Do you want it to be serious or light-hearted? What kind of language do you want to use? What kind of emotions do you want to evoke in your readers? Answering these questions will help you determine the overall tone and approach you to want to take with your story.

Finally, once you have a general outline of the topics you would like to cover, it is time to start thinking about the specific details you want to include. This is where your diary entries from brainstorming will come in handy! Review your entries and start identifying the key moments, events, conversations, and emotions that you want to share. These details will add life to your story and make it more relatable for your readers.

Step #3 Collect your memories and thoughts

The third step in writing an autobiography is collecting your memories and thoughts. This can be done in several ways, but the easiest way is to start writing simply. Write about your childhood, family, friends, experiences, and anything else that you can think of. Write freely and without judgment – this is for your eyes only!

You can also use prompts to help you get started. For example, you could answer the following questions:

  • What are some of your earliest memories?
  • Who were the most influential people when you were growing up?
  • What were some of the defining moments or experiences of your childhood?
  • What are some of the things that you remember most about your family?

Answering these questions will help you start thinking about the specific details you want to include in your story.

Once you have written down all of your memories and thoughts, it is time to organize them into a cohesive narrative. This is where your outline from the previous step will come in handy. Use your outline to determine which memories and thoughts will go into each section of your autobiography.

Step #4 Choose the right style to write in

The writing style will often determine the structure and language used in your autobiography. A few best sources of resources for this include:

First-person narrative: This is the most common style for autobiographies, as it allows you to write directly about your own experiences.

Third-person narrative: This style can be used if you want to write about someone else’s life or if you want to distance yourself from the events of your story.

Episodic storytelling: This style is perfect for stories full of interesting anecdotes and memories.

You will also want to decide on the overall tone of your autobiography.

  • Do you want it to be serious or light-hearted?
  • What kind of language do you want to use?
  • What kind of emotions do you want to evoke in your readers?

Answering these questions will help you determine the overall tone and approach you to want to take with your story.

Step #5 Organize the story of your life into chapters

If your autobiography is going to be long, you will need to organize it into chapters so that readers can easily follow your story.

Start by dividing your life into major sections, such as childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, etc. You can then further divide your experiences into smaller chapters within each of these sections. For example, if you are writing about your childhood, you might have chapters on your family, home, friends, etc.

Once you have divided your life into sections and chapters, you can start thinking about the specific details you want to include. This is where your outline from the previous step will come in handy. Use your outline to determine which memories and thoughts will go into each section of your autobiography.

Step #6 Create your first draft

Now that you have all of your memories and thoughts organized, you can start writing your first draft. This draft does not need to be perfect – in fact, it shouldn’t be! The goal of this draft is to get all of your thoughts and experiences down on paper.

Start by writing a general introduction to your story. This should include the basic facts about your life, such as your name, where you grew up, and your early years. Next, start writing about each topic you included in your outline. Write freely and without judgment – this is for your eyes only!

Step #7 Get feedback from friends and family

Once you have written the first draft of your autobiography, it is time to get feedback from your friends and family. Ask them to read your story and give their honest opinion. Do they think it is interesting? Does it flow well? Are there any parts that are confusing or could be improved?

Getting feedback from other people will help you see your story from a different perspective and give you some valuable insights into how to make your story even better.

Step #8 Edit and revise your autobiography

Once you have received feedback from your friends and family, it is time to edit and revise your autobiography. This is where you will start to fine-tune your story and turn it into something truly special.

Start by reading through your story and making any necessary changes. Then, ask someone else to read it and give you their feedback. Repeat this process until you are happy with the results.

Proofreading is also an important step in the editing process. Be sure to read through your story multiple times and look for any typos or grammatical errors.

Step #9 Publish your autobiography

Once you are happy with the final version of your autobiography, it is time to start thinking about how you want to publish it. If you are planning to self-publish, there are several different options that you can choose from.

If you are interested in getting your autobiography published by a traditional publishing house, you must submit a query letter to them. This short letter introduces your story and explains why you think it would be a good fit for their publishing company .

If you are not interested in self-publishing or traditional publishing, there are still several other options that you can choose from. For example, you could create an e-book or audiobook version of your autobiography, and you could also submit your story to magazines or websites that accept personal essays.

No matter how you choose to publish your autobiography, share it with your friends and family. They will be proud of your accomplishment and enjoy reading about your life.

Promoting your autobiography

my autobiography of my self

Suppose you have published your autobiography; congratulations! This is a huge accomplishment that you should be very proud of.

Once your autobiography is published, you will need to promote it if you want people to read it. There are several different ways that you can do this.

One way to promote your autobiography is to create a website or blog where you can share information about your book. You can also use social media to spread the word about your book. Be sure to use hashtags and post links to your book’s sales page on Twitter and Facebook.

Another way to promote your autobiography is to give interviews about it. You can do this in person, on the radio or television, or online. This is a great way to generate interest in your book and reach a wider audience.

You can also hold events to promote your book. For example, you could host a book signing or reading. You could also give a talk about your book at a local library or community center.

Social media, email, book signings, interviews, and other events are great ways to promote your autobiography. By taking the time to promote your book, you will be able to reach a larger audience and sell more copies.

No matter how you choose to promote your autobiography, be sure to put in the effort if you want, people to read it.

Autobiography vs. Biography

The author is the essential distinction between biography and autobiography writing. The person whose life is chronicled in the book writes their autobiography. On the other hand, biographies may be written by anybody and about anybody.

The process of writing an autobiography is not an easy one.

Our life is a story of our own life. Even if we do not feel that much to write about, you can still make it quite interesting with the help of being an awesome, real-life example for it.

It requires you to remember many details and facts, which may sound boring. To help you with this task, we have prepared a list of useful tips that will make your writing process much easier.

Autobiography vs. Memoir

The nonfiction genre known as a memoir is closely connected to an autobiography, but they are not the same thing. An autobiography, in particular, is a first-person account of the author’s entire life. A memoir is more like a multi-period journey within an author’s life than a chronicle of the whole life story.

10 Tips on How to Start Autobiography About Yourself

The top 10 tips for writing an autobiography are sprinkled throughout this article exactly where you will need them.

So, let’s get started!

1 – Consider a theme

Themes are used to structure many autobiographies, and becoming is a great illustration. The book’s title contains the words “becoming” in each section. Each portion of the autobiography is linked to an elevated theme. Include stories from your past that shaped your present-day perspective and way of life.

The first draft is the draft that you created after all these things. This can be written almost like a diary, but it should be focused and concise. However, this draft should not look like an autobiography: too short or too long. The main thing in your first draft is to have fun!

2 – Skip the irrelevant parts

Every meal, automobile ride, and a terrifying trip to the supermarket isn’t necessary to describe unless you came across the Russian Mafia at the veggies or at the grocery store, which is perched.

Start editing your biography. The last thing you want to do is get a friend or family member with editing skills to look at your stuff because they’ll make fun of you (unless, of course, it’s good). Some suggestions on what editing does: It makes sure the piece flows smoothly; this could be done by cutting out sentences or using better transitions between ideas. A summary would also help since people often lose interest if there isn’t one and aren’t interested.

3 – Captivate, but don’t chronicle

Always keep in mind how to make each part, chapter, page, paragraph, and sentence more interesting. You want to tell the truth, but it’s up to you how you do it. Build anticipation, rivalry, and secrecy. Let the drama linger until it becomes unpleasant. Don’t try to fix things immediately or remove tension.

4 – Do you write it in the future tense?

When it comes to writing in the future tense, it’s a little tricky. The majority of autobiographies follow a step-by-step structure and recall events that have already happened. The reader is transported from one beginning to another, and even to the present, via this procedure.

You can be the reader of your autobiography. Just start writing about the events that happened to you, and tell them in the most simple way possible so that the reader will feel like reading it themself.

The story usually concludes there, but the end is frequently written in the present tense. If you want to bet or anticipate your goals, dreams, or fears for the future, basic principles of tense apply.

5 – Write in first-person narrative

Traditional biographies need third-person writing, but the third-person voice may sound arrogant in the autobiography style.

An autobiography is a first-person account of the author’s life, written by them alone. It may also be partly based on first-person experiences described in the third person by someone else who was present during them and told from this second-person perspective. The story can include events that happened to others and things that have been changed because their authors didn’t want anyone to know about them at all!

6 – Include dialogue snippets

Use quotation marks the same way you’d use them in a novel. Show short back-and-forth tennis matches between characters in which they discuss. Remember to leave out the mundane parts!

7 – Select a particular tone

Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants is one of the more humorous autobiographies. Some, such as Andre Agassi’s Open, are more serious. Select an overall tone and stick with it, as your tale (like most tales) will likely include a variety of feelings.

8 – Write a catchy title

Your title shouldn’t be dull, and your autobiographical writing shouldn’t be. Jane Doe: An Autobiography is one title to avoid. You aren’t forcing anyone to read it unless you’re famous. Jane Doe: The Tale of My Life is another dull book.

9 – Don’t do grammar mistakes!

The grammar errors in the essay make the reader believe that you do not write it. Even amateurs like us can spot grammar mistakes and bad usage, especially if we compare your autobiography with other autobiographical essays. Before writing an autobiography, see how much space there is for you on the paper.

Then keep thinking about where I will start writing and what direction I should take to captivate my readers right away without giving them time to get bored of the writing style.

10 – Write the story in scenes or vignettes

Each vignette has a beginning, middle, and end. It is a small story, and each vignette progresses as you click. Instead of describing the experience to the reader, each vignette should be described in rich sensory language that depicts the experience. Each vignette is multi-sensory, immediate, and personal.

Final Words

Autobiographies are a great way to connect with your readers on a more personal level and can be a great source of inspiration. Whether you’re just getting started or looking for some tips on how to start one, we’ve put together a list of top 10 tips that will help you get started! We also have a few FAQs to answer any remaining questions you may have. Do you have any advice on autobiography writing? Share it with us in the comments below!

FAQs on writing your Autobiography

How do i know if my autobiography is interesting enough to be published.

Answer: There is no one answer to this question, as the best way to find out is to write and submit your autobiography for review. The best places to submit your work include Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. Once your autobiography is accepted, you will need to follow all the publisher’s guidelines. This includes submitting a finished manuscript, getting a copyedited and proofread copy, and making sure your book is formatted correctly. Once you have completed all of these steps, the next step is to promote your book. This can be done through social media, blog postings, and more. Make sure to set a schedule for promoting your book and stick to it! You also want to make sure to price your book affordably so that as many people can purchase it. Finally, be patient – promoting a book is not an overnight process.

Why is writing in the first person important in an autobiography?

Answer: A first-person book is a personal memoir, and it requires the first-person experience to tell its story. The author of first-person books must write from their own experience, which helps them bring readers into the world they inhabit and makes them feel as if they are experiencing things with that character or sometimes through them themselves — such as what it’s like for someone who has had an eating disorder to try on clothes at different sizes (as described in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “The Beauty Myth”).

What is a good topic for an autobiography?

Answer: Many different topics could make great fodder for an autobiography, and the sky is the limit! If you have a compelling story, then an autobiography could be the perfect vehicle to tell it. Some of the most popular topics for autobiographies include life-changing events, overcoming adversity, and personal growth. Once you have decided on a topic, it is important to develop a plan. This includes planning out the content, developing a writing style that is easy to read and engaging, and scheduling time to write. Once you have completed your manuscript, it is important to edit it and ensure that all the details are correct. Remember, an autobiography reflects your life, so make sure that it is accurate and reflects your true personality. Finally, create a personal branding strategy and use social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook to market your book.

Most Read Articles in 2023:

Sharon Baisil

Hi, I am a doctor by profession, but I love writing and publishing ebooks. I have self-published 3 ebooks which have sold over 100,000 copies. I am featured in Healthline, Entrepreneur, and in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology blog.

Whether you’re a busy professional or an aspiring author with a day job, there’s no time like now to start publishing your ebook! If you are new to this world or if you are seeking help because your book isn’t selling as well as it should be – don’t worry! You can find here resources, tips, and tricks on what works best and what doesn’t work at all.

In this blog, I will help you to pick up the right tools and resources to make your ebook a best seller.

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Writing Beginner

How To Write an Autobiography 2024 (Tips, Templates, & Guide)

Your life story has value, merit, and significance. You want to share it with the world, but maybe you don’t know how .

Here’s how to write an autobiography:

Write an autobiography by creating a list of the most important moments, people, and places in your life. Gather photos, videos, letters, and notes about these experiences. Then, use an outline, templates, sentence starters, and questions to help you write your autobiography .

In this article, you are going to learn the fastest method for writing your autobiography.

We are going to cover everything you need to know with examples and a free, downloadable, done-for-you template.

What Is an Autobiography?

Typewriter, lightbulb, and crumpled paper - How To Write an Autobiography

Table of Contents

Before you can write an autobiography, you must first know the definition.

An autobiography is the story of your life, written by you. It covers the full span of your life (at least, up until now), hitting on the most significant moments, people and events.

When you write your autobiography, you write an intimate account of your life.

What Should I Include In an Autobiography?

If you are scratching your head, baffled about what to include in your autobiography, you are not alone.

After all, a big part of how to write an autobiography is knowing what to put in and what to leave out of your life story. Do you focus on every detail?

Every person? Won’t your autobiography be too long?

A good way to think about how to write an autobiography is to use the Movie Trailer Method.

What do movie trailers include?

  • High emotional moments
  • The big events
  • The most important characters

When you plan, organize, and write your autobiography, keep the Movie Trailer Method in mind. You can even watch a bunch of free movie trailers on YouTube for examples of how to write an autobiography using the Movie Trailer Method.

When wondering what to include in your autobiography, focus on what would make the cut for a movie trailer of your life:

  • Most important people (like family, friends, mentors, coaches, etc.)
  • Significant events (like your origin story, vacations, graduations, life turning points, life lessons)
  • Emotional moments (When you were homeless, when you battled a life-threatening condition, or when you fell in love)
  • Drama or suspense (Did you make it into Harvard? Did your first surgery go well? Did your baby survive?)

Autobiography Structure Secrets

Like any compelling story, a well-structured autobiography often follows a pattern that creates a logical flow and captures readers’ attention.

Traditionally, autobiographies begin with early memories, detailing the writer’s childhood, family background, and the events or people that shaped their formative years.

From here, the narrative typically progresses chronologically, covering major life events like schooling, friendships, challenges, achievements, career milestones, and personal relationships.

It’s essential to weave these events with introspective insights.

This allows readers to understand not just the what, but also the why behind the author’s choices and experiences.

Towards the end, an effective autobiography often includes reflections on lessons learned, changes in perspective over time, and the wisdom acquired along life’s journey.

Example of the Structure:

  • Introduction: A gripping event or anecdote that gives readers a hint of what to expect. It could be a pivotal moment or challenge that defines the essence of the story.
  • Childhood and Early Memories: Recounting family dynamics, birthplace, cultural background, and memorable incidents from early years.
  • Adolescence and Discovering Identity: Experiences during teenage years, challenges faced, friendships formed, and personal evolutions.
  • Pursuits and Passions: Describing education, early career choices, or any particular hobby or skill that played a significant role in the author’s life.
  • Major Life Events and Challenges: Chronicles of marriage, parenthood, career shifts, or any significant setbacks and how they were overcome.
  • Achievements and Milestones: Celebrating major accomplishments and recounting the journey to achieving them.
  • Reflections and Wisdom: Sharing life lessons, changes in beliefs or values over time, and offering insights gained from lived experiences.
  • Conclusion: Summarizing the journey, contemplating on the present state, and sharing hopes or aspirations for the future.

How To Write an Autobiography Quickly: Strategies & Templates

Want the quickest way to organize and write your autobiography in record time? You can literally write your autobiography in 7 days or less with this method.

The secret is to use done-for-you templates.

I have personally designed and collected a series of templates to take you from a blank page to a fully complete Autobiography. I call this the How to Write an Autobiography Blueprint.

And it’s completely free to download right from this article. 🙂

In the How to Write an Autobiography Blueprint, you get:

  • The Autobiography Questions Template
  • The Autobiography Brainstorm Templates
  • The Autobiography Outline Template

Here is an image of it so that you know exactly what you get when you download it:

Autobiography Blueprint

How To Write an Autobiography: Step-by-Step

When you sit down to write an autobiography, it’s helpful to have a step-by-step blueprint to follow.

You already have the done-for-you templates that you can use to organize and write an autobiography faster than ever before. Now here’s a complete step-by-step guide on how to maximize your template.

  • Brainstorm Ideas
  • Order your sections (from medium to high interest)
  • Order the ideas in each section (from medium to high interest)
  • Write three questions to answer in each section
  • Choose a starter sentence
  • Complete a title template
  • Write each section of your by completing the starter sentence and answering all three questions

Brainstorm Your Autobiography

The first step in writing your autobiography is to brainstorm.

Give yourself time and space to write down the most significant people, events, lessons, and experiences in your life. The templates in the How to Write an Autobiography Blueprint provide sections for you to write down your brainstormed ideas.

How to Brainstorm Your Autobiography

This will help you organize your ideas into what will become the major sections of your book.

These will be:

  • Y our most significant events and experiences.
  • The people who impacted you the most.
  • The challenges you have overcome.
  • Your achievements and successes.
  • The lessons you have learned.

The “other” sections on the second page of the Brainstorm template is for creating your own sections or to give you more space for the sections I provided in case you run out of space.

As I brainstorm, I find asking myself specific questions really activates my imagination.

So I have compiled a list of compelling questions to help you get ideas down on paper or on your screen.

How to Write an Autobiography: Top 10 Questions

Order Your Sections (From Medium to High Interest)

The next step is to order your main sections.

The main sections are the five (or more) sections from your Brainstorm templates (Significant events, significant people, life lessons, challenges, successes, other, etc). This order will become the outline and chapters for your book.

How do you decide what comes first, second or third?

I recommend placing the sections in order of interest. Ask yourself, “What’s the most fascinating part of my life?”

If it’s a person, then write the name of that section (Significant People) on the last line in the How to Write an Autobiography Outline Template. If it’s an experience, place the name of that section (Significant Events) on the last line.

For example, if you met the Pope, you might want to end with that nugget from your life. If you spent three weeks lost at sea and survived on a desert island by spearfishing, that is your ending point.

Then complete the Outline by placing the remaining sections in order of interest. You can work your way backward from high interest to medium interest.

If you are wondering why I say “medium to high interest” instead of “low to high interest” it is because there should be no “low interest” parts of your autobiography.

But wait, what if you met the Pope AND spent three weeks lost at sea? How do you choose which one comes first or last?

First of all, I want to read this book! Second, when in doubt, default to chronological order. Whatever event happened first, start there.

Here is an example of how it might look:

Autobiography Example

Order The Ideas in Each Section (From Medium To High Interest)

Now, organize the ideas inside of each section. Again, order the ideas from medium to high interest).

Within your “Significant People” section, decide who you want to talk about first, second, third, etc. You can organize by chronological order (who you met first) but I recommend building to the most interesting or most significant person.

This creates a more compelling read.

Keep in mind that the most significant person might not be the most well-known, most famous, or most popular. The most significant person might be your family member, friend, partner, or child.

It comes down to who shaped your life the most.

So, if your “significant people list” includes your dad, a famous social media influencer, and Mike Tyson, your dad might come last because he had the biggest significance in your life.

Write Three Questions to Answer in Each Section

Ok, you’ve done the heavy lifting already. You have the major sections organized and outlined.

Next on your autobiography to-do list is to choose and write down three questions you are going to answer in each section. You can write your questions down in the provided “boxes” for each section on the template outline (or on another piece of paper.

This is easier than it might seem.

Simply choose one of the sample autobiography questions below or create your own:

  • Why did I choose this person/event?
  • What does this person/event mean to me?
  • How did I meet this person?
  • Where did it happen?
  • When did it happen?
  • Why did it happen?
  • How did it happen?
  • What is the most interesting part?
  • How did I feel about this person or event?
  • How do I feel now?
  • Why does this person or event matters to me?
  • How did this person or event change my life?
  • What is the most challenging part?
  • How did I fail?
  • How did I succeed?
  • What did I learn?

Questions are the perfect way to write quickly and clearly. I LOVE writing to questions. It’s how I write these blog posts and articles.

Choose a Starter Sentence

Sometimes the hardest part of any project is knowing how to start.

Even though we know we can always go back and edit our beginnings, so many of us become paralyzed with indecision at the starting gate.

That’s why I provided sample starter sentences in your How to Write an Autobiography Blueprint.

Here are the story starters:

  • I began writing this book when…
  • Of all the experiences in my life, this one was the most…
  • I’ve been a…
  • My name is…
  • Growing up in…
  • It wasn’t even a…
  • It all started when…
  • I first…
  • I was born…

Keep in mind that you do not need to begin your book with one of these story starters. I provide them simply to get you going.

The key is to not get bogged down in this, or any, part of writing your autobiography. Get organized and then get writing.

Complete a Title Template

At the top of the How to Write an Autobiography Outline is a place for you to write your book title.

Some authors struggle forever with a title. And that’s ok. What’s not ok is getting stuck. What’s not ok is if coming up with your title prevents you from finishing your book.

So, I provided a few title templates to help juice your creativity.

Just like the story starters, you do not need to use these title templates, but you certainly can. All you need to do is fill in the title templates below and then write your favorite one (for now) at the top of your outline. Presto! You have your working title.

You can always go back and change it later.

How to Write an Autobiography Title templates:

  • [Your Name]: [Phrase or Tag Line]
  • The [Your Last Name] Files
  • Born [Activity]: A [Career]’s Life
  • The Perfect [Noun]: The Remarkable Life of [Your Name]

Examples using the Templates:

  • Christopher Kokoski: Blog Until You Drop
  • The Kokoski Files
  • Born Writing: A Blogger’s Life
  • The Perfect Freelancer: The Remarkable Life of Christopher Kokoski

Write Your Autobiography

You have your outline. You have your title, templates, and sentence starters. All that is left to do is write your autobiography.

However, you can use tools like Jasper AI and a few other cool tricks to craft the most riveting book possible.

This is the easy way to remarkable writing.

Check out this short video that goes over the basics of how to write an autobiography:

How To Write an Autobiography (All the Best Tips)

Now that you are poised and ready to dash out your first draft, keep the following pro tips in mind:

  • Be vulnerable. The best autobiographies share flaws, faults, foibles, and faux pas. Let readers in on the real you.
  • Skip the boring parts. There is no need to detail every meal, car ride, or a gripping trip to the grocery store. Unless you ran into the Russian Mafia near the vegetables or the grocery store is perched on the side of a mountain above the jungles of Brazil.
  • Keep your autobiography character-driven . This is the story of YOU!
  • Be kind to others (or don’t). When writing about others in your story, keep in mind that there may be fallout or backlash from your book.
  • Consider a theme: Many autobiographies are organized by theme. A perfect example is Becoming . Each section of the book includes “becoming” in the title. Themes connect and elevate each part of the autobiography.
  • Write your story in vignettes (or scenes). Each vignette is a mini-story with a beginning, middle, and end. Each vignette builds. Each vignette should be described in rich sensory language that shows the reader the experience instead of telling the reader about the experience. Each vignette is immersive, immediate, and intimate.
  • Include snippets of dialogue. Use quotation marks just like in fiction. Show the dialogue in brief back-and-forth tennis matches of conversation. Remember to leave the boring parts out!
  • Choose a consistent tone. Some autobiographies are funny like Bossy Pants by Tina Fey. Others are serious such as Open by Andre Agassi. Your story (like most stories) will likely include a mix of emotions but choose an overall tone and stick with it.
  • Don’t chronicle, captivate . Always think about how to make each section, each chapter, each page, each paragraph, and each sentence more compelling. You want to tell the truth, but HOW you tell the truth is up to you. Create suspense, conflict, and mystery. Let drama linger until it becomes uncomfortable. Don’t solve problems quickly or take away tension right away.

How Do I Format an Autobiography?

Most autobiographies are written in the first person (using the pronouns I, me, we, and us).

Your autobiography is written about you so write as yourself instead of pretending to be writing about someone else.

Most autobiographies are also written in chronological order, from birth right up to your current age, with all the boring parts left out. That doesn’t mean you can’t play around with the timeline.

Sometimes it’s more interesting to start at a high moment, backtrack to the beginning and show how you got to that high moment.

Whatever format you choose, be intentional, and make the choice based on making the most compelling experience possible for your readers.

How Long Should an Autobiography Be?

There are no rules to how long an autobiography should be but a rough guideline is to aim for between 200 and 400 pages.

This will keep your book in line with what most readers expect for books in general, and will help get your book traditionally published or help with marketing your self-published book.

How To Write a Short Autobiography

You write a short autobiography the same way that you write a long autobiography.

You simply leave more out of the story.

You cut everything down to the bones. Or you choose a slice of your life as you do in a memoir. This often means limiting the people in your book, reducing the events and experiences, and shrinking your story to a few pivotal moments in your life.

How To Start an Autobiography

The truth is that you can start your autobiography in any number of ways.

Here are four common ways to begin an autobiography.

  • Start at the beginning (of your life, career or relationship, etc.)
  • Start at a high moment of drama or interest.
  • Start at the end of the story and work backward
  • Start with why you wrote the book.

Good Autobiography Titles

If you are still stuck on titling your autobiography, consider going to Amazon to browse published works. You can even just Google “autobiographies.”

When you read the titles of 10, 20, or 50 other autobiographies, you will start to see patterns or get ideas for your own titles. (HINT: the title templates in the Autobiography Blueprint were reverse-engineered from popular published books.

Also, check out the titles of the full autobiography examples below that I have included right here in this article.

Types of Autobiographies

There are several different kinds of autobiographies.

Each one requires a similar but slightly nuanced approach to write effectively. The lessons in this article will serve as a great starting point.

Autobiography Types:

  • Autobiography for School
  • Autobiography Novel
  • Autobiography for a Job
  • Short Autobiography
  • Autobiography for Kids

Therefore, there is actually not just one way to write an autobiography.

Memoir vs. Autobiography: Are They The Same?

It’s common to feel confused about a memoir and an autobiography. I used to think they were the same thing.

But, nope, they’re not.

They are pretty similar, which is the reason for all the confusion. A memoir is the story of one part of your life. An autobiography is the story of your full life (up until now).

What Is the Difference Between an Autobiography and a Biography?

An autobiography is when you write about your own life. A biography, on the other hand, is when you write the story of someone else’s life.

So, if I write a book about the life of the President, that’s a biography.

If the President writes a story about his or her own life, that’s an autobiography.

What Not To Include In an Autobiography

Autobiographies are meant to be a snapshot of our lives that we can share with others, but there are some things that are best left out.

Here are three things you should avoid including in your autobiography:

1) Anything That Readers Will Skip

Your life may not be filled with non-stop excitement, but that doesn’t mean you need to include every mundane detail in your autobiography.

Stick to the highlights and leave out the low points.

2) Character Attacks on Others

It’s okay to discuss conflicts you’ve had with others, but don’t use your autobiography as a platform to attack someone’s character.

Keep it civil and focus on your own experiences and how they’ve affected you.

3) Skipping Highlights

Just because something embarrassing or painful happened to you doesn’t mean you should gloss over it in your autobiography.

These are the moments that shape us and make us who we are today, so don’t skip past them just because they’re uncomfortable.

By following these simple tips, you can ensure that your autobiography is interesting, honest, and engaging.

How To Write an Autobiography: Autobiography Examples

I have always found examples to be extremely instructive. Especially complete examples of finished products. In this case, books.

Below you will find examples of published autobiographies for adults and for kids. These examples will guide you, motivate you and inspire you to complete your own life story.

They are listed here as examples, not as endorsements, although I think they are all very good.

The point is that you don’t have to agree with anything written in the books to learn from them.

Autobiography Examples for Adults

  • A Promised Land (Autobiography of Barack Obama)
  • If You Ask Me: (And of Course You Won’t) (Betty White)
  • It’s a Long Story: My Life (Willie Nelson)
  • Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (Rob Lowe)
  • Becoming (Michelle Obama)

Autobiography Examples for Kids

  • This Kid Can Fly: It’s About Ability (NOT Disability) (Aaron Philips)
  • Bee Fearless: Dream Like a Kid (Mikaila Ulmer)

Final Thoughts: How To Write An Autobiography

Thank you for reading my article on How to Write an Autobiography.

Now that you know all of the secrets to write your book, you may want to get it published, market it, and continue to upskill yourself as an author.

In that case, read these posts next:

  • Can Anyone Write A Book And Get It Published?
  • The Best Writing Books For Beginners 2022 (My 10 Favorites)
  • Why Do Writers Hate Adverbs? (The Final Answer)
  • How To Write a Manifesto: 20 Ultimate Game-Changing Tips

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How to Write an Autobiography

Last Updated: February 21, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Gerald Posner . Gerald Posner is an Author & Journalist based in Miami, Florida. With over 35 years of experience, he specializes in investigative journalism, nonfiction books, and editorials. He holds a law degree from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, and a BA in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley. He’s the author of thirteen books, including several New York Times bestsellers, the winner of the Florida Book Award for General Nonfiction, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He was also shortlisted for the Best Business Book of 2020 by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 2,280,015 times.

What's your story? Anyone who has lived a full life has something fascinating to share with the world. The trick to writing an autobiography is to treat it like any good story: it should have a protagonist (you), a central conflict, and a cast of fascinating characters to keep people engaged. You may want to think about a certain theme or idea that has been present in your daily life to revolve your story around. Read on to learn how to craft the story of your life and polish your writing to make it sing.

Mapping Out Your Life

Step 1 Write out your...

  • Your autobiography doesn't have to begin with your birth. You may want to include some family history as well. Write down information about your ancestry, your grandparents' lives, your parents' lives, and so on. Having information about your family history will help readers get a sense of how you became the person you are.
  • What happened when you were a teenager? What led you to make the decisions you made?
  • Did you go to college? Write about those transitory years, too.
  • Write about your career, your relationships, your children, and any big life-altering events that occurred.

Step 2 Identify the main characters.

  • Teachers, coaches, mentors, and bosses are extremely influential in people's lives. Decide whether someone who has been a role model (or the opposite) for you will figure into your story.
  • Ex-boyfriends and girlfriends might co-star in some interesting stories.
  • What enemies have you had in life? Your story will be boring if you don't include some conflicts.
  • Offbeat characters such as animals, celebrities you've never met, and even cities are often points of interest in an autobiography.

Step 3 Pull out the best stories.

  • The childhood story. Whether your childhood was happy or traumatic, you should include a few anecdotes that give a picture of who you were and what you experienced at the time. You can tell the story of your childhood by breaking it down into smaller anecdotes that illustrate your personality - your parents' reaction when you brought home a stray dog, the time you climbed out of the window at school and ran away for 3 days, your friendly relationship with a homeless person living in the woods… get creative.
  • The coming of age story. This heady and often sensual period in a human's life is always of interest to readers. Remember that it's not about writing something unique; everyone comes of age. It's about writing something that resonates with readers.
  • The falling in love story. You could also write the opposite of this, the never-finding-love story.
  • The identity crisis story. This usually occurs in the 30s or 40s and is sometimes referred to as a mid-life crisis.
  • The story of facing down some force of evil. Whether it's your battle with addiction, a controlling lover, or a madman who tried to kill your family, you've got to write about conflict you've experienced.

Step 4 Write in your own voice.

  • Write as though you're opening your heart to a trusted friend, in prose that's clear, strong and not too cluttered with vocabulary words you rarely use.
  • Write so that your personality is revealed. Are you funny? Intense? Spiritual? Dramatic? Don't hold back; your personality should come through in the way you tell your story.

Step 5 Be revealing.

  • Don't always cast yourself in a positive light. You can have foibles and still be the protagonist. Reveal mistakes you've made and times when you've failed yourself and other people.
  • Reveal your inner thoughts. Share your opinions and ideas, including those that may spark controversy. Be true to yourself through your autobiography.

Step 6 Capture the spirit of the times.

Crafting a Narrative

Step 1 Create an overarching...

  • What's your central conflict? What's the biggest obstacle life presented that took years to overcome or come to terms with? Maybe it's an illness you were diagnosed with at an early age, a relationship wrought with turmoil, a series of career setbacks, a goal you worked for decades to achieve, or any other number of things. Look to your favorite books and movies for more examples of conflicts.
  • Build tension and suspense. Structure the narrative so that you have a series of stories leading up to the climax of the conflict. If your central conflict is trying to reach the goal of competing in the Olympics for skiing, lead up to it with stories of small successes and plenty of failures. You want your readers to ask, will she make it? Can he do it? What's going to happen next?
  • Have a climax. You'll get to the point in your story when it's time for the conflict to come to a head. The day of the big competition has arrived, a showdown happens with your worst enemy, your gambling habit gets the better of you and you lose all your money - you get the picture.
  • End with a resolution. Most autobiographies have happy endings because the person writing the story lived to tell the tale - and hopefully get it published. Even if your ending isn't cheerful, it should be deeply satisfying. You somehow accomplished your goal or won the day. Even if you lost, you came to terms with it and gained wisdom.

Step 2 Decide where the story is going to start.

  • You could frame the entire autobiography with reflections from the present, telling your story through a series of flashbacks.
  • You could begin the story with a poignant moment from your childhood, go backward to tell the story of your heritage, move forward to your college years, and launch into the story of your career, with anecdotes from your childhood sprinkled in for comic relief.

Step 3 Weave in themes.

  • Consider ending chapters on a poignant or suspenseful note, so people can't wait to start the next one.
  • The beginnings of chapters are a good place to take a bird's eye view of your past, describe the setting of a place, and set the tone for what's to come.

Editing the Book

Step 1 Make sure you get the facts right.

  • You can stretch the truth about your own goals and intentions, but don't include fabricated conversations with real people, or altered versions of events that really happened. Of course, you won't remember everything perfectly, but you should reflect reality as best you can.
  • Get permission to use people's names or quote them if you're including content on what other people said or did. Some people don't appreciate appearing as a character in someone else's autobiography, and you should respect that by altering the way you describe them or changing their names if necessary. [6] X Research source

Step 2 Edit your draft

  • If several people recommend cutting a certain section, strongly consider making the cut.
  • Try to get opinions from people outside your circle of family and friends. People who know you might try to spare your feelings, or they might be biased - especially if they appear in the story.

Step 4 Hire a copyeditor.

  • Bossy Pants , by Tina Fey.
  • My Confession , by Leo Tolstoy.
  • A Long Walk to Freedom , by Nelson Mandela.
  • The Sound of Laughter , by Peter Kay. [7] X Research source

Publishing Your Story

Step 1 Take steps to...

  • If you don't want to pay for a publishing service, you can still create a nice copy of your book by taking it to a copy store and having it printed and bound.

Step 2 Consider finding a literary agent.

  • Start the query letter with an airtight blurb succinctly describing the highlights of the book. Situate your book in the correct genre, and describe what will make it stand out from the rest. Tell the agent why you think he or she is the right person to shop your book around to publishers.
  • Send sample chapters to agents who show interest.
  • Sign a contract with an agent you trust. Make sure to read the contract carefully and check into the agent's history before signing anything.

Step 3 Submit a query...

  • Many publishers don't accept unsolicited manuscripts or queries. Make sure you only send letters to publishers that accept them.
  • If a publisher decides to move forward with a book deal with you, you'll need to sign a contract and set up a schedule for editing, designing, proofreading, and finally publishing the book.

Step 4 Look into publishing your book online.

Writing Help

my autobiography of my self

Expert Q&A

Gerald Posner

  • Your biography can also include a dedication, foreword, vital statistics, chronology sheets, family tree, and epilogue. Thanks Helpful 7 Not Helpful 0
  • If the purpose of your autobiography is to pass on your story to your heirs, consider including memorabilia (e.g. pictures, heirlooms, medals, mementos, letters, etc.) and putting your story in a scrapbook format. Of course, you may not be able to copy the memorabilia that accompanies your autobiography, so you still have to think about what you intend to do with your original work and other items, such as medals or bulky heirlooms. Thanks Helpful 5 Not Helpful 0
  • Make your story vivid but don't get bogged down in unimportant details. While you want your autobiography to be memorable, you don't want it to be boring. Too many details—listing everyone that was at a party or trying to include all the events of each day—will bog the story down. Thanks Helpful 5 Not Helpful 1

my autobiography of my self

  • Be aware of what constitutes libel. If you write something defamatory or maliciously untrue about another person in an autobiography that you intend to publish, consider changing his or her name (if still living). Otherwise, you might find yourself facing a lawsuit. If you're unsure about what to change, consult a lawyer who specializes in libel. Thanks Helpful 5 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

Self Publish a Book

Expert Interview

my autobiography of my self

Thanks for reading our article! If you'd like to learn more about writing as a career, check out our in-depth interview with Gerald Posner .

  • ↑ https://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir
  • ↑ https://self-publishingschool.com/how-to-write-an-autobiography/
  • ↑ https://blog.reedsy.com/narrative-arc/
  • ↑ https://cdn5-ss8.sharpschool.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_222705/File/Parents%20and%20Students/Star%20Works/How%20to%20write%20an%20Autobiography.pdf
  • ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/04/how-to-write-a-memoir-jeanette-winterson-and-helen-macdonald
  • ↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/defamation-and-invasion
  • ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/feb/07/biographies-autobiography-nielsen-2001
  • ↑ https://www.pw.org/literary_agents

About This Article

Gerald Posner

To write an autobiography, start by making a timeline of your most important life events that you feel you could write about. Then, identify the main characters in your life story, including family members, ex-boyfriends or girlfriends, friends, and enemies. Once you have your cast of characters, pull life events from your timeline, such as a story from your childhood, a coming of age story, a love story, or a triumphant story. Write about these events and then connect them with a cohesive plot by writing in your own voice and being honest with the reader. To learn more about how to edit and publish your autobiography once it's finished, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How we work, guide on how to write the best autobiography of myself.

Writing autobiography can be nerve-wracking that you can barely start a single letter on. But there are also some instances when the story just keeps on flowing that you won’t even know when to stop. With these two cases, just continue on writing your bio and review all the details you were about to get out from yourself after that. In order to be effective, learn first how to write an autobiography of myself by starting with the basic definition of an autobiography.

What Is an Autobiography?

An autobiography came from the Greek word autos, which means self, bios, which means life, and graphein , which means to write. In a simple explanation, autobiography is when you learn how to write a life story about yourself. It is a narrative of your story, written in your voice, and seen in your perspective. If we’re talking about a company you should know that stories about company success are becoming more and more important today. To learn more about it go to  corporate story biography writing .

There are some who believe that autobiographies are waste of time since they are a biased narrative of events and are heavily influenced by someone’s inaccurate memory. Autobiographies are usually incomplete since they only cover the important events of a person and those that the person remembers the most.

How Do You Start an Autobiography?

If you want to learn how to make an autobiography, start with the basics. Plan how you are able to approach the writing proper task. While it may be true that it seems like an easy essay that depicts a part of your life, writing a biography of yourself will demand more from you. In planning to write your autobiography, here are the things you have to remember and take into account:

  • Define your purpose for writing your autobiography
  • As you write your draft, always consider your audience
  • Generate ideas for your autobiography and put it in writing
  • Choose the important stories you want to be part of your autobiography
  • Complete an outline for your draft

After considering these factors, the next step is writing a draft. Start by looking through the best autobiography openings you can find and figure out which you can use as a model. Make sure that you write in the first person since that’s what autobiographies are all about. Never switch back to second-person or third-person and be consistent in using the first person point of view throughout the entire content.

When you begin to write the story, never forget to describe the setting in a manner that the reader will be able to feel like actually being there. Don’t be too dramatic or ramble in your introduction. Just make sure that you are able to catch the reader’s attention with your first line.

Let the story flow out of you. Make sure that it does not run all over the place and that it is leading somewhere. Never skip over important facts in your story and conclude your story with a bang. After drafting, editing is the next task you have in store. Some tips in editing that you can consider include:

  • Reading the piece over the over again
  • Check if the dialogues are placed in appropriate locations
  • Include vivid and descriptive details
  • Make the storytelling interesting by going non-chronological
  • Make sure to embed your personality in your writing

If you are having a hard time on how to start an autobiography, you can choose the help of the experts. Hire autobiography help to make it a lot easier on your part.

What Are the Main Differences Between Biography and Autobiography?

Biographies and autobiographies are usually interchanged. These terms confuse people but the difference between the two is actually simple. It is literally due to the point of view of the storyteller.

A biography is a narrative of a life story of a person told from the perfective of another person. On the other hand, an autobiography is a narrative of a person written by that same person.

Another difference is that most autobiographies are incomplete considering the person writing it is still alive and has lots more of stories to tell while biographies are usually completed and concluded.

Learning how to write a short autobiography is easy given the existence of the online world and its abundant content. You can also easily search sites and accounts of popular bio creator and learn from there.

What You Should Know about Writing Your Own Bio

There is a good chance that if you haven’t had to write a bio already, that you may have to in the future. A bio is required of many job applicants, it is used on many networking sites, freelancers have to have one for potential clients and if you have a website or blog connected to your business, you should probably have one. Bios provide a concise summary of who a person is and what they do, while at the same time, they allow a bit of personality to come through. There are basically two main functions your bio should perform: 1) establish your credentials and qualifications; 2) create enough interest so the reader will want to know more.

What to Consider When Writing a Bio about Yourself

When writing your bio, you need to make sure that you include the following in order:

  • Professional or business experience as well as current employment
  • Completed presentations or publications
  • Professional memberships that you have
  • Certifications, honors, and awards you have received
  • Contact information so your reader will know where to get more information about you

Tips for Writing Your Own Bio

The following are some tips that can be useful when writing your own bio:

  • Identify your audience.  To create an effective bio you need to determine who will be reading your bio and what impression you want them to have. The purpose of your bio will help identify the audience. For a job application the audience will be employers, for a speaking engagement the audience will be comprised of people interested in the topic you are speaking on.
  • Use other peoples bios as a guide.  You may be thinking “I can’t write my bio by copying somebody else” and you would be correct. However, if you like how the bio structure, there is nothing wrong with presenting your own information using the same structure.
  • Only include relevant information.  A typical bio is less than a page. You should only include information relevant to your purpose.
  • Write first and revise later.  On your first draft don’t worry too much about length and include anything that might be good. You can go back and revise. Many people tend to freeze up when the try and revise as they write and end up with nothing.
  • Have somebody else read your bio.  Somebody who can be objective and give an honest opinion preferably. It is hard to be objective when writing about yourself.

Our company offers bio writing and editing services if you have problems writing the bio. Just ask us to “write my bio for me” and we will handle the task for you.

Need Biography Help?

Writing your own bio means having to spend hours or days even to really get down to the nitty-gritty of your life’s history to get the information you need for your biography. If you want to spare yourself from spending endless hours working on your bio, you should consider hiring a professional writing company like us to handle this for you. Our bio writing service specializes in biographies and because of this, you can rest easy knowing that your own bio will be in good hands.

It doesn’t matter how fast you need it, how long or short you want it, once you send us the details of your order and paid for our fees, we’ll immediately assign a professional bio writer to you to work on your bio.

About Our Bio Writing Service

The bio writing service we provide offers bio writing and editing for any type of bio. We use professional writers who specialize in writing bios and all of our writers have extensive bio writing experience. Benefits of using our service include:

  • Any bio you receive will be completely original and tailored to meet your specific requirements.
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What Is an Autobiography?

What to Consider Before You Start to Write

  • Writing Research Papers
  • Writing Essays
  • English Grammar
  • M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
  • B.A., History, Armstrong State University

Your life story, or autobiography , should contain the basic framework that any essay should have, with four basic elements. Begin with an introduction that includes a thesis statement , followed by a body containing at least several paragraphs , if not several chapters. To complete the autobiography, you'll need a strong conclusion , all the while crafting an interesting narrative with a theme.

Did You Know?

The word autobiography  literally means SELF (auto), LIFE (bio), WRITING (graph). Or, in other words, an autobiography is the story of someone's life written or otherwise told by that person.

When writing your autobiography, find out what makes your family or your experience unique and build a narrative around that. Doing some research and taking detailed notes can help you discover the essence of what your narrative should be and craft a story that others will want to read.

Research Your Background

Just like the biography of a famous person, your autobiography should include things like the time and place of your birth, an overview of your personality, your likes and dislikes, and the special events that shaped your life. Your first step is to gather background detail. Some things to consider:

  • What is interesting about the region where you were born?
  • How does your family history relate to the history of that region?
  • Did your family come to that region for a reason?

It might be tempting to start your story with "I was born in Dayton, Ohio...," but that is not really where your story begins. It's better to start with an experience. You may wish to start with something like why you were born where you were and how your family's experience led to your birth. If your narrative centers more around a pivotal moment in your life, give the reader a glimpse into that moment. Think about how your favorite movie or novel begins, and look for inspiration from other stories when thinking about how to start your own.

Think About Your Childhood

You may not have had the most interesting childhood in the world, but everyone has had a few memorable experiences. Highlight the best parts when you can. If you live in a big city, for instance, you should realize that many people who grew up in the country have never ridden a subway, walked to school, ridden in a taxi, or walked to a store a few blocks away.

On the other hand, if you grew up in the country you should consider that many people who grew up in the suburbs or inner city have never eaten food straight from a garden, camped in their backyards, fed chickens on a working farm, watched their parents canning food, or been to a county fair or a small-town festival.

Something about your childhood will always seem unique to others. You just have to step outside your life for a moment and address the readers as if they knew nothing about your region and culture. Pick moments that will best illustrate the goal of your narrative, and symbolism within your life.

Consider Your Culture

Your culture is your overall way of life , including the customs that come from your family's values and beliefs. Culture includes the holidays you observe, the customs you practice, the foods you eat, the clothes you wear, the games you play, the special phrases you use, the language you speak, and the rituals you practice.

As you write your autobiography, think about the ways that your family celebrated or observed certain days, events, and months, and tell your audience about special moments. Consider these questions:

  • What was the most special gift you ever received? What was the event or occasion surrounding that gift?
  • Is there a certain food that you identify with a certain day of the year?
  • Is there an outfit that you wear only during a special event?

Think honestly about your experiences, too. Don't just focus on the best parts of your memories; think about the details within those times. While Christmas morning may be a magical memory, you might also consider the scene around you. Include details like your mother making breakfast, your father spilling his coffee, someone upset over relatives coming into town, and other small details like that. Understanding the full experience of positives and negatives helps you paint a better picture for the reader and lead to a stronger and more interesting narrative. Learn to tie together all the interesting elements of your life story and craft them into an engaging essay.

Establish the Theme

Once you have taken a look at your own life from an outsider’s point of view, you will be able to select the most interesting elements from your notes to establish a theme. What was the most interesting thing you came up with in your research? Was it the history of your family and your region? Here is an example of how you can turn that into a theme:

"Today, the plains and low hills of southeastern Ohio make the perfect setting for large cracker box-shaped farmhouses surrounded by miles of corn rows. Many of the farming families in this region descended from the Irish settlers who came rolling in on covered wagons in the 1830s to find work building canals and railways. My ancestors were among those settlers."

A little bit of research can make your own personal story come to life as a part of history, and historical details can help a reader better understand your unique situation. In the body of your narrative, you can explain how your family’s favorite meals, holiday celebrations, and work habits relate to Ohio history.

One Day as a Theme

You also can take an ordinary day in your life and turn it into a theme. Think about the routines you followed as a child and as an adult. Even a mundane activity like household chores can be a source of inspiration.

For example, if you grew up on a farm, you know the difference between the smell of hay and wheat, and certainly that of pig manure and cow manure—because you had to shovel one or all of these at some point. City people probably don’t even know there is a difference. Describing the subtle differences of each and comparing the scents to other scents can help the reader imagine the situation more clearly.

If you grew up in the city, you how the personality of the city changes from day to night because you probably had to walk to most places. You know the electricity-charged atmosphere of the daylight hours when the streets bustle with people and the mystery of the night when the shops are closed and the streets are quiet.

Think about the smells and sounds you experienced as you went through an ordinary day and explain how that day relates to your life experience in your county or your city:

"Most people don’t think of spiders when they bite into a tomato, but I do. Growing up in southern Ohio, I spent many summer afternoons picking baskets of tomatoes that would be canned or frozen and preserved for cold winter’s dinners. I loved the results of my labors, but I’ll never forget the sight of the enormous, black and white, scary-looking spiders that lived in the plants and created zigzag designs on their webs. In fact, those spiders, with their artistic web creations, inspired my interest in bugs and shaped my career in science."

One Event as a Theme

Perhaps one event or one day of your life made such a big impact that it could be used as a theme. The end or beginning of the life of another can affect our thoughts and actions for a long time:

"I was 12 years old when my mother passed away. By the time I was 15, I had become an expert in dodging bill collectors, recycling hand-me-down jeans, and stretching a single meal’s worth of ground beef into two family dinners. Although I was a child when I lost my mother, I was never able to mourn or to let myself become too absorbed in thoughts of personal loss. The fortitude I developed at a young age was the driving force that would see me through many other challenges."

Writing the Essay

Whether you determine that your life story is best summed up by a single event, a single characteristic, or a single day, you can use that one element as a theme . You will define this theme in your  introductory paragraph .

Create an outline with several events or activities that relate back to your central theme and turn those into subtopics (body paragraphs) of your story. Finally, tie up all your experiences in a summary that restates and explains the overriding theme of your life. 

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my autobiography of my self

How to write an autobiography: 7 key steps

Many people who’ve lived interesting lives want to learn how to write an autobiography. Whether you want to write a memoir or a fictional autobiography, these 7 steps will help you start:

  • Post author By Jordan
  • 4 Comments on How to write an autobiography: 7 key steps

my autobiography of my self

What is autobiography?

Autobiography means to write about yourself, typically the account of significant events in your life. The word stems from the Greek, αὐτός (autos) meaning self , plus βίος (bios) meaning life and γράφειν ( graphein ) – to write.

Autobiography vs memoir: What’s the difference?

What’s the difference between autobiography and memoir? Are there specific kinds of autobiography? These may be questions you ask as you set out to write your life story.

As Ian Jack writes in The Guardian , there are differences between autobiography vs memoir although the terms are often used interchangeably:

An autobiography is usually a record of accomplishment. All kinds of people, more or less famous, can write them or be helped to write them: footballers, politicians, newsreaders. Deeds, fame and an interesting life are not necessary ingredients of the memoir. The memoir’s ambition is to be interesting in itself, as a novel might be, about intimate, personal experience. It often aspires to be thought of as “literary”, and for that reason borrows many of literature’s tricks – the tricks of the novel, of fiction – because it wants to do more than record the past; it wants to re-create it. If a memoir is to succeed on those terms, on the grounds that all lives are interesting if well-enough realised, the writing has to be good. Ian Jack, in The Guardian , February 2003.

7 steps to write your own life story:

  • Brainstorm your autobiography’s focus and scope
  • Skim autobiographies for inspiration
  • Choose between autobiography and memoir
  • Outline key and illustrative life events
  • Draft key scenes from your life
  • Find strong transitions
  • Check details and get beta readers

1. Brainstorm your autobiography’s focus and scope

Deciding what period and events you’ll cover in your life story is a helpful first step in choosing how to write an autobiography.

Squishing the intrigues, heartbreaks, surprises and secrets of your life into narrative form may seem an impossible task. Life of course does not unfold in neat paragraphs, scenes and chapters.

Make it easier and brainstorm your autobiography’s focus and scope. Ask:

  • What period of my life do I want to tell readers about?
  • Where should the timeline start? (Infancy? Childhood? Adolescence?)
  • What are key events of my life readers may find intriguing?

This will help you refine your autobiography’s focus [you can also pinpoint your story’s focus in the Central Idea brainstorming tool in the Now Novel dashboard].

For deciding your story’s scope, ask:

  • What essential scenes and events should I include?
  • What themes or subjects need mention (for example, if you have experienced a trauma or illness that has greatly impacted your life, exploring personal events and insights that resulted from them would make sense)

Autobiography Exercise: Scenes to show

Write a brief bullet list of events to include in your autobiography or memoir.

Focus on events that show strong emotion, key turning points or changes, or vivid life lessons , because these connect with readers.

For example:

  • A first encounter with someone who turned out to be an amazing mentor
  • A positive or challenging move to another school, city or country in childhood
  • The first time you met a major love interest in your life
  • The moment you walked away from a job or other commitment to pursue a new dream

How to write an autobiography - infographic | Now Novel

2. Skim autobiographies for inspiration

One of the best ways to learn how to write an autobiography is, of course, to read published examples.

Get hold of copies of autobiographies that interest you . Skim parts such as the beginning and end, chapter beginnings and endings. Read for details that leap out at you, grab your attention.

Take notes on how the author approaches telling their life story. Do they:

  • Proceed chronologically from childhood to adulthood or play with time and memories?
  • Start with a dramatic, life-changing incident or lead in slowly?
  • Tell the reader what they’re going to cover or leave the reader to gradually discover the narrative structure or shape of the story?

Reading autobiography and note-taking in this way helps you see the options for how to structure your narrative.

3. Choose between autobiography and memoir

Reading autobiography examples will help you see how authors use common narrative elements.

For example, the acclaimed author Vladimir Nabokov begins Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited :

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. […] I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory : An Autobiography Revisted (1967), 17.

Nabokov, in typically ornate fashion, breaks the ‘rules’ of autobiography. He uses third person to describe a ‘ young chronophobiac’ – one who is afraid of time. We can guess this ‘young chronophobiac’ is Nabokov himself, and that he is using a tone of ironic detachment to imply that the act of dredging through memories – or even the idea of time itself – fills him with ‘something like panic’.

The above seems more like a literary play with form (an attribute Ian Jack ascribes memoir) than a straightforward, chronological autobiography.

Readers might indeed wonder why Nabokov calls Speak, Memory an autobiography.

Nabokov does, however, proceed more or less chronologically, from before his birth, to Chapter 2 which begins:

It was the primordial cave (and not what Freudian mystics might suppose) that lay behind the games I played when I was four. Nabokov, Speak, Memory , p. 20.

Thus Nabokov blends elements of memoir. He blends illustrative snapshots of life (the part illuminating the whole) with key events (birth, childhood) typical of autobiographical narration.

Thinking about how you’ll structure your life story , however, will make it more purposeful and consistent.

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4. Outline key and illustrative life events

In deciding how to write an autobiography, there are two types of events to include:

  • Key events – Crucial, formative experiences, for example an early childhood triumph or loss that shaped your view of the world.
  • Illustrative events – Individual encounters, lessons, romances, teachers and mentors that provide texture, background, humour, drama or the other vital elements of storytelling .

Examples of key events and illustrative events in autobiography

As an example, Nabokov uses the games he would play as a child at the start of chapter two to illustrate how he came to value imagination and beauty . He describes making a couch tent:

I then had the fantastic pleasure of creeping through that pitch-dark tunnel, where I lingered a little to listen to the singing in my ears – that lonesome vibration so familiar to small boys in dusty hiding places – and then, in a burst of delicious panic, on rapidly thudding hands and knees I would reach the tunnel’s far end…’ Nabokov, Speak, Memory , p. 20.

This is an example of illustrative event: a scene in autobiography that reveals something about the author.

In this case, we see Nabokov’s love of games of imagination and sensory stimulation (something one finds abundant in his fiction).

An example of a key event would be a major relocation, a historical conflict (such as war), or another key turning point. For example, Nabokov describes the effects of the Russo-Japanese War (a key event) in 1905 on the family unit:

The close of Russia’s disastrous campaign in the Far East was accompanied by furious internal disorders. Undaunted by them, my mother, with her three children, returned to St. Petersburg after almost a year of foreign resorts. Nabokov, Speak, Memory , p. 24.

Autobiography exercise: Finding key and illustrative events

Write a bullet list each of key and illustrative events – a sentence describing each. Examples:

  • The year my family moved from Country A to Country B
  • The first time I held a violin in my hands
  • The first close friendship I ever made at school

Illustrative Events

  • The experience and emotion of boarding a plane for the first time
  • A specific funny or insightful violin lesson or teacher
  • A day with a close school friend that left an indelible impression

Autobiography and art - Fellini quote | Now Novel

5. Draft key scenes from your life

Now that you have ideas for key and illustrative events in your life, expand on an example.

Use the techniques of fiction to enrich the scene.

For example, Nabokov describes his sensory impressions behind the family couch.

  • Impressions of sound, smell, touch, taste or specific visual details
  • Emotions (Nabokov conveys a palpable sense of the child’s simultaneous delight in secrecy and panic in the dark when he describes crawling through the tunnel he made using the family couch)

As you draft, keep this in mind: What do I want to tell, show, teach? How will this help, entertain, surprise, amuse my reader?

6. Find strong transitions

Learning how to write an autobiography is not that different from learning how to write fiction.

For one, autobiographical writing and fiction writing both need engaging introductions, transitions, exposition and development.

An advantage of memoir and autobiography is that transition is a shared, relatable part of life.

For example, most children in countries where school attendance is required by law will leave the family unit and go out into the world at a similar age.

These key life changes are useful places in a memoir or autobiography for chapter breaks or scene transitions . Nabokov, for example, uses the family move to St Petersburg at the start of Chapter 4 to transition into describing his first teacher, a natural early childhood memory to include:

With a sharp and merry blast from the whistle that was part of my first sailor suit, my childhood calls me back into that distant past to have me shake hands again with my delightful teacher. Vasiliy Martinovich Zhernosekov had a fuzzy brown beard, a balding head, and china-blue eyes, one of which bore a fascinating excrescence on the upper lid. Nabokob, Speak, Memory , p. 24.

Note how Nabokov signals the narrative transition – by describing a sound he associates with that period of his life. It’s a vivid, descriptive way to end one section of story and begin another.

7. Check details and get beta readers

As you write an autobiography or memoir, it’s often helpful to speak to family or old friends. Because you never know who may remember a funny, interesting or surprising detail about a time you are remembering and trying to capture.

The people who know you best may be your best beta readers when you write about yourself. It’s also good etiquette, if writing about a family member or friend who is still living, to run sections concerning them past them.

Need someone to read over your autobiography so far? Get help from a skilled editor. Jump to Top

Related Posts:

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  • How to write a flashback scene: 7 key steps
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my autobiography of my self

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

4 replies on “How to write an autobiography: 7 key steps”

Just starting to write a family history beginning with what I know about my immigrant grandparents, then with a follow-up through moves and my childhood.

Hi Peter, that sounds a wonderful use of family history. I hope it is going well.

Very helpful.

Glad you found it helpful, Sally. Thanks for writing in.

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How to Write an Autobiography (Fully Explained)

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on Published: November 20, 2021  - Last updated: July 31, 2023

Categories Writing , Storytelling

Sooner or later, many of us think we’d like to write an autobiography. Maybe we should even write our memoirs, but we’ll talk more about that in a minute.

The point is this: We’ve all these memories and associations, relationships, sometimes sharp, sometimes soft, but we have them in our mind, and we feel like we want to put them on paper.

We want to tell someone the story we experienced, and sometimes we don’t even understand why we want to tell that particular story, but we have a strong feeling that we want to do so. In this article, we’ll look at exactly how you can approach your autobiography writing.

Autobiography or Memoir

An autobiography is a whole thing – a life, usually told chronologically as a series of significant events. Sometimes with the help of a ghostwriter. You should only ever have to write one autobiography!

But to qualify for it, you must have either :

a) lived a life worth living

b) been infamous or famous

Maybe both!

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write a story about your life. Quite the contrary.

But the memoir form may be better suited for you.

Memoirs as a Slice of Life

A memoir is a much more artistic endeavor than an autobiography or biography. They’re less limited to dry facts and more concerned with the meaning of life – whether by examining a specific period or looking at a period of life through a thematic lens.

It’s about a story within one’s life, not the whole life story. A slice-of-life experience. An excellent memoir is much closer to creative nonfiction than an autobiography.

The great thing about memoirs is that you can use them for almost any purpose and make them whatever you want.

A memoir usually isn’t as long as an autobiography and is written from a different perspective.

Writing an autobiography is about your life from your perspective. That’s not always the case with memoirs. Here, the author focuses on

a) a particular period of life,

b) a particular kind of life, or

c) a particular event.

You can tell about a day in your life that was particularly memorable, which is another type of memoir.

You don’t have to tell the story chronologically, but if it helps put things in order, you can do that too.

Memoirs can also be more subjective than an autobiography. A memoir is usually the story of your life as you see it.

Themes in a Memoir or Autobiography

You can focus on crucial moments and look at a period or a topic you want to write about.

Topics can be anything from your relationship with your parents to overcoming fear. Family, religion, work, relationships, health, hobbies – whatever you prefer – are fair game for the memoirist’s pen.

Themes give meaning to life. That’s why they’re so important in an autobiography or memoir.

There are other forms you should keep in mind:

  • In a biography , someone else writes about someone.
  • An autobiographical essay is required of prospective college or college applicants, in which they focus on experiences and accomplishments that add weight to their application. It’s an opportunity for a student to demonstrate relevant qualifications and qualities for entry and the ability to construct a well-argued piece of writing that is looser in style than straight academic writing. You can think of it as a personal essay.

The Moving Parts

If you’re thinking about writing your autobiography, you should first be aware of the key elements that will ensure your autobiography stands out and engages readers.

Many factors play a role in this, and we’ll discuss them one by one.

Universal Message

At its core, autobiographical writing is a search for meaning and identity.

A good autobiography isn’t just about you and your experiences. Somewhere in your autobiography, there’s always a universal message that manifests itself in the story you tell.

In this sense, an autobiography isn’t simply a list of experiences you string together, although you can use a chronological structure. But that’s far from the whole story.

A great autobiography has all the elements of a fantastic novel or movie. In other words, it’s to engage the reader emotionally and keep them enthralled.

Otherwise, there’s no motivation to keep reading.

In filmmaking, a central theme is sometimes called a “controlling idea” – akin to a thesis statement, it’s the fulcrum around which the narrative revolves.

No one is interested in a string of events. The events must have meaning, and the music and rhythm of life should permeate your autobiography for it to jump off the page and truly engage the reader.

There’s nothing like a universal message told in the form of a story.

A Strong Story

An excellent autobiography is a story told with strength and nuance. That’s why it matters to be clear about the story you want to tell and the key events that the story embraces.

Granted, this story may not be apparent when writing your autobiography begins. The story may not be clear to you until late in the writing and editing.

You may not even understand the story you’re telling until you revise. That’s why it’s so important to be flexible in outlining, structuring, writing, and revising. In other words, in the overall organization of your autobiography, which we’ll discuss in more detail in this article.

We’ll look at specific methods to help you structure your autobiography and assemble the necessary pieces.

And we’ll show you how to combine those pieces to create an excellent autobiography.

But before we go any further, let’s look at key elements that make a good autobiography.

When discussing a particular moment in your life story, you should be concerned with the spirit of the times – the so-called Zeitgeist.

For example, if you’re talking about the 1960s, you want the flavor and feel of that time to be reflected on the page.

It can be allusions to the music of the time. It can be allusions to the cars or the way of shopping that existed back then. The things that were happening on the street.

They can have to do with the attitudes of the people around you that were important at the time and how they acted and thought.

This creates a picture in the reader’s eye of what was happening around you then. That essential things were happening to you, or you were doing important things.

There’s something mysterious about a good autobiography.

Not everything in life is unambiguous! Life is often very ambiguous, and readers appreciate honesty and humility. By its nature, personal experience is subjective.

Readers don’t want to read someone arrogant and know everything. The fact is that not everything in your own life is clear to yourself, let alone to others around you!

Therefore, it can be excellent to acknowledge this and either mention it directly in your writing or have moments in the story where you allow the mystery to exist because it does.

This sense of mystery lets the reader’s imagination run wild. It allows the reader to understand that life comprises a series of veils. In most cases, the reader will find himself relating parts of your story to his life story. He’ll feel addressed, and that’s what draws him in.

Life isn’t just about clear challenges and overcoming them. As compelling as such “hero stories” may be. There are profound mysteries in life that we all ponder occasionally and keep popping up.

That’s why I think this sense of mystery is very important.

Revelations and Story Beats

In addition to secrets, you should also have moments of revelation in your autobiography.

Moments when something suddenly becomes clear, or someone realizes something. Life lessons that change the trajectory of your life. Or the nature and meaning of a relationship become apparent, which drives you to a decision or action.

In that sense, the events in your autobiography are less about the external events and more about the internal events where you decide what to do at certain stages. Or you come to a judgment or conclusion about something that you’ll probably change later in your life.

The point is that these moments of change, the so-called swing points in your life – the “beats” in movie language – are very important because they mark turning points in the story of your life.

The Plot of Your Life

It’s constructive to think of your life as a movie plot. We’ll discuss this technique later in this article.

So your autobiography isn’t just a collection of the best and worst moments of your life, even if you desperately want the polarity of good and bad to make your story stand out.

Juxtaposition is a very important element. You want things to contrast because that helps build emotion. It helps build tension and drama in the story.

Tension is essential for reader engagement. You can think of it like a rubber band that you slowly twist. It gets tighter and tighter. The trick is to keep stretching it open, building it up more and more, and then relaxing it again. Tighten it up and then relax it again. Over and over again.

In other words, play with the tension in your life story, your autobiography.

Context Shifts

Another critical element in your autobiography is context shifts.

Sometimes these are changes of place. So you move, go to a different place, or arrive at a different place.

Sometimes they’re contextual shifts in terms of relationships with other people.

Sometimes it’s contextual shifts regarding your life purpose and how you define what’s important to you and what you want to accomplish.

But it’s helpful to be aware of these contextual shifts in your life and think about these seams as you write your autobiography.

Now let’s look at the key steps to writing your autobiography.

A Very Personal Journey

Run away if anyone tells you that there’s some standard template for writing an autobiography or memoir! Quick.

Writing and stories aren’t about squeezing experiences and memories into some template.

The author’s connection to the material is the most crucial thing in writing a good, meaningful work.

Writing is about how you see the world, understand your experiences, and want to share them with readers.

Writing is a personal journey that can be very different for everyone.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a memoir about how you worked your way up in your profession and discovered leadership and management skills or if you’re writing a memoir about your relationship with your mother.

Either is perfectly fine.

Tell the stories that burn inside you. Write about what it means to be alive, awake, aware, and a wonderful person. Make up a story that’s as personal as you see fit.

Memoirs help you do that. How you choose what to include and what not to include, what to focus on, and what to ignore is up to you.

A Thought for the Reader

Picture the scene. You have a few minutes in the bookstore, browsing the titles scattered on the table of featured books – or the digital equivalent online.

A cover catches your eye. Something intrigues you so much that you pick up the book.

What do you do?

You probably read the blurb on the back cover and then the first page or two. Often that’s enough to make you buy the book or quickly put it back on the pile.

Something in the blurb and the first few pages must appeal to you. Otherwise, you won’t get involved, and the book has left your universe forever!

So when thinking about, constructing, and writing your memoir or autobiography, be clear about your story’s appeal to other people, your future readers!

This doesn’t mean you should be cocky about your writing. On the contrary, an honest path through your story is almost always better. But it means you develop a sense of your reader’s attention!

Otherwise, you’re just writing for yourself. That’s fine, by the way – it can be an excellent way to soothe the soul.

But if you want other people to read your stuff, you need to think carefully about what in your story will grab attention and what is worth paying attention to in each scene!

The Two Treasure Chests

We all have two treasure chests regarding memories, stories, and, thus, memoir writing.

The first is the treasure chest of memories and reflections. These are in the treasure chest of your mind, and your job is to capture them on paper or the screen and eventually work them into a story.

The second treasure chest is physical and digital mementos. Photos, CDs, letters, diaries, old notebooks, clothes, souvenirs, and more. They serve as a tremendous stimulus for remembering and writing. Although you could collect them in one place before writing, that’s probably impractical. Therefore, a good solution is to have a photo mood board with everything you’ve accumulated over the years.

An easy way to do this is to use the built-in photo app on your computer. I use a Mac, so this is Photos for me. It’s easy to collect pictures in an album and resize them to see more or less of them as needed.

Then and Now Time

One of the questions people ask when writing a memoir is how to handle tenses.

I think it’s worth considering two different time frames: the “then time” and the “now time.” This means you put yourself in the moment of the remembered events but see them as you experienced them then. This way, you can vividly represent them and discover them in your text.

It’s not so much a matter of tense as it’s of perspective and setting.

The “now time” is the time of reflection: you look back on past events with the wisdom of hindsight.

As a rule, it’s a good idea to write the main narrative in the “then time” because otherwise, you risk your memoir becoming a boring flashback instead of a compelling journey for the reader.

Connect with Your Inner Child

One particular technique worth mentioning when writing about childhood experiences is the “connect with your inner child” meditation. I first learned about it at the beautiful Plum Village retreat in France.

A guided meditation takes you back to your childhood and creates a connection you can access. Incredibly powerful in life and writing.

Imagine seeing your younger self in a scene and later adding how your older, wiser self understood what you were experiencing, even if you didn’t know it then.

This technique of shifting perspective is highly effective in both memoirs and novels.

It’s worth trying the Plum Village app for IOS. It’s completely free and offers many great meditations.

Break Out of the Prison of Linear Narrative

Where should you start with your memoir?

And how do you start writing them?

Unless you’re dealing with a tight time frame and a compelling ongoing narrative, telling your story in a non-linear way will probably help a lot.

Remember, you’re selecting events, not trying to tell everything that happened.

Therefore, not only can you select periods – which don’t have to be worked through in strict order, especially if you’re writing out your memoir thematically – but you can powerfully use nonlinear writing for your entire process.

We don’t think linearly, so why write that way?

When I sit down to write, I focus on the task: the sentences, paragraphs, and pages in front of me. I don’t worry excessively about everything having to be perfect and fit at the time of writing. Everything is in its own time! During the editing and the second draft, I start moving the blocks around so they tell a story.

Using Scrivener to Structure Nonlinear Writing

The app that best helps this nonlinear writing process is Scrivener.

I’ve used it for many years, and how it handles index cards on its “corkboard” has saved me more time than I care to remember in finding structure in writing and filmmaking.

Another excellent app I can recommend is Aeon Timeline. The latest version, 3, has a narrative mode and several other perspectives that let you get a handle on chronology, eras, intersections of characters, and more.

The Truth in Autobiography

When you write your memoir, you write a piece of truth. Your truth. There’s no such thing as objective truth, certainly not in writing. Nor, for that matter, in filmmaking.

There’s only a subjective truth – the truth as you see it. The exciting thing is that your truth becomes someone else’s truth through a magical transformation process.

Your mother’s truth becomes your truth, your neighbor’s truth becomes your truth, and your lover’s truth becomes your truth.

That’s magic.

One of the reasons I recommend writing your memoir instead of an autobiography is that you can focus on a particular story, a particular moment in your life. If you do it right, you can present it in a way that speaks to others.

You write your memoir to express your truth in a way that communicates it clearly to your reader without misleading them.

This is because they’re based on facts and what happened (as best you can remember it). This is part of a primary, unwritten contract you make with future readers when writing your memoir or autobiography.

Find a Coherent Narrative

To tell your story clearly and understandably, you must find a coherent narrative that ties together the concepts you want to convey.

The narrative won’t be perfect; it’ll need to be revised because your story isn’t an objective fact; it’s your truth.

It’s the narrative that makes your story interesting to your readers. Readers like narratives!

Hopefully, you’ll write your story so that even if the reader doesn’t know what happened to you, they’ll know what you felt and thought.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s very liberating to understand that the shape and order of your narrative will emerge during the writing process – not something you’ve to decide before you even start putting words on the page.

A Structural Approach to Autobiography and Memoir

You don’t have to pressure yourself to figure out the structure of your narrative from the start. You don’t have to summarize ideas, memories, or themes in predefined chapters.

Chapters are the surest way into the writer’s prison.

As the wonderful writer Terry Pratchett put it:

Life doesn’t happen in chapters at least, not regular ones. Nor do movies. Homer didn’t write in chapters. I can see what their purpose is in children’s books (“I’ll read to the end of the chapter, and then you must go to sleep”) but I’m blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults. Sir Terry Pratchett

Writing programs like Scrivener allow you to collect and spit the fragments out, knowing you can later group them into a form. That’s tremendously liberating. It’s how I’ve made films, how I write long texts, and how I write articles – including this article.

I’ve no idea how this article will turn out. But it’ll appear; you can bet on that. And I know it’ll be good because it comes from the heart. And it’s immediate. Not overthought.

When you write your memoir, you can do the same thing.

I start with many different ideas and notes, photos, and videos I’ve taken. I make sure I can find them easily. If I’ve everything in one place, it’s easier for me to get it out.

You’ve to let your mind become a sieve, a filter, a funnel into which you pour your experiences so they come out transformed.

You’ll have to go through everything several times. You’ll have to go through your story several times.

First, you write down everything you remember, everything you think is essential, and everything that feels like it belongs to your story.

Second, you shape this mass of material into something coherent.

Third, you edit the material.

Dreams and Meditations

Dreams and meditations are essential in all forms of writing, even in memoirs. The trick is to capture the fragment on paper or screen as quickly as possible before it flies away.

Let me give you an example:

I remember first hearing Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band .

I was walking down the hallway at school when I was about nine years old. Suddenly I heard this incredible sound from a record player (yes, I’m that old) turned up full blast in an adjoining room. There was no one in the room, just the music. Coming from a conservative family where pop music just wasn’t played at home, I think this was the first time I got a taste of a larger culture. Out there.

I was amazed.

Use Dictation to Write Your Memoir

Sometimes when I write, I think of a scene, close my eyes, and start dictating. It’s all the more convenient when I know that one of the many transcription apps will do the hard work for me afterward.

Recently, I recalled that my brother and I were up against the local giant nettle patch when I was about twelve years old. To us, they weren’t nettles – they were an army. Hours later, we were called up for tea – and I suffered from hay fever for years afterward !

This memory also reminded me of another day when, together with local boys, we found a barn with huge black garbage cans in it. The game was to hide in the garbage cans while others threw stones and tried to hit us. Inevitably, a rock hit me right between the eyes. I’d have lost an eye if it had been just an inch further away.

Rather than lose these memories to the chaff of the day, I immediately documented them with a voice recording on my iPhone. Safe in the knowledge that I could quickly transcribe and include them in my memoir later.

Allow yourself to dream, to remember, to record, to document. Don’t be guided by the thought that these recordings must have a particular form before they must.

One way to think about your memoir is to think of it as a series of vignettes – short, impressionistic scenes that focus on a moment or give a particular insight into a character, idea, or environment.

The word’s origin is worth knowing: it comes from Old French and means “little vine.” If you think about it, it’s a very nice analogy for what excellent memoir writing can do: a series of independent yet interconnected vines that together form a whole.

I don’t see a linear path when I think about my life this way. Things have happened randomly; I’ve been in one place and then another. Or in the same place in different periods.

I don’t see my life as a coherent, meaningful narrative. It’s more like a series of vignettes between which I can see connections, but not a continuous line.

Your vignette can be part fantasy, part dream; you can change the period, time of day, weather, season, lighting, or anything else you want.

If you include dialog, make sure it’s believable; if you include your (or other) participants’ thoughts, make sure they ring true.

If you’re worried about authenticity, pick a moment you can remember clearly.

For example,

As a child, I’m sitting on the floor in the kitchen of my house. I’m nine years old. The kitchen is very bright. I’m eating a sugared roll – one of my favorite foods. I’m thinking about my friend’s birthday party tomorrow, which I’m really looking forward to. I’m also thinking about getting my housework done today. It’s light in the kitchen.

The truth, of course, is that I’m thinking about all of this at the same time.

Later, I listen to the sound of rain falling on the roof of the conservatory. It’s a sound I’ve long loved. I watch the different shades of light coming in through the window. The light casts shadows. The light is bright. I think about the things I need to do today. I’ve some homework to do. I need to do the dishes. I need to clean up.

What might hold together seemingly random moments like the above is the growing quality of reflection and the pressure that life puts on the mind.

Use Prompts

When writing memoirs and autobiographies, many prompts can be handy.

We’ve already discussed the two treasure chests above.

But many beneficial questions can get your mind going and make deep memory connections.

Here are just a few examples:

  • What was my most treasured toy? Why was it important to me?
  • What do I remember about the kitchen growing up? What smells can I still remember today? What could I glimpse out the window?
  • What did I do that I regretted? What can’t I tell another soul about?
  • Driving with the family in the car. What’s happening right now? Where are we going?
  • When was the first time I was furious? What had happened?
  • When did I feel most betrayed in my life?
  • When did I fall in love for the first time? Out of love?

As you can imagine, there are many, many more.

The point isn’t to go on an endless memory hunt but to lift the veil of the unconscious to find the topic necessary for your memoir. And more often than not, a more resounding theme emerges. A deeper meaning to your life story that you want to put on paper.

That, after all, is the real art of memoir: distilling a lifetime’s experiences into a coherent, readable, and meaningful whole.

The prompts don’t have to be about the past – they can be about the present.

They can be about your life today – your current life and your relationship to it and the people around you. Then you can discover how profound forces and influences have shaped your reality.

Your Motivations

Ultimately, you’re the only person who knows your motivations for writing your memoir. There’s no need for you to explain to the public!

What do you hope to gain by writing your memoir?

A sense of closure? A sense of accomplishment? Redemption?

A chance to share the themes of your life story with others so they can learn from your journey?

An opportunity to see your story told so you can look back and reflect on the meaning of your life and the direction your life might take in the future.

Whatever the reason, the result should be more significant than a simple retelling of your life.

Perhaps it’s about creating a legacy, leaving something that will stay with you beyond your time, years, and life into the future.

When you write your memoir, you’re also writing your legacy. Or at least part of it.

That’s why it’s worth pausing for a moment.

Beware of the natural human instinct to right the wrongs done to us in the past. Seeking revenge will lead you down a dark path. Once it’s published, it’s published. And it’s hard to crawl back.

My advice would be to make your memoir a positive impulse.

We all make mistakes; why not reflect on them with awareness, acceptance, and understanding?

Awareness will lead us to change our pattern of behavior, acceptance will lead us to forgiveness, and understanding will show us how to forgive others.

Remember, forgive the person, but not the crime.

Writing your memoir can be a part of the healing process if you let it.

Scenes That Resonate

Actors know there are “scene objectives” in scenes – things the character wants and is trying to achieve.

This isn’t always true, but it’s often the case that the character either achieves their goal or doesn’t. There will be a clear resolution to the scene.

You can also look at your memoir in this way.

The goal of a particular scene is to get the character from one point in the story to the next in a way that makes sense to the reader.

How do you do that? Through the concept of scenes that “get there.” In a way, it’s similar to a joke that “lands” with its punchline.

These “landings” are ways to get from one scene to the next.

They’re places of transition where action and reflection mix, and you can move from one scene to the next. This is where you place the dissonance leading to your character’s next destination.

Remember that these transitions will become more apparent and more evident as you write and move into revision. You don’t have to have a set structure for your memoir. However, you need a series of vivid scenes, fast or slow sections, that deepen your narrative.

The Movie of Your Life

There’s a classic and well-understood dramatic arc that underlies almost all movies. I’m not suggesting that you apply it to how you write your autobiography or memoir, but it can benefit you as you reflect on the ebb and flow of your life.

We go through a series of “walls” in our lives. Ones that we break through after we find our way or ones that we somehow get around.

Overcoming the significant obstacles of life usually requires inner change and realization. When we overcome life’s walls, we learn an important lesson that we take into the next phase.

I found it very helpful to plot these walls on a timeline of my life. On the X-axis was my age, and on the Y-axis was the amount of hardship endured. That corresponds to the level of drama. This was a precious exercise because it helped me step back from the story of my life and look at it from the outside.

The way a reader might.

It helped me recognize the moments that involved real struggle, emotion, and conflict. In this way, it served as a map for my memoir.

So I took the significant events in my life – death, illness, divorce, early trouble spots, etc. – and drew them on the line where they took place, what age I was, and what was happening in my life at the time.

An interesting thing happened.

I thought I’d written about significant events before but never went into enough detail to immerse the reader in the pain, emotion, and drama.

Also, I hadn’t allowed myself to take ownership and responsibility for these events.

Subconsciously, I’d distanced myself from my own life. This isn’t to say that it was all my fault. But I was guilty of being too easy on myself.

As you can probably guess, this was an essential moment in my writing process.

What’re your walls? When did you overcome them? How did you overcome them?

Maybe you’ve decided you’re going to overcome them. Or maybe you’re still waiting to overcome them.

In any case, these moments of significant change are essential to the success of your autobiography.

Commit to Yourself

Writing memoirs or autobiographies is difficult. Even if no one but you may ever get to see them!

It requires deep inner work – a journey into the soul.

And it requires a serious commitment to writing continuously over a long period.

The former means accessing your unconscious, as I described earlier in this article.

The latter is a challenge that all writers face. The simple yet not-so-simple task of sitting down in your chair and writing every day. Your writing journey.

So before you start, make some commitments to yourself.

  • Commit to writing every day.
  • Commit to writing as many words as you estimate you’ll need to finish your book.
  • Commit not to cheat on your word count.
  • Do your best because you know your best is good enough.
  • Show up to your desk and your soul.

This is the hallmark of a professional writer. Which you may not be. But why not adopt the mindset and practices of one?

One thing: don’t rush.

A memoir or autobiography shouldn’t be written under time pressure. Give your writing time to breathe and your reflections time to go deep. You’re laying the groundwork for something great.

One of the hardest things to write about is your relationship with your parents.

I lost both of my parents, one of them recently. Even as time passes, it’s hard to look deep (as a writer must) in a way that inevitably evokes pain and grief in me.

But that pain must be endured if you’re to have access to what’s probably one of the most important influences on your psyche, whether you want to admit it or not.

As a writer, artist, and human being, you must deal with them honestly. And do so with as much compassion as possible.

In other words, you must go through the same process of soul-searching and profound inner discovery as you’d with any other complicated subject.

You must apply your understanding of life and its meaning to the subject. And you must write from a position of humility and compassion.

Brainstorming for Your Autobiography

I always think of “brainstorming” more as “thought development” – a quieter and more meditative approach to writing.

You call up ideas and play with them. Try them out. To see what develops. These ideas transform as you write, re-read, and sleep on them.

Then when you come back to your writing, you’ve new things to work with. Ideas that have been developing in the background.

This is a good way to gather ideas for your memoir. It’s a way to write without writing.

  • In one sentence, invent a sentence that says something about your life.
  • In a paragraph, invent a paragraph that says something about your life.
  • In a scene, invent a scene that says something about your life.
  • Write a memory that says something about your life.

Then ask yourself: What do you’ve to say?

  • What’s the most important thing you’ve to say?
  • What’s the most dramatic thing you’ve to say?
  • What’s the most impactful moment you can convey?

I use mind mapping extensively to “develop thoughts” – the best apps I’ve found for this are iThoughts and TheBrain. The beauty of TheBrain is that it allows for contextual thinking around a subtopic – something difficult to achieve with traditional radial mind maps.

You can also use free online tools like XMind, Coggle, or paper and a pen.

You’ll find that this way of thinking brings ideas to life in ways you mightn’t be able to if you only thought linearly.

Why not just write an essay about your life, drawing from the stream of consciousness? And then see what sticks.

Related: How to Focus on Writing an Essay

Write a Letter to Yourself

Another way to write your autobiography or memoir is to imagine you’re writing a letter to yourself.

A great letter is to tell yourself the story you want to write about yourself.

Or you can take on the role of mentor to yourself:

The “you,” in this case, is your current self.

  • Write a letter to your former self.
  • What advice would you give to your former self?
  • What guidance would you give?
  • What would you do differently?
  • How would your former self respond?
  • How would your current self respond?
  • How would your future self react?
  • How would your friends and family react?
  • How would your children react?

How to Outline Your Autobiography or Memoir

The most important thing you need to know about outlining as a writer is that it’s not a process that happens before you settle down to write, and it’s written down in a kind of gospel.

Quite the opposite.

The “how” (the outline) and the “what” (the writing) are intricately intertwined and bounce off each other.

Outlining Is a Dynamic Process

If you have a good idea of what you want to write about, you can put that idea into an outline.

There are many different ways to do this. Most involve writing a few key words, phrases, sentences, or even just a few key phrases that describe the main content of your book.

A book is usually a collection of chapters (but be sure to read my comments about the chapters above).

You can outline a chapter by writing a few key words, phrases, sentences, or even just a few key sentences to describe the main content of your chapter.

You can also outline a scene. Again, you write a few key words, phrases, sentences, or even just a few key phrases to describe the main content of your scene.

An outline aims to give you a “basic structure” to work with.

The more details you’ve, the better.

How to Approach Research in Your Autobiography or Memoir

Aside from the treasure troves described above, which are more for stimulation or inspiration than research, you’ll need to track down specific facts and connections at some point in your writing.

You can do most of this research on the Internet.

There are now so many excellent online resources for writers. These include accessible radio archives, video archives, music archives, image archives, document archives, government archives, etc.

The list is endless.

Of course, you can also use your local library.

If you’re using a Mac, DevonAgent, and DevonThink can help you organize your searches and cross-referencing. DevonAgent prevents you from having to open hundreds of browser tabs, and DevonThink uses a very clever “fuzzy logic” search to find relevant things in your document collection. Although academics love both apps, they’re invaluable to me as a writer.

Another great option for research and clippings is Roam Research (or its free competitor Obsidian). Think of them as digital scrapbooks where you can drop everything useful and find valuable and relevant parts later.

Or go with a paper notebook.

Most importantly, document your research, and don’t throw anything away.

Remember that you’ll be researching at all stages of the writing process, including during editing and fact-checking. Therefore, it can be constructive to work with multiple monitors so that you can do the research queries on one while you continue writing on the other.

It’s often helpful to write a chapter or scene first and do your research later. This helps you focus your research on what you need and not disappear down a rabbit hole from which little productive writing comes out!

It’s also important to realize that researching and writing your book are closely related. They’re all part of the same journey.

When you write, you generate new ideas and write down the book that will become the finished memoir or autobiography.

This is an interactive process.

The structure of your finished book will also influence how you write it and, therefore, how you research it.

Remember that oral research also plays an important role: If people, family members, eyewitnesses, etc., are still alive and willing, their memories and perspectives can be beneficial.

Writing First Drafts

The most important thing to say about first drafts is that you do them!

That means you sit down and start writing. Even if you don’t feel like it. When you start writing, your resistance is quickly overcome, and you get into a good state of mind.

The second thing I say about first drafts is that you shouldn’t edit them as you write. That’s why I recommend not thinking too much about chapters in the first draft stage – there will be plenty of opportunities later to organize your text and divide it into chapters.

Everything that hinders your writing your first draft must be gently pushed aside. That’s why sometimes it’s better to research after you’ve written a scene.

The third thing to say about first drafts is that they should be about anything and everything.

As a writer, you need to get out of your way and not be too critical with your word choice, sentence structure, or anything else.

This is because you can only find your voice if you write your way to it. That means you’re writing many things that aren’t the finished book.

The more you write, the more you learn about yourself and your writing voice.

You may not understand the subject of your memoir or autobiography until your first draft is finished. That’s perfectly fine. It’s desirable.

Remember that your first draft should probably be just for you. Beware of letting critics in too early, even if they’re constructive.

If someone else reads your writing or sees your first drafts, that person or those people will likely impact the creative writing process, which you don’t want at this stage.

So, if you have a writing group or writing partner, wait until you’ve completed at least two first drafts before sharing the text.

Related: Why Creative Process Matters

The Path From First to Second Draft

First, put some distance between you and your first draft. If you don’t give yourself a break, you’ll have difficulty identifying the “plot holes” where you need to get your narrative going.

It’s about giving shape to the story – a story that you may not understand until after your first draft.

Your second draft isn’t about tinkering with or polishing your first draft. It’s about completely rewriting the story and moving the pieces around in the overall structure to make it work.

This is where I find Scrivener very useful. Especially the index card mode in Corkboard. It allows me to move writing blocks around, sometimes almost intuitively (since cold logic rarely works well in creative endeavors), to find the flow of a piece.

When you move the blocks, having a clear timeline is helpful – either on paper or (my choice) in a program like Aeon Timeline. This timeline helps you anchor the chronological flow of events, so you’re freer to make thematic connections knowing that you can always insert a reference to where we’re in space and time.

There’s going to be some missing. That’s fine. Write it.

Do you notice anything unclear in your narrative? Clarify it. Explain it so that someone reading the story for the first time will understand.

Sometimes it’s a matter of contextualization: a “framing scene” before the action scene. It’s incredible how sometimes putting a later scene at the beginning of the work can help make everything clear and functional.

Wield a Scalpel

The last advice I want to give you is to approach your second draft with a scalpel in hand. Cut it down, and remove any fat you discover.

Creative work often (not always) benefits from being shorter. A more compact narrative moves essential points in the story closer together and effectively tightens the connective tissue between scenes.

Cut out scenes you don’t need, scenes that are too long, and scenes that are in the background and don’t move the story forward. The goal is to create a lean, mean storytelling machine that continuously moves the story forward.

This also means cutting limp sentences, unnecessary adjectives, and anything else that makes your text wordier than it needs to be.

Examples of Great Autobiographical Writing

Maya Angelou – a series of seven autobiographies, including the work that brought her international acclaim I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Vladimir Nabokov – covering his life until he arrived in America in 1940, Speak Memory is known for how it blends fiction with fact.

Helen Keller – written with the aid of a braille typewriter The Story of My Life was dedicated to Alexander Graham Bell, a lifelong friend and avid supporter of deaf and blind research.

Mark Twain – keen to tell stories to other human beings, rather than pen a dry account of his life, Twain arranged that most of his Autobiography remain unpublished for 100 years after he died in 1910. No doubt the amount of vitriol and sharp observation, even of friends in the work, was a significant factor in this decision! Interestingly, most of his autobiography was dictated to a secretary rather than written directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an autobiography.

An autobiography is a self-written account of an individual’s life, often detailing personal experiences, emotions, and reflections.

What should be included in an autobiography?

An autobiography should include significant events, relationships, challenges, achievements, and personal growth experiences. It should also offer insights into the author’s personality, values, and motivations.

How should I begin my autobiography?

Begin your autobiography with an engaging introduction that captures the reader’s attention. You can start with a memorable moment, an important event, or a unique aspect of your life.

What is the appropriate writing style for an autobiography?

A: The writing style for an autobiography should be honest, engaging, and descriptive. It should capture your voice and personality, connecting readers with your experiences and emotions.

How do I organize my autobiography?

Organize your autobiography in chronological order or around specific themes. You can divide it into chapters, focusing on different stages of your life or significant aspects of your personality.

How do I maintain reader interest throughout my autobiography?

To maintain reader interest, use vivid descriptions, create engaging anecdotes, and vary the pace and tone of your writing. Share unique perspectives and include moments of self-reflection to keep the reader engaged.

How do I approach sensitive or controversial topics in my autobiography?

Approach sensitive or controversial topics with honesty and sensitivity. Be aware of the potential impact on others, and consider using discretion or pseudonyms to protect privacy.

What should I focus on when writing about my childhood?

Focus on significant moments, relationships, and experiences that shaped your personality, values, and beliefs. Describe the environment, culture, and people that influenced your early years.

How do I conclude my autobiography?

Conclude your autobiography by summarizing your experiences, reflecting on the lessons learned, and sharing your hopes for the future. Consider leaving the reader with a final thought or message that encapsulates the essence of your life story.

What should I consider before publishing my autobiography?

Before publishing your autobiography, edit and revise the manuscript, fact-check for accuracy, and seek feedback from trusted readers. Consider legal and ethical implications, and explore various publishing options, including traditional publishers, self-publishing, or digital platforms.

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Mastering the Art of Self-Narration: A Guide on How to Write an Autobiography

  • September 6, 2023

Table of Contents:

The power of self-narration, self-discovery:, self-expression:, preparing for self-narration, setting clear objectives:, identifying the target audience:, creating an engaging story, choosing a narrative style:, highlighting important life events:, balancing personal and professional aspects:, including anecdotes and personal insights:, using metaphors and analogies:, engaging the reader:, editing and proofreading, seeking external feedback, polishing your manuscript, publishing your autobiography, marketing and promoting your book, why would i need an autobiography writing service, what is a professional biography writing service, what are memoir writing services, essential elements and detailed insights.

Writing your autobiography is an incredible journey that allows you to reflect on your life, share your experiences, and inspire others. Whether you intend to publish it or create a personal keepsake, this guide will help you master the art of self-narration from inception to completion.

When you write a self-narration, you’re not just jotting down the facts of your life. It’s like taking a fascinating journey into your past, discovering who you are, and leaving behind something precious for your family and future generations. Let’s dig into detail.

Writing your life story can be like going on a treasure hunt. You dig deep into your memories and experiences and uncover hidden gems about yourself. You may learn about your strengths, weaknesses, dreams, and what shaped you into who you are today.

Your autobiography is your canvas, and words are your colors. It’s a way to paint a vivid picture of your life, thoughts, and feelings. You can express yourself and share your joys, sorrows, and everything. It’s like telling the world, “This is who I am, and this is what I’ve been through.”

Think of your autobiography as a gift to the future. It’s like passing down a precious family heirloom. When you write your story, you create a document that your children, grandchildren, and even their children can read. It allows them to understand where they came from, who their ancestors were, and the experiences that shaped their family’s history. It’s a way of leaving a piece of yourself behind for future generations.

Before you start writing about your life, take some time to think back on the important events that have made you who you are. Try to remember the moments that stood out and impacted you.

Decide why you want to write your life story. Do you want to learn more about yourself, share your knowledge and experiences with others, or connect with a specific group of people? Knowing your purpose will guide how you write your autobiography.

Think about who will be reading your story. Is it for your family, friends, or maybe a wider audience? Understanding your readers helps you write in a way that will interest and connect with them.

When you’re working on writing an interesting and captivating story, there are a few things you should think about:

Think about how you want to tell your story. There are different ways to do it. You can tell it in the order that things happened (chronological), focus on specific themes or topics (thematic), or reflect on your experiences (reflective). You should pick the style that fits your story the best.

You’ll want to figure out the big moments in your life that mattered. These could be turning points or milestones, like when something significant changed for you. You’ll want to give extra attention to these events in your autobiography.

Consider how you’ll mix your personal stories with your professional accomplishments. You want to balance your personal and work life in your narrative. This will help your readers get a full picture of who you are.

When you write your life story or autobiography, sharing personal stories and thoughts is a good idea. Anecdotes are short, interesting stories from your life, and personal insights are your thoughts and feelings. This makes your autobiography more interesting and relatable because people like to hear about your experiences and what you’ve learned.

You can use metaphors and analogies to make your story more exciting and memorable. Metaphors are comparisons that help you describe something by saying it’s like something else (e.g., “Her smile was as bright as the sun”). Analogies are similar and help people understand something by comparing it to something they already know (e.g., “Life is like a rollercoaster, with its ups and downs”). These tools make your writing more vivid and interesting.

To keep your readers interested, write in a way that feels like a conversation. Use active voice, which means the subject of the sentence is doing the action (e.g., “She painted the picture”), and ask rhetorical questions, which are questions that you don’t expect an answer to. This helps the reader feel involved and interested in your story.

Understand the critical role of revising and polishing your work to make it the best it can be: This means that after you’ve written your autobiography, you should go back and look at it again. Think of it like making a cake. Mix the ingredients (write your story), then bake it and add icing (revise and polish). This step is very important to make your writing the best.

This is about asking other people to read your autobiography and give you helpful suggestions. Ask a friend for their opinion when you want to know if your new outfit looks good. Getting feedback from others can help you make your story even better.

Think of this like cleaning and organizing your room. You go through your writing to make sure there are no mistakes (like spelling or grammar errors), and you arrange it nicely so it’s easy to read and understand. This makes your autobiography look more professional and well-structured.

You have two main options when it comes to getting your autobiography out into the world. Traditional publishing is like working with a big company that helps you publish your book, while self-publishing is like doing it all yourself. Each has its good and not-so-good sides.

Once your book is ready, you must let people know it exists. This is where marketing and promotion come in. It’s like telling everyone about a cool party you’re throwing. You can use social media, book readings, or ask bloggers and influencers for reviews. The goal is to reach the people who will enjoy your book.

Autobiography writing services are valuable for people who want to document their life stories but may not have the writing skills, time, or expertise to do it themselves. These services can help ensure your story is well-written and compelling.

A professional biography writing service specializes in creating compelling and concise biographies for individuals, often for professional purposes. These biographies can be used for personal branding, social media profiles, websites, or professional networking.

Memoir writing services like Book Writing Founders are specialized writing services that help individuals document their personal life stories and experiences in a memoir. These services assist with writing, editing, and structuring the memoir.

In wrapping up your journey of self-narration, it’s essential to recognize the profound power that writing your autobiography holds. This transformative experience allows you to put your life’s moments into words and offers the potential to impact you and your readers in meaningful ways.

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How to Start an Autobiography about Yourself: Full Guide + Autobiography Examples

You’re probably thinking: I’m no Mahatma Gandhi or Steve Jobs—what could I possibly write in my memoir? I don’t even know how to start an autobiography, let alone write the whole thing.

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

But don’t worry: essay writing can be easy, and this autobiography example for students is here to show you that memoir writing can be easy and even exciting. Every person, whether famous or not, is unique and has a story worth sharing. All you need to do now is scroll down the page and enjoy this amazing sample autobiography, as well as some related practical hints.

👨‍🎓️ A Student Autobiography Example

📚 more autobiography examples for students.

  • 💡 Autobiography Ideas

😕 How to Start an Autobiography

🔗 references.

An autobiography is the story of your own life . Even if you think you don’t have much to include in your memoir, you can still make it quite interesting.

Bill Gates claims that he always tries to find a lazy person to do a difficult job. Why? Because a lazy person will look for an easy way to do it! That’s why we found a lazy but smart student to write a short autobiography example, and now we’ll share the easiest ways to do it with you. Feel free to use it as an autobiography example outline .

Below is a student autobiography sample with subheadings. Remember: it doesn’t have to be exactly as shown in the examples. They’re rather to show you the right path to be moving towards. Also, if something in your writing needs fixing, don’t hesitate to use a phrase reworder .

My Childhood

Not sure how to make an autobiography introduction? Why not start from the very beginning? Writing about your early years is the easiest and most logical start for an autobiography.

Just in 1 hour! We will write you a plagiarism-free paper in hardly more than 1 hour

I was born on a cold winter night, when even time seemed to stand still, in my native Bennington, Oklahoma. I do not remember much of my early childhood, but my mom said I was a very active, curious, and communicative child. I would ask dozens of questions each minute, even without waiting for the answers. I suppose this is why my parents offered me books and educational movies as early as my third birthday.

In the next part of your autobiography essay, describe yourself in a few words. It does not necessarily need to be too creative. You can take a short learning style quiz and put the information you’ll find out into your autobiography. It will be quite a unique addition. And don’t forget to make a smooth transition from the previous part!

Fortunately, my thirst for knowledge did not come to an end when I was at school. I was passionate about history and science. This passion helped me gain a profound knowledge of these areas, and I was admitted to the college of my dreams. Today, I am a student at a law school, and I feel very happy about it.

An old saying goes, “A life with a goal is a life that is whole.” Be positive and show everyone that your life is whole.

I am certain that my degree will become my ticket to a better tomorrow. I want to become a renowned lawyer in the field of employment legislation. I study hard and devote my free time to reading scholarly reviews and watching interviews with recognized specialists in the field.

My Ups and Downs

This part aims to show that you are capable of analyzing your experiences and learning valuable lessons.

Of course, I understand that life is not just a bed of roses, and challenges and hardships are an integral element of life. Since my parents could not help me cover my college expenses in full, paying off my student loan has become an important challenge for me. I combine a part-time job and full-time study to earn my living and my education. I feel triumphant at the beginning of every month when I receive my salary and plan how I will spend my money.

Autobiography Conclusion

In this part of your autobiographical essay, you want to establish the main lesson to take away from your story. In other words, what’s remarkable about your story?

I have come to believe that two main factors determine success. The first is a person’s determination and will to succeed. Are you ready to make sacrifices to achieve your goal, like working and studying at the same time? Are you prepared to recover after failure and proceed to your goal again? Without strong internal motivation, it is nearly impossible to become successful. Equally important is the support of people around you. Being determined to succeed does not mean alienating everyone and stepping on other people to achieve your goal. On the contrary, success is about recognizing your weaknesses and accepting support from people who genuinely want to help you. For instance, if it were not for my parents’ support of my educational endeavors, I might not be attending law school today.

Would you call this student an inspirational leader like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr. ? In all honesty, no. He may be an interesting and nice person, but he hasn’t left such a mark on history as some other people have—at least not yet.

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But can you learn something from his story? Most definitely.

The autobiography example above is suitable for both college and high school students.

In case you still lack the inspiration to write your memoir, you can always come to our experts, who will help you structure and write your narrative. Alternatively, you can find some more interesting examples of an autobiography at Phoenix.edu and at Southwestern College website .

And in case you’re still wondering how to write an autobiography, just keep reading!

Short Autobiography Example

As a student, you might need to write a short biography for various reasons, such as when applying for a scholarship, internship, or job. If you’re looking for a short autobiography example, check out the sample below.

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I am Aisha Patel, hailing from the city of Mumbai, India. Growing up in a culturally rich environment taught me to appreciate traditions, diversity, inclusion, and community. 

I have always been motivated by my parents, both accomplished physicians. I found myself drawn to the field of medicine at an early age. Since then, I devoted countless hours to volunteering, participating in healthcare camps, and working with NGOs to expand medical access in marginalized communities. I became determined to expand my horizons and receive a world-class medical education. Eventually, I set my sights on studying in the United States. 

I aspire to use the knowledge and skills I acquire to contribute to healthcare practices in India and globally. I plan to address pressing societal health challenges with empathy and expertise.

Autobiography of Myself as a Student

Writing an autobiography focusing on academic interests creates a platform for self-reflection. This activity can help you understand how your academic pursuits have shaped your identity and aspirations.

The following example will provide valuable insights into the content of a well-crafted autobiography:

My name is Sam Davis, and I am a dedicated student from Boston. My academic journey has been shaped by my passion for history. Since childhood, I have been deeply interested in people’s experiences throughout the centuries. This fascination is what inspired my academic pursuits. 

I have always been on top of my class in history courses. I enjoyed diving deep into the different eras and learning about various cultures and events. In addition to excellent grades, my commitment has been recognized through multiple honors and awards. In particular, I have been included on the Dean’s List and received accolades for my research papers. 

My primary academic interest is studying American history and evolution since the nation’s founding. I enjoy exploring the social and political forces that have shaped the United States. I am also keenly interested in ancient civilizations and the parallels between them and the contemporary world. 

Outside the classroom, I actively participate in historical reenactments and volunteer at local museums. Helping preserve and share our collective heritage is one of my primary goals. Such experiences allow me to bring history to life and engage with others who share my passion. 

I am eager to continue my scholarly pursuits and contribute to our understanding of the past. I believe we can learn many important and exciting lessons by making meaningful connections between history and the present.

💡 Autobiography Ideas for Students

Are you looking for inspiration to write your autobiography? Here are some thought-provoking autobiography essay topics that will help you reflect on your personal growth, academic journey, and unique experiences.

  • Personal experience adopting a cat from Humane Society .
  • My first travel to Dresden .
  • Describe your personal leadership experience .
  • Discuss your experience of resolving a problem in your neighborhood .
  • How Italian culture influenced my life .
  • How refraining from coffee for two weeks changed my everyday life.
  • Tell how you implement the concept of life-wide learning in your life.
  • Why I decided to take up wrestling and how it changed my life.
  • Narrate your personal experience of a healthy lifestyle .
  • My first memories of riding a bicycle .
  • How the quarantine time helped me to focus and myself and grow.
  • My health vision and strategy to improve health behavior.
  • Discuss how a psychology course changed your vision of the world.
  • How parenting style affected my childhood.
  • Personal experience of working with self-initiated expatriates .
  • My first day at college .
  • Why I love poetry .
  • Describe your experience in Shotokan Karate and your favorite technique.
  • The role non-verbal communication plays in my everyday life.
  • Lessons I learned from my first semester.
  • My reminiscence of the tragedy on September 11th .
  • Give details about a childhood experience that changed your life .
  • My understanding of the concept home .
  • Personal experience of mysophobia and the lessons I’ve learned.
  • Represent your favorite meeting place .
  • A defining event from my childhood.
  • Describe your experience of relocation to another country.
  • Why I started practicing art and dance movement therapy .
  • The impact mindfulness practicing had on my life.
  • My experience of winning the fight by losing it.
  • Why people like having lunch at a restaurant : my experience.
  • Describe the last conflict , its reasons, and how you resolved it.
  • Tell about your dream car .
  • Starting college as a major life event.
  • Describe your dream home .
  • My experience as a manager in an organization .
  • Narrate how peculiarities of your culture influence your behavior.
  • Tell about the significant event that influenced your life.
  • Personal experience of challenging gender norms.
  • Discuss your personal relationship with alcohol abuse .
  • Represent your plans and career goals .
  • Describe a high school experience that influenced your personality.
  • How I managed to apply international marketing courses in daily life.
  • Write about the teachers who made a difference in your life.
  • Experience of working as a head nurse.
  • My history of important habit development.
  • Discuss the challenges in friendship you’ve experienced and how you managed to cope with them.
  • Significance of music in my life.
  • Describe what you are responsible for in your life.
  • Give details about the most memorable holiday you had in your childhood.

What does every autobiography include? A theme. Essentially, the theme is the main “lesson” from the autobiography—the critical point that all of your life events come together to demonstrate.

How do you go about creating a theme?

You can do it by:

  • Discussing a string of events or one event in particular (or even just one day in your life)
  • Introducing a role model or an authority figure
  • Talking about your childhood dreams and memories

To make the task easier for you, we’ve put together a list of prompts you can use to signal your theme to the reader.

Simply complete these phrases, develop the ideas, and add specific details to your student autobiography examples and ta-da! Your A-level autobiography is ready!

A Student’s Autobiography: Starting Phrases

Use one of these phrases as the first sentence of your autobiography:

  • I was born in…
  • I was an active (or quiet, knowledge-loving, shy, curious, etc.) child.
  • My childhood dream was…
  • My earliest memory is…
  • I am grateful to my parents (or teachers, friends, etc.) because…
  • My role model was…
  • My lifetime dream is…
  • The most memorable day of my life was…
  • One phrase that I will never forget is…
  • If only one of my dreams could come true, I would wish for…
  • My main belief in life is…
  • I am driven by my desire/passion/wish to…
  • The main lesson that my parents taught me was…
  • The childhood hobby that most shaped my personality is…
  • One event that influenced who I am today is…
  • My motto in life is…
  • My favorite book/movie/author is…
  • When I was growing up, I always dreamed of becoming a…
  • One thing I wish I knew five (or ten, twenty, etc.) years ago is that…
  • My favorite childhood picture is…

Feel free to use this example of an autobiography for students and follow the simple steps described above to complete an A-level memoir with ease.

✏️ Student Autobiography FAQ

Writing an essay for a scholarship, be sure to include relevant information about yourself. Prove that you are a perfect candidate. Customize your life story in a way that showcases your strengths and positive qualities. Any other application will require a similar approach.

It’s a source of background information about the author that he or she chooses to reveal. An autobiographical essay is to include key facts about the author in chronological order. These facts usually are name, birth date, education, occupation, etc.

For a good college application, make sure to put an emphasis on the positive sides of your personal history. They should be relevant for the admission commission. Focus on academic achievements, relevant certifications, courses, etc.

Some people believe that an autobiography is one of the easiest essays to write. The author definitely knows the subject thoroughly. When writing about yourself, start with an introduction : your name, birth date, education, current position.

  • What Is an Autobiography? ThoughtCo
  • Beginning the Academic Essay: Harvard College Writing Center
  • What Are the Differences Between an Autobiographical Narrative & a Biography? Seattle PI
  • 500 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing: The New York Times
  • Autobiography: Merced College
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How to Write a Biography About Yourself in 10 Steps

Our guide shows you how to write your self-biography effectively.

Farzana Zannat Mou

Last updated on Mar 6th, 2024

How to Write a Biography About Yourself

When you click on affiliate links on QuillMuse.com and make a purchase, you won’t pay a penny more, but we’ll get a small commission—this helps us keep up with publishing valuable content on QuillMuse.  Read More .

Table of Contents

A personal biography, often shortened to just my self Biography, is a brief statement summarizing your skills and achievements. You can write a bio to differentiate yourself from other candidates, gain new clients, or connect with social media followers. Learning how to write a biography about yourself can help you build your brand and market yourself effectively. 

In this article, we are going to discuss biography with steps, tips, and strategies to help you write how to write a biography about yourself. 

Introduction 

Before writing, how to write a biography of yourself. First, we have to know what a personal biography is. A personal biography is a brief introduction summarizing your experience, references, education, and personal or professional achievements. This can help you convey your brand and show others what makes you unique. You can use your profile as a marketing tool when applying for jobs, attracting potential clients, or encouraging people to follow you on social media.

A personal biography often conveys the purpose or goal of writing the biography, such as talking to a client or getting a job. 

In your personal biography, you can include details about your personal or professional achievements, such as awards you’ve won or positive feedback you’ve received from customers. You may choose to discuss your personal or professional background in your biography, such as your current position, years of experience in the industry, or your motivation for pursuing your career path. A personal biography typically mentions your education and other qualifications, such as internships, certifications, or professional development training.

Where To Show Personal Bio 

Many people use their biography when looking for a job to explain to the hiring manager why they are the ideal candidate for the job. You can also use your biography in other ways. Some places you can post your biography include: 

  • Professional networking sites 
  • Social media accounts 
  • Professional or personal websites 
  • Other places to describe your credentials, such as the biography of a speaker at an industry conference.

How to Write a Biography About Yourself 

How To Write a Personal Bio

When you think you have to do something for your better career you must be alert about how to write a biography about yourself. Now I will share with all of you some significant strategies on how to write a biography about myself. 

1. Introduce yourself 

If you think about how to write a biography about yourself let’s start your bio with a brief introduction that describes who you are. The first sentence might include your name, followed by some details you want to highlight, such as your education, certifications, or achievements. Include other relevant details, such as your job title, industry experience, and job duties. After a strong introduction, summarize your passions and values. You might consider the following areas when writing your introduction.

2. Keep it short 

The length of your biography can vary depending on the focus and goals. On your social media site, you can write a brief professional biography of two or three sentences. Other bios, such as a website bio, can be several paragraphs long. No matter where you plan to display your biography, keep it short to grab readers’ attention and encourage them to learn more about you or connect with you.

3. Select a point to see 

In an individual bio, you’ll be able to either type in a first-person or third-person point of view. First-person dialect employs words like “I,” “we” and “me” to depict yourself. It’s a great thought to compose within the first person if you need to form a personal connection with your gathering of people. For this case, you will select a first-person bio on the off chance that you are an independent realistic originator pointing to put through with clients by depicting your design skills and past ventures. 

A third-person bio employs your favored pronouns to supply data approximately to you. It’s useful to utilize the third individual after you need to form a formal bio or illustrate your mastery. Another advantage of a third-person bio is that it permits you to incorporate your full title, which can be supportive of look search engine optimization (SEO). 

4. Write Strategically 

Set yourself apart from others by writing a compelling story that others can read to learn more about you. Include personal stories that inspired you to pursue your current career or influenced your career goals. These anecdotes can give readers a personal understanding of your interest in the field, your passions, and your core values. Here are some questions you can consider to help write a good biography: 

  • Who is your target audience? 
  • What do you want them to learn from your biography? 

5. Include your contact information 

Your profile is the first step to connecting with others. The contact information section can encourage readers to contact you because it makes you seem open and approachable. Place your contact information at the bottom of your biography in an easy-to-see location. 

This information may include: 

  • Your professional email address 
  • Links to your contact page 
  • Links to your professional social media profiles

6. Create a unique profile for each location 

Many facial expressions of a man. 

Search engines value diversity. So if you paste the same bio on every website, chances are only one of them will appear on the first page of your search results (other than that very few people will look).

7. Links to examples of your work 

The goal of your biography is to show who you are and what you’ve done, but it cannot fully achieve that goal unless it also includes Links to examples of your best work. 

For each link, make sure you use relevant anchor text (the blue words you click on). The words you use should tell readers what will happen when they click the link. For example, it’s better to say: 

Do you have a good online reputation? Start your analysis 

“He writes a guide to online reputation” 

instead of 

“To see what he writes about how a person’s online reputation affects their career, click here. 

Tim Lamborghini is an expert at promoting their work. You can see their involvement with books, podcasts, and personal and professional achievements in her bio.

8. Regularly update your profile 

You are constantly learning new skills and achieving new goals in your career. Keeping these achievements to yourself will only limit your opportunities. 

Instead, you should take a few minutes to update your various profiles every time you go through a major life event. This way, your biography will always accurately reflect who you are and what you have to offer, allowing you to gain better exposure, gain the respect of your peers, and ultimately be recruited.

9. Tell jokes 

Create some jokes when you will figure out how to write a biography about yourself. Another way to communicate with your audience is to make them laugh. While you need to maintain a professional tone throughout the rest of your biography, it’s a good idea to add a humorous note at the beginning or end. 

As long as it’s relevant to your target audience, a funny story or joke in your biography can make a lasting impression on readers. 

10. Match the word count to the platform 

While you analyze how to write a biography about yourself you should concern yourself with the word limit of the biography. The time it takes to write your biography is up to you unless you’re filling out the biography section of your profile and are only allowed a certain number of words. However, you should keep in mind your background and what your audience is looking for when deciding how much to write. 

For example, people reading a biography on a job site may be screening many candidates, so it’s best to keep the biography on these sites short, between 300 and 500 words. Otherwise, readers may be tempted to ignore them. 

For a biography on your website, a longer biography (between 1500 and 2000) is often better because you can include more details. Search engines also prefer longer bios, so they often rank higher in search results, making your bio more visible.

How to Write Biography About Myself

Conclusion 

One important thing that most people do not pay enough attention to when applying for a job is their “personal history”. Perhaps a lack of time and a general lack of awareness of the importance of personal biographies has led candidates to create dry and boring personal biographies that don’t deliver the value they deserve. To pass difficult technical interviews in different companies, in addition to thorough preparation, creating and presenting the best personal biography is extremely important. 

This article will show you how to write a biography about yourself and how to create the best personal biography to increase your chances of making a good impression and landing your dream job.

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How to Write a Biography About Yourself

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15 personal bio examples that are fun, creative, and get the job done.

Struggling to write about yourself? These personal bio examples show how you can talk about your professional and personal life in a creative, engaging way.

Published on Nov 27, 2022

By Austin Distel

my autobiography of my self

Personal bios can be hard to write. Waxing lyrical about yourself can be uncomfortable, especially in the context of professional achievements and amazing things you’ve done.

But, in a world where we’re often separated from other humans via a screen, your personal bio is one of the easiest ways for a company, colleague, or a potential lead to learn more about you.

‍ If you don’t know what to include or how to get started, we’ve pulled together some personal bio examples that showcase a handful of creative and engaging ways to present yourself on your social media accounts, your personal website, and on any bylined articles you write outside of your site. 

We also provide some cool personal bio generator templates from our AI marketing platform , Jasper. Now you won’t have to scramble around at the last minute to come up with a short bio of yourself when you’re suddenly asked to send one over via email!

The business case for personal bios: why you should write one

You might wonder what the big deal is—it’s just a bio, right? Do people even read them? The answer is actually, yes; they do. Personal bios can be a great way to find out more about the person behind a website or an article. This helps establish a connection and encourages readers to relate to you. 

The thing is, you might not think a lot of people care about where you went to school or what you like to do in your spare time, but you just don’t know who’s reading your professional bio.

It might be a hotshot manager for your dream company who also loves to spend their weekends kayaking the coast. Or it might be the marketer for a well-known brand looking for a writer .

Learning little nuggets of information about you can put you ahead of other candidates they’re researching or other freelancers they’re in talks with. It could be the difference between getting that contract and not. 

What’s the difference between a personal bio and a resume?

Your resume is a list of your professional roles. Your personal bio digs deeper than this and gives readers an insight into things like: 

  • Your interests outside of work
  • Your backstory
  • What gets you up in the morning 
  • Your passions and values 
  • Your goals 

Understanding this information can help them see if you’d be a good fit, or if you have the personal qualities they’re looking for in someone they want to work with. This information also helps you connect better with like-minded people.

Say, for example, you’re scrolling through Twitter, see a fun Tweet, and click on the person’s bio only to find out they also run 5km every evening and are passionate about addressing climate change. Chances are, you’re going to want to connect with them. 

How to write a personal bio

Before we share some creative bio examples, let’s take a look at what your personal biography should include. Bear in mind that this will vary depending on what platform you’re posting it on (platforms like Twitter and Instagram have a limited word count).

However, you can have a “master” bio that you pull snippets from for other platforms. Not only does this keep your messaging cohesive across platforms, but it makes it easy to get a bio together at short notice because you already have all the information you need written down. 

What to include in a bio on your site

For this ‌exercise, let’s focus on what you need to include in a personal bio on your website. This will be your “master” bio as it’ll probably be the longest and go into the most detail.

People who are poking around on your website have already shown an interest in who you are and what you do, so they’re more likely to stick around and read a longer bio. Here’s what you should include:

  • Your name: obviously, you need to state your name. Most people choose to include their full name, including surname, at the start of their bio. However, if your website URL or personal brand is already your full name, you can shorten it to just your first name. 
  • Your position: your current position and the tasks you’re responsible for should get a mention. This is particularly important if you’re looking for jobs or are writing a bio for a networking platform like LinkedIn. 
  • Your work experience: mention any key roles you’ve held in the past and how you got to where you are today. Stories like this show readers your journey and give an insight into your specialisms and professional skills. 
  • What you do and who you do it for: kind of like stating your “niche”, talking about what exactly it is you do (like graphic design or paid ad campaigns), and who you do it for (like finance companies or busy e-commerce owners) can help readers identify if you’re a good fit. 
  • What you do outside of work: personal bios should be more personal than a resume or professional bio and should therefore include personal details about what you like to do when you’re not working. Do you frequent pop-up restaurants? Attend dog shows with your puppy? Rock climb in the mountains? 
  • Professional accomplishments: talk about what you’ve achieved both at work and outside of work. This gives readers an idea about the things you value and what you might be able to achieve for them (it’s also a great talking point for people who want to reach out). 
  • Personal story: share a personal, creative story to add a splash of personality. It can be anything from the disastrous first birthday party you held for your daughter to the time you were taken in by a local family after getting lost in Mongolia. Don't forget to add a custom image !

How often should you refresh your personal bio? 

The life you live now isn’t the same life you were living ten, five, or even two years ago. Your personal bio should reflect your current situation, which means it’ll probably need to be regularly updated.

If you’re not sure about when to give it a refresh, consider:

  • When you land a new job 
  • When you achieve a big milestone (either at work or in your personal life)
  • When your old one doesn’t have the same ring to it 

Schedule time every few months to go back over your personal bio and see if everything is still true and up-to-date. 

Where to display your personal bio 

Your personal bio can be displayed anywhere that you might want people to find out more about you. Often, this will be places like social media, your website, guest post bylines, or your speaker profile, but you can also include it in other marketing materials like flyers for events you’re hosting or the blurb for your latest ebook. 

  • Twitter: cramming a personal bio into 160 characters can be hard, but it can also be a great lesson in identifying what information matters the most. Use up as many of the characters as you can, and use them wisely..
  • LinkedIn: the summary section of your LinkedIn profile gives you up to 2,000 characters to use. This is the ideal place to share your “master” bio.
  • Instagram: at 150 characters, you have just a few words to explain who you are and what you do on Instagram—use them wisely.
  • Personal website: people who land on your website are already interested in you—share your “master” bio here in all its glory. 
  • Guest posts: bylined articles need a couple of sentences about the author. Make it engaging to encourage readers to click through to your site or remember your name. 
  • Speaker profile: if you speak at events or conferences, you’ll need a short but sweet speaker bio that gets attendees interested in your session.

Get inspired: fun personal bio examples 

#1 twitter bio example: sally fox.

Sally Fox Twitter Bio

Sally includes what she does and who she does it for, as well as a humorous bit of information about her and her contact information—all within Twitter’s 160 character limit.

#2 Twitter bio example: Kash Bhattacharya

Kash Bhattacharya Twitter Bio

Kash showcases his accomplishments as well as a bit of backstory about what he’s doing and how long he’s been doing it.

#3 Twitter bio example: Jay Acunzo

Jay Acunzo Twitter Bio

Jay shares his mission in his Twitter bio, as well as what he’s best known for.

#4 Pinterest bio example: Grey & Scout

Grey & Scout Pinterest Bio

Liz of Grey & Scout introduces herself and tells her followers what they can expect to see from her—not an easy feat with such a limited word count.

#5 Guest post bio example: Justin Champion

Justin Champion Guest Post Bio

In this guest author byline, Justin uses the third person to introduce who he is and what he does, as well as share his goal with readers.

#6 LinkedIn bio example: Katrina Ortiz

Katrina Ortiz LinkedIn Bio

Katrina uses her LinkedIn bio to tell a story. Readers are hooked from the first sentence, but she also gives key insights into her specialties and achievements. 

#7 LinkedIn bio example: Karen Abbate

Karen Abbate LinkedIn Bio

Karen does things a bit differently with her LinkedIn summary and lists out key things readers might want to know about her and her career. 

#8 LinkedIn bio example: Katie Clancy

Katie Clancy LinkedIn Bio

Katie starts her LinkedIn bio with an analogy that serves to hook readers from the start. From there, she branches out into how it relates to her profession, as well as her key achievements and career highlights.

#9 Personal website bio example: Dave Harland

Dave Harland About Page Bio

Dave Harland’s About Page shares the story of how he got into writing‌. At the end, he highlights his experience and why this story has helped him become a go-to copywriter.

#10 Personal website bio example: Gummi Sig

Gummi Sig About Page Bio

Gummi Sig begins his bio in the third person before diving into first-person storytelling mode. Perhaps the best part about this personal bio is the call to action at the end that encourages potential leads to get in touch.

#11 Personal website bio example: Leigh Whipday

Leigh Whipday About Page Bio

Leigh Whipday of Toy Fight has a short professional bio on the website. It includes both his professional achievements as well as insights about his life outside of work to attract his target audience.

#12 Personal website bio example: Blake Fili Suarez

Blake Suarez About Page Bio

Blake includes both a short and a long version of his bio so that readers can choose the best option for them. Both include what he does as well as personal anecdotes about his life and business.

Create your own with the Jasper personal bio template

Jarvis Personal Bio Template

# 13 Personal website bio example: Kaleigh Moore

Kaleigh Moore Personal Bio

Besides a short professional bio that’s more focused on her work, Kaleigh Moore also has a personal bio on her site. It goes into detail about her first e-commerce business and how it led her into writing for the biggest names in e-commerce. It also shares some fun facts and photos of Kaleigh.

#14 Instagram bio example: Carlos Gil

Carlos Gil Personal Instagram Bio

Carlos Gil does a good job of using limited space wisely, mentioning accomplishments, what he does and for who, as well as what he’s working on.  

#15 Instagram bio example: Samantha Anderl

Samantha Anderl Personal Instagram Bio

Co-founder of Harlow, Samantha Anderl, uses her personal Instagram bio not only to promote the company but also to give some insight into her personality. As this bio shows, a little humor can go a long way in attracting like-minded people to both you and your business.

Struggling with a blank page? Not sure which words to put down first? Overwhelmed by all the great professional bio examples out there and have now got writer’s paralysis? That's where an AI writing assistant can come in handy. Jasper’s personal bio template, in particular, can save the day. 

Simply plug in a few key pieces of information about yourself (use the list we mentioned above as a starting point) and choose the tone of voice you want to portray . Jasper will then work its AI magic and create a collection of personal bios you can tweak or use as they are. For example, here’s the start of a short bio for Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs. 

Jasper Personal Bio Template

Jasper can create well-written, engaging bios for anyone in any role, as long as you provide the right info. For instance, besides setting the point of view and tone, we gave Jasper some basic details, including a fictional name, role, and location for a Senior Product Marketing Manager. 

As you can see from the bio options below, Jasper added emotion and personality to the details we gave. And he even added missing details such as past companies and years of experience, which we could easily swap out for factual details when writing a bio for a real person. 

Jasper Personal Bio Template For Marketing Manager

We provided similar details for the bio of a fictional social media marketer, feeding Jasper info on specialties, previous roles, and hobbies. This time in the third person, Jasper added flair to our inputs, as well as some additional details that could be verified or swapped out, such as Luisa being from Columbia. 

Jasper Personal Bio Template For Social Media Manager

Any of Jasper’s outputs could be combined, edited, or expanded in minutes to create a polished bio that showcases your areas of expertise, your professional goals, and your personality. Writing about yourself doesn’t have to be hard!

Also related: the Jasper company bio template

Companies can also make use of Jasper’s bio templates with the company bio template. Again, just input some key facts about your business, and— voila! —Jasper will create a fun and creative bio you can use wherever you like. 

Create your punchy personal bio today

Never again be asked to send over a personal bio “on the fly”. Instead, create a “master” bio that can be chopped up into engaging chunks and shared on your chosen promotional platforms.

Include key information about your job title, achievements, and what exactly it is you do, as well as personal anecdotes, your interests, and how you spend your spare time.

Your personal bio is a chance to connect with potential clients, hiring managers, and like-minded colleagues, so take the time to write one that really presents you as you want to be presented.

‍ Start a free trial to create your Personal Bio using Jasper today.

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Meet The Author:

Austin Distel

Austin Distel

Austin Distel is the Sr. Director of Marketing at Jasper , your AI marketing co-pilot. When not working, Austin is also an Airbnb superhost in Austin, Texas.

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The Best Short Professional Bios (Examples + Templates)

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Summary. To write a short bio you should first make an initial introduction introducing yourself in the first or first person. Your short bio should include your brand, your accomplishments, and your values and goals. Your short bio should be one to three short paragraphs or four to eight sentences long.

Knowing how to write a concise, informative, and interesting biography about yourself can help throughout various parts of the professional process. You can use your bio to capture the attention of potential employers or clients and convince them to choose to employ or work with you.

In this article, you’ll learn more about what goes into a short bio and how to write one, and you’ll also get to see some short bio templates and examples to help you get an idea of what yours should look like.

Key Takeaways

A short bio serves to introduce you, your achievements, and what you offer professionally to potential employers or clients.

It’s important to keep your bio brief so that readers stay engaged and will remember your main points.

You may need to adjust your bio for different audiences, as your clients may want to know different information than a recruiter would.

Talk about your skills and accomplishments in your bio, but don’t exaggerate them.

How to Write a Short Bio

What Is a Short Bio?

How to write a short bio, what to include in a short professional bio, short bio examples, short bio templates, tips for writing a short bio, writing a short bio faq.

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A short bio serves as your introduction to the professional world. In terms of finding or expanding on your job, a bio will cover your:

Work history

Achievements

Any other relevant professional information

Think of it as a professional memoir that a hiring manager or consumer can read and understand quickly. It’s usually about one to three paragraphs depending on experience.

There’s an emphasis on being succinct when it comes to writing a professional bio. This is because a bio is supposed to be a preface to attract recruiter attention and incline them to reach out for more information. Many readers will get lost or bored with a lengthy bio.

Using a short bio can be helpful across very different industries, from marketing to accounting, from psychiatry to sales.

You’re probably familiar with providing short bios on social media websites and applications. While the information and skills you include in a professional bio may differ, the general formatting is similar.

There’s a lot of considerations to take into account when writing a short bio, and it can quickly become intimidating. Deciding what information is relevant and how to keep it near 140 characters is no small task.

If you’re having difficulty writing a short bio, follow the outline below to craft an introduction that engages your reader.

Make an initial introduction. You can’t jump right into everything you’ve done and what you want to do in the future before introducing yourself.

Your bio’s first sentence should begin with your full name in the third person or introduce yourself in the first person and continue to briefly outline your most notable skills and accomplishments. It’s a good place to state your current job and employer.

Go deeper with what motivates you. Once you’ve catchily illustrated who you are in your short bio, you can use the second sentence to describe your motivations for your work.

Stating what drives you to do the work you do is essential to employers and customers alike. Whether you work as a physician or fitness consultant , there’s a reason why this is your profession, and you should explain that in your short professional bio.

Describe your accomplishments. Your short bio is for detailing why you’re the ideal candidate to be trusted with handling an employer or consumer’s business. By describing your prior accomplishments, you let them know what you could offer as an employee and how you’ve succeeded in the past.

While you should avoid sounding braggy, the reader is looking for information about what your qualifications are , and your accomplishments generally measure these qualities.

Even though you could probably go on for ages about the details of your accomplishments, save that for an interview . In a short bio, only include the most impressive of your achievements to outline.

Accomplishments relevant to a short bio could include:

Impressive results on a project

Former promotions

Awards received in your field

Certifications received

Include contact information. The purpose of a short bio as either a business or a job seeker is to inspire the reader to reach out. Without contact information, this pursuit becomes futile. Make sure your short bio has some way to contact you at the end.

Relevant contact information may include:

Phone number

Professional networking profile

A short professional bio includes:

Your full name. You can choose to write your bio in the first person (I, me, my) or third person (he, she, they), but either way, you need to include your full name at some point. Branding doesn’t work so well without a brand name (i.e., you!)

Your brand. Of course, if you have an actual brand that you’re trying to market, you should include the brand name as well.

What you do. Summarize what you want the reader to know about what you do in one sentence — tricky, we know.

Your accomplishments. For a short bio, you can stick with just one major accomplishment from your professional life. Or, if you have a string of impressive achievements, try condensing all of them down to one sentence.

Your goals and values. Let the reader know what makes you tick — why do you do what you do and what do you hope to achieve with your work? People are compelled by a story more than anything else, so it’s important to get this part right.

Something personal (optional). If you have a quirky tidbit about yourself you’d like to include, go for it. Just make sure it doesn’t throw off te the tone of the rest of your bio.

Contact info (optional). If your bio is serving as a call-to-action to drum up business or get leads on job opportunities, it makes sense to include your contact information at the end of your bio. It’s not necessary if that information is available elsewhere on the page , though.

Entry-Level Job-Seeker Bio Example

Mitchell Morrison is an upcoming video producer and editor who believes in the art of visual organization. He is a recent graduate from the University of Washington and focused on post-production during his time studying there. He was introduced to the magical world of visual art production by watching his father work on editing commercials growing up and has been working towards his dream of becoming a video editor ever since. During his last year of college, Mitchell participated in a competitive internship with Digital Space Films. He was chosen out of 2,000 applicants based on his academic portfolio and personal statement essay. This internship was an incredible learning experience and resulted in three professional accreditations for music video editing. Mitchell currently lives in Seattle, Washington pursuing freelance opportunities and spending time with his Dog, Pikachu. To get into contact with Mitchell: MitchellMorrisonVideo.com/contact

Working Professional Website Bio Example

Lisa Kennedy is an experienced real estate professional. She knows how important a home is for long-term happiness and has invested her career in putting people in the house they’ve always dreamed of. Lisa was driven to pursue real estate from her passion for helping people during life-altering times, and a keen interest in high-end, luxury homes. She’s been working in the real estate industry for ten years and in that time has assisted over 3,500 people in finding homes. She was educated at the University of Los Angeles with a bachelor’s in business management. She’s worked for some of the most respectable Real Estate companies in Los Angeles and individually under her agency “Kennedy Homes.” Lisa has also been published in Real Estate Quarterly Magazine as the 2017 winner of the “Top Luxury Home Seller” award. Lisa loves the culture of Los Angeles and has been living there with her family of five since she graduated from college. She enjoys spending her free time exploring towns along the West Coast and swimming. If you’d like to get in touch with Lisa: Email: [email protected]

Professional Networking Profile Bio Example

Bianca Jones Marketing Manager Miami, FL The first step towards customer satisfaction is being reached by stellar product marketing, and that’s what I aim to provide. My professional experience as a product marketing manager has allowed me to assist many organizations in improving their sales margins and audience response to emerging products. I’ve brought dedication and positive results to the companies I’ve worked for because I am passionate about product perception, marketing, and business statistics. What drives a product to success interests and inspires me. I specialize in long-term growth strategies and audience outreach. In addition to eight years of experience in professional product marketing, I have also published two books on creating a career as a marketer called “What to Do After Your Bachelor’s” and “A Marketer’s How-To.” If you’re interested in learning more about how to market your business better, or just discuss more, feel free to contact me by email at [email protected].

Your first choice is whether you want your bio to be written in the third person or first person. These short bio templates show both options, and also include different ideas for what to include, and how. Feel free to pick and choose your favorite parts of each of the two.

[Full Name] is a [job title] who [believes/knows] in the power of [what you do]. [He/She/They] began their journey in [field] by [how you got started in the field], and now dreams of [what you hope to accomplish]. [His/Her/Their] biggest accomplishment to date has been [your biggest accomplishment]. [Full Name] lives in [where you live] and participates in [a hobby/interest]. To get in touch with [Full Name], call/email/message me on [how you’d like to be contacted].
I am a [job title] who helps [who you help] [what you help them do]. It’s my belief that [your unique perspective on the field]. In the past [# of years] years, I’ve [major accomplishment #1] through [how you accomplished it]. I have a passion for [your professional passion], but on the side, I also enjoy [personal passion]. Get in touch with me today at [contact info] — I look forward to talking with you about [what you want to talk to your readers about].

You have a firm grasp of the structure of a short bio and what to include. Now, you may need some tips for how to polish your short professional bio and make it stand out from the competition.

Be mindful of length. While you’re probably getting sick of hearing that your bio should be short, it’s good to keep in mind throughout the writing process. It’s easy to go off on a tangent while trying to include everything relevant or rationalize, making your bio too long.

Avoid this impulse. The point of a bio is that it’s limited. You want to intrigue the reader enough to inspire them to seek more information about you or your services.

Tailor your bio to your intended audience. Whether you’re using a short bio to attract a particular customer base or potential employer, tailoring it to fit their wants and needs is crucial. Consider your intended audience base and what they’re looking for in a candidate or service.

Be genuine. Your short bio should be an authentic representation of your traits, experience, and personality. People are repelled by what they interpret as stretching the truth. If you’re being received as disingenuous by the reader, they’ll probably move on.

Proofread. The only way to steer clear of errors in your short bio is by proofreading it. Imagine a hiring manager being completely interested in your bio.

They love what you have to say about yourself and find your prior experience enticing. That is, until they come across a mistake that clearly shows you didn’t do proofread or edit.

Include links to your portfolio, website, or networking profile. One way to circumvent the confining factor of keeping your bio short is by including links to more detailed sources.

This can be in the form of linking your portfolio or website to allow the reader to go deeper into your discussed skills if they please, without taking up more space in your bio.

Implement these links seamlessly into your bio by attaching them to anchor words that describe what clicking will lead them to.

Add some personality. You aren’t the only person who has an impressive list of accomplishments to put on a bio, so you’re going to need to find some additional ways to make an impression.

What should a short bio include?

A short bio should include your name, what you do, and your achievements. You should also include your company or product’s brand, if you have one, and your goals and motivations for doing what you do. This humanizes you and helps you stand out from the rest of the pack.

How long is a short bio?

A short bio is typically one to three paragraphs long. These should be short paragraphs though, as other experts say that between four and eight sentences is the ideal length for a short bio.

What makes a good bio?

A good bio is succinct and memorable. Readers don’t want to spend long reading about your professional and personal life, so go back and cut it down to the important parts multiple times after you draft it. You might be surprised at how little you actually need to include.

What should you avoid putting in a short bio?

You should avoid including anything negative or arrogate. It’s never a good idea to write anything negative about previous jobs or employers. Only include positive things in your professional short bio.

It’s important to include your achievements in a short bio, but there is a fine line between mentioning your achievements and bragging about them. Stick to the facts when talking about your accomplishments.

Fremont University – Building Your Professional Bio

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Sky Ariella is a professional freelance writer, originally from New York. She has been featured on websites and online magazines covering topics in career, travel, and lifestyle. She received her BA in psychology from Hunter College.

Don Pippin is an executive and HR leader for Fortune 50 and 500 companies and startups. In 2008, Don launched area|Talent with a focus on helping clients identify their brand. As a Certified Professional Resume Writer, Certified Digital Career Strategist, and Certified Personal Branding Strategist, Don guides clients through career transitions.

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Writing My Autobiography

my autobiography of my self

A re you still writing?” he asked.

“I am,” I answered.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“An autobiography,” I said.

“Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?”

The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an autobiography. The implication isn’t altogether foolish. Most autobiographies, at least the best autobiographies, have been written by people who have historical standing, or have known many important people, or have lived in significant times, or have noteworthy family connections or serious lessons to convey . I qualify on none of these grounds. Not that, roughly two years ago when I sat down to write my autobiography, I let that stop me.

An autobiography, to state the obvious, is at base a biography written by its own subject. But how is one to write it: as a matter of setting the record straight, as a form of confessional, as a mode of seeking justice, or as a justification of one’s life? “An autobiography,” wrote George Orwell, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Is this true? I prefer to think not.

Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Let him relate the events of his own life with Honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.” One of the nicest things about being a professor, it has been said, is that one gets to talk for fifty minutes without being interrupted. So one of the allurements of autobiography is that one gets to write hundreds of pages about that eminently fascinating character, oneself, even if in doing so one only establishes one’s insignificance.

The great autobiographies—of which there have not been all that many—have been wildly various. One of the first, that of the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, is marked by an almost unrelieved braggadocio: No artist was more perfect, no warrior more brave, no lover more pleasing than the author, or so he would have us believe. Edward Gibbon’s autobiography, though elegantly written, is disappointing in its brevity. That of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, heavily striking the confessional note, might have been told in a booth to a priest. Ben Franklin’s autobiography is full of advice on how the rest of us should live. John Stuart Mill’s is astounding in its account of its author’s prodigiously early education, which began with his learning Greek under his father’s instruction at the age of three. Then there is Henry Adams’s autobiography, suffused with disappointment over his feeling out of joint with his times and the world’s not recognizing his true value. In Making It , Norman Podhoretz wrote an autobiography informed by a single message, which he termed a “dirty little secret,” namely that there is nothing wrong with ambition and that success, despite what leftist intellectuals might claim, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Please note that all of these are books written by men. Might it be that women lack the vanity required to write—or should I say “indulge in”—the literary act of autobiography? In Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome , I recently read that Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, wrote her autobiography, which has not survived, and which Mary Beard counts as “one of the great losses of all classical literature.” I wish that Jane Austen had written an autobiography, and so too George Eliot and Willa Cather. Perhaps these three women, great writers all, were too sensibly modest for autobiography, that least modest of all literary forms.

A utobiography can be the making or breaking of writers who attempt it. John Stuart Mill’s autobiography has gone a long way toward humanizing a writer whose other writings tend toward the coldly formal. Harold Laski wrote that Mill’s “ Autobiography , in the end the most imperishable of his writings, is a record as noble as any in our literature of consistent devotion to the public good.”

If Mill’s autobiography humanized him, the autobiography of the novelist Anthony Trollope did for him something approaching the reverse. In An Autobiography , Trollope disdains the notion of an author’s needing inspiration to write well. He reports that “there was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office,” where he had a regular job. “I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession [that of novelist], I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.” Trollope recounts—emphasis here on “counts”—that as a novelist he averages forty pages per week, at 250 words per page. He writes: “There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn.” Trollope then mentions that on the day after he finished his novel Doctor Thorne , he began writing his next novel, The Bertrams . For a long spell the literati refused to forgive Trollope for shearing inspiration away from the creation of literary art, for comparing the job of the novelist to a job at the post office. Only the splendid quality of his many novels eventually won him forgiveness and proper recognition.

A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.” The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the scrupulously examined one is rare indeed.

My own life has not provided the richest fodder for autobiography. For one thing, it has not featured much in the way of drama. For another, good fortune has allowed me the freedom to do with my life much as I have wished. I have given my autobiography the title Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life , with the subtitle Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life . Now well along in its closing chapter, mine, I contend, has been thus far—here I pause to touch wood—a most lucky life.

My title derives from the story of Croesus, who ruled the country of Lydia from circa 585–547 b.c. , and who is perhaps today best known for the phrase “rich as Croesus.” The vastly wealthy Croesus thought himself the luckiest man on earth and asked confirmation of this from Solon, the wise Athenian, who told him that in fact the luckiest man on earth was another Athenian who had two sons in that year’s Olympics. When Croesus asked who was second luckiest, Solon cited another Greek who had a most happy family life. Croesus was displeased but not convinced by Solon’s answers. Years later he was captured by the Persian Cyrus, divested of his kingdom and his wealth, and set on a pyre to be burned alive, before which he was heard to exclaim that Solon had been right. The moral of the story is, of course: Never say you have had a lucky life until you know how your life ends.

I have known serious sadness in my life. I have undergone a divorce. I have become a member of that most dolorous of clubs, parents who have buried one of their children. Yet I have had much to be grateful for. In the final paragraph of a book I wrote some years ago on the subject of ambition, I noted that “We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.” In all these realms, I lucked out. I was born to intelligent, kindly parents; at a time that, though I was drafted into the army, allowed me to miss being called up to fight in any wars; and in the largely unmitigated prosperity enjoyed by the world’s most interesting country, the United States of America.

Writing is a form of discovery. Yet can even writing ferret out the quality and meaning of one’s own life? Alexis de Tocqueville, the endlessly quotable Tocqueville, wrote: “The fate of individuals is still more hidden than that of peoples,” and “the destinies of individuals are often as uncertain as those of nations.” Fate, destiny, those two great tricksters, who knows what they have in store for one, even in the final days of one’s life? I, for example, as late as the age of eighteen, had never heard the word “intellectual.” If you had asked me what a man of letters was, I would have said a guy who works at the post office. Yet I have been destined to function as an intellectual for the better part of my adult life, and have more than once been called a man of letters. Fate, destiny, go figure!

T he first question that arises in writing one’s autobiography is what to include and what to exclude. Take, for starters, sex. In his nearly seven-hundred-page autobiography, Journeys of the Mind , the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown waits until page 581 to mention, in the most glancing way, that he is married. Forty or so pages later, the name of a second wife is mentioned. Whether he had children with either of these wives, we never learn. But then, Brown’s is a purely intellectual autobiography, concerned all but exclusively with the development of the author’s mind and those who influenced that development.

My autobiography, though less than half the length of Brown’s, allowed no such luxury of reticence. Sex, especially when I was an adolescent, was a central subject, close to a preoccupation. After all, boys—as I frequently instructed my beautiful granddaughter Annabelle when she was growing up—are brutes. I came of age BP, or Before the Pill, and consummated sex, known in that day as “going all the way,” was not then a serious possibility. Too much was at risk—pregnancy, loss of reputation—for middle-class girls. My friends and I turned to prostitution.

Apart from occasionally picking up streetwalkers on some of Chicago’s darker streets, prostitution for the most part meant trips of sixty or so miles to the bordellos of Braidwood or Kankakee, Illinois. The sex, costing $3, was less than perfunctory. (“Don’t bother to take off your socks or that sweater,” one was instructed.) What was entailed was less sensual pleasure than a rite of passage, of becoming a man, of “losing your cherry,” a phrase I have only recently learned means forgoing one’s innocence. We usually went on these trips in groups of five or six in one or another of our fathers’ cars. Much joking on the way up and even more on the way back. Along Chicago’s Outer Drive, which we took home in those days, there was a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer sign that read, “Have you had it lately?,” which always got a good laugh.

I like to think of myself as a shy pornographer, or, perhaps better, a sly pornographer. By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography. On the subject of sex in my first marriage (of two), for example, I say merely, “I did not want my money back.” But, then, all sex, if one comes to think about it, is essentially comic, except of course one’s own.

On the inclusion-exclusion question, the next subject I had to consider was money, or my personal finances. Financially I have nothing to brag about. In my autobiography I do, though, occasionally give the exact salaries—none of them spectacular—of the jobs I’ve held. With some hesitation (lest it seem boasting) I mention that a book I wrote on the subject of snobbery earned, with its paperback sale, roughly half-a-million dollars. I fail to mention those of my books that earned paltry royalties, or, as I came to think of them, peasantries. In my autobiography, I contented myself with noting my good fortune in being able to earn enough money doing pretty much what I wished to do and ending up having acquired enough money not to worry overmuch about financial matters. Like the man said, a lucky life.

If I deal glancingly in my autobiography with sex and personal finances, I tried to take a pass on politics. My own political development is of little interest. I started out in my political life a fairly standard liberal—which in those days meant despising Richard Nixon—and have ended up today contemptuous of both our political parties: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as the critic Dwight Macdonald referred to them. Forgive the self-congratulatory note, but in politics I prefer to think myself a member in good standing of that third American political party, never alas on the ballot, the anti-BS party.

Of course, sometimes one needs to have a politics, if only to fight off the politics of others. Ours is a time when politics seems to be swamping all else: art, education, journalism, culture generally. I have had the dubious distinction of having been “canceled,” for what were thought my political views, and I write about this experience in my autobiography. I was fired from the editorship of Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine, the American Scholar —a job I had held for more than twenty years—because of my ostensibly conservative, I suppose I ought to make that “right-wing,” politics. My chief cancellers were two academic feminists and an African-American historian-biographer, who sat on the senate, or governing board, of Phi Beta Kappa.

T he official version given out by Phi Beta Kappa for my cancellation—in those days still known as a firing—was that the magazine was losing subscribers and needed to seek younger readers. Neither assertion was true, but both currently appear in the Wikipedia entry under my name. The New York Times also printed this “official” but untrue version of my cancellation. In fact, I was canceled because I had failed to run anything in the magazine about academic feminism or race, both subjects that had already been done to death elsewhere and that I thought cliché-ridden and hence of little interest for a magazine I specifically tried to keep apolitical. During my twenty-two years at the American Scholar , the name of no current United States president was mentioned. If anything resembling a theme emerged during my editorship, it was the preservation of the tradition of the liberal arts, a subject on which I was able to acquire contributions from Jacques Barzun, Paul Kristeller, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Frederick Crews, and others.

That I was fired not for anything I had done but for things I had failed to do is an indication of how far we had come in the realm of political correctness. I take up this topic in my autobiography, one theme of which is the vast changes that have taken place in American culture over my lifetime. A notable example is an essay on homosexuality that I wrote and published in Harper’s in 1970, a mere fifty-three years ago. The essay made the points that we still did not know much about the origin of male homosexuality, that there was much hypocrisy concerning the subject, that homosexuals were living under considerable social pressure and prejudice, and that given a choice, most people would prefer that their children not be homosexual. This, as I say, was in 1970, before the gay liberation movement had got underway in earnest. The essay attracted a vast number of letters in opposition, and a man named Merle Miller, who claimed I was calling for genocide of homosexuals, wrote a book based on the essay. Gore Vidal, never known for his temperate reasoning, claimed my argument was ad Hitlerum . (Vidal, after contracting Epstein-Barr virus late in life, claimed that “Joseph Epstein gave it to me.”) I have never reprinted the essay in any of my collections because I felt that it would stir up too much strong feeling. For what it is worth, I also happen to be pleased by the greater tolerance accorded homosexuality in the half century since my essay was published.

The larger point is that today neither Harper’s nor any other mainstream magazine would dare to publish that essay. Yet a few years after the essay was published, I was offered a job teaching in the English Department of Northwestern University, and the year after that, I was appointed editor of the American Scholar. Today, of course, neither job would have been available to me.

Do these matters—my cancellation from the American Scholar , my unearned reputation as a homophobe—come under the heading of self-justification? Perhaps so. But then, what better, or at least more convenient, place to attempt to justify oneself than in one’s autobiography?

Many changes have taken place in my lifetime, some for the better, some for the worse, some whose value cannot yet be known. I note, for example, if not the death then the attenuation of the extended family (nephews, nieces, cousins) in American life. Whereas much of my parents’ social life revolved around an extensive cousinage, I today have grandnephews and grandnieces living on both coasts whom I have never met and probably never shall. I imagine some of them one day being notified of my death and responding, “Really? [Pause] What’s for dinner?”

I take up in my autobiography what Philip Rieff called, in his book of this title, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, a development that has altered child-rearing, artistic creation, and much else in our culture. Although the doctrines of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others are no longer taken as gospel, their secondary influence has conquered much of modern culture. My parents’ generation did not hold with therapeutic culture, which contends that the essentials of life are the achievement of self-esteem and individual happiness, replacing honor, courage, kindness, and generosity.

In my autobiography, I note that when my mother was depressed by her knowledge that she was dying of cancer, a friend suggested that there were support groups for people with terminal diseases, one of which might be helpful. I imagined telling my mother about such groups, and her response: “Let me see,” she is likely to have said. “You want me to go into a room with strangers, where I will listen to their problems and then I’ll tell them mine, and this will make me feel better.” Pause. “Is this the kind of idiot I’ve raised as a son?”

T hen there is digital culture, the verdict on which is not yet in. Digital culture has changed the way we read, think, make social connections, do business, and so much more. I write in my autobiography that in its consequences digital culture is up there with the printing press and the automobile. Its influence is still far from fully fathomed.

One of my challenges in writing my autobiography was to avoid seeming to brag about my quite modest accomplishments. In the Rhetoric , Aristotle writes: “Speaking at length about oneself, making false claims, taking the credit for what another has done, these are signs of boastfulness.” I tried not to lapse into boasting. Yet at one point I quote Jacques Barzun, in a letter to me, claiming that as a writer I am in the direct line of William Hazlitt, though in some ways better, for my task—that of finding the proper language to establish both intimacy and critical distance—is in the current day more difficult than in Hazlitt’s. At least I deliberately neglected to mention that, in response to my being fired from the American Scholar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan flew an American flag at half-mast over the Capitol, a flag he sent to me as a souvenir. Quoting others about my accomplishments, is this anything other than boasting by other means? I hope so, though even now I’m not altogether sure.

I have a certain pride in these modest accomplishments. Setting out in life, I never thought I should publish some thirty-odd books or have the good luck to continue writing well into my eighties. The question for me as an autobiographer was how to express that pride without preening. The most efficient way, of course, is never to write an autobiography.

Why, then, did I write mine? Although I have earlier characterized writing as a form of discovery, I did not, in writing my autobiography, expect to discover many radically new things about my character or the general lineaments of my life. Nor did I think that my life bore any lessons that were important to others. I had, and still have, little to confess; I have no hidden desire to be spanked by an NFL linebacker in a nun’s habit. A writer, a mere scribbler, I have led a largely spectatorial life, standing on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, watching the circus pass before me.

Still, I wrote my autobiography, based in a loose way on Wordsworth’s notion that poetry arises from “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Writing it gave me an opportunity to review my life at the end of my life in a tranquil manner. I was able to note certain trends, parallels, and phenomena that have marked my life and set my destiny.

The first of these, as I remarked earlier, was the fortunate time in which I was born, namely the tail end of the Great Depression—to be specific, in 1937. Because of the Depression, people were having fewer children, and often having them later. (My mother was twenty-seven, my father thirty at my birth.) Born when it was, my generation, though subject to the draft—not, in my experience of it, a bad thing—danced between the wars: We were too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. We were also children during World War II, the last war the country fully supported, which gave us a love of our country. Ours was a low-population generation, untroubled by the vagaries of college admissions or the trauma of rejection by the school of one’s choice. Colleges, in fact, wanted us.

Or consider parents, another fateful phenomenon over which one has no choice. To be born to thoughtless, or disagreeable, or depressed, or deeply neurotic parents cannot but substantially affect all one’s days. Having a father who is hugely successful in the world can be as dampening to the spirit as having a father who is a failure. And yet about all this one has no say. I have given the chapter on my parents the title “A Winning Ticket in the Parents Lottery,” for my own parents, though neither went to college, were thoughtful, honorable, and in no way psychologically crushing. They gave my younger brother and me the freedom to develop on our own; they never told me what schools to attend, what work to seek, whom or when to marry. I knew I was never at the center of my parents’ lives, yet I also knew I could count on them when I needed their support, which more than once I did, and they did not fail to come through. As I say, a winning ticket.

As one writes about one’s own life, certain themes are likely to emerge that hadn’t previously stood out so emphatically. In my case, one persistent motif is that of older boys, then older men, who have supported or aided me in various ways. A boy nearly two years older than I named Jack Libby saw to it that I wasn’t bullied or pushed around in a neighborhood where I was the youngest kid on the block. In high school, a boy to whom I have given the name Jeremy Klein taught me a thing or two about gambling and corruption generally. Later in life, men eight, nine, ten, even twenty or more years older than I promoted my career: Hilton Kramer in promoting my candidacy for the editorship of the American Scholar , Irving Howe in helping me get a teaching job (without an advanced degree) at Northwestern, John Gross in publishing me regularly on important subjects in the Times Literary Supplement , Edward Shils in ways too numerous to mention. Something there was about me, evidently, that was highly protégéable.

I  haven’t yet seen the index for my autobiography, but my guess is that it could have been name-ier. I failed, for example, to include my brief but pleasing friendship with Sol Linowitz. Sol was the chairman of Xerox, and later served the Johnson administration as ambassador to the Organization of American States. He also happened to be a reader of mine, and on my various trips to Washington I was often his guest at the F Street Club, a political lunch club where he reserved a private room in which we told each other jokes, chiefly Jewish jokes. I might also have added my six years as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose members included the actors Robert Stack and Celeste Holm, the Balanchine dancer Arthur Mitchell, Robert Joffrey, the soprano Renée Fleming, the novelist Toni Morrison, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the architect I. M. Pei, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, and other highly droppable names.

Confronting one’s regrets is another inescapable element in writing one’s autobiography. Ah, regrets: the red MG convertible one didn’t buy in one’s twenties, the elegant young Asian woman one should have asked to dinner, the year one failed to spend in Paris. The greater the number of one’s regrets, the grander their scope, the sadder, at its close, one’s life figures to be. I come out fairly well in the regrets ledger. I regret not having studied classics at university, and so today I cannot read ancient Greek. I regret not having been a better father to my sons. I regret not asking my mother more questions about her family and not telling my father what a good man I thought he was. As regrets go, these are not minor, yet neither have I found them to be crippling.

Then there is the matter of recognizing one’s quirks, or peculiar habits. A notable one of mine, acquired late in life, is to have become near to the reverse of a hypochondriac. I have not yet reached the stage of anosognosia, or the belief that one is well when one is ill—a stage, by the way, that Chekhov, himself a physician, seems to have attained. I take vitamins, get flu and Covid shots, and watch what I eat, but I try to steer clear of physicians. This tendency kicked in not long after my decades-long primary care physician retired. In his The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bill Bryson defines good health as the health enjoyed by someone who hasn’t had a physical lately. The ancients made this point more directly, advising bene caca et declina medicos (translation on request) . For a variety of reasons, physicians of the current day are fond of sending patients for a multiplicity of tests: bone density tests, colonoscopies, biopsies, X-rays of all sorts, CT scans, MRIs, stopping only at SATs. I am not keen to discover ailments that don’t bother me. At the age of eighty-seven, I figure I am playing with house money, and I have no wish to upset the house by prodding my health in search of imperfections any more than is absolutely necessary.

The older one gets, unless one’s life is lived in pain or deepest regret, the more fortunate one feels. Not always, not everyone, I suppose. “The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum,” said George Bernard Shaw, who lived to age ninety-four. Though the world seems to be in a hell of a shape just now, I nonetheless prefer to delay my exit for as long as I can. I like it here, continue to find much that is interesting and amusing, and have no wish to depart the planet.

Still, with advancing years I have found my interests narrowing. Not least among my waning interests is that in travel. I like my domestic routine too much to abandon it for foreign countries where the natives figure to be wearing Air Jordan shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, and cargo pants. Magazines that I once looked forward to, many of which I have written for in the past, no longer contain much that I find worth reading. A former moviegoer, I haven’t been to a movie theater in at least a decade. The high price of concert and opera tickets has driven me away. The supposedly great American playwrights—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee—have never seemed all that good to me, and I miss them not at all. If all this sounds like a complaint that the culture has deserted me, I don’t feel that it has. I can still listen to my beloved Mozart on discs, read Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Willa Cather, and the other great novelists, watch the splendid movies of earlier days on Turner Classics and HBO—live, in other words, on the culture of the past.

“Vho needs dis?” Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have remarked when presented with some new phenomena of the avant-garde or other work in the realm of art without obvious benefit. “Vho needs dis?” is a question that occurred to me more than once or twice as I wrote my autobiography. All I can say is that those who read my autobiography will read of the life of a man lucky enough to have devoted the better part of his days to fitting words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays and stories on a wide variety of topics. Now in his autobiography all the sentences and paragraphs are about his own life. He hopes that these sentences are well made, these paragraphs have a point, and together they attain to a respectable truth quotient, containing no falsehoods whatsoever. He hopes that, on these modest grounds at least, his autobiography qualifies as worth reading.

Joseph Epstein  is author of  Gallimaufry , a collection of essays and reviews.

Image by  Museum Rotterdam on Wikimedia Commons , licensed via Creative Commons . Image cropped. 

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my autobiography of my self

my autobiography of my self

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MY self: An autobiography of survival

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Kelley Kitley

MY self: An autobiography of survival Paperback – April 12, 2017

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  • Print length 202 pages
  • Language English
  • Publication date April 12, 2017
  • Dimensions 6 x 0.46 x 9 inches
  • ISBN-10 1544864817
  • ISBN-13 978-1544864815
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (April 12, 2017)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 202 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1544864817
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1544864815
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.7 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.46 x 9 inches
  • #12,101 in Women's Biographies

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my autobiography of my self

Kelley Kitley

Kelley Kitley, LCSW, is CEO and Founder of SERENDIPITOUS PSYCHOTHERAPY, LLC. She is a licensed clinical social worker in private practice and has treated patients in Santa Monica and Chicago for the past twelve years. An action oriented therapist, she believes the therapeutic process is a partnership and she works with clients using a holistic approach to achieve their mental health goals. While she predominantly uses positive psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help clients heal and become the best version of themselves, she has a eclectic array of experience and specialized training to draw upon.

Her areas of expertise include anxiety and panic disorder, agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. Kelley also works with patients in longer term treatment to work through, rape and sexual abuse traumas, eating disorders, substance abuse, loss and phase of life issues. Kelley is particularly effective working with women and their partners through pre- and post-natal anxiety and depression, and in the area of sexual dysfunction.

Kelley has been featured as an expert women's mental health expert in over 100 national publications, podcasts, radio, and tv including WSJ, Huffington Post, Shape, Self, Women's Health Magazine, Fitness Magazine columnist, NBC, NPR, and WGN.

******************

Kelley grew up as the eldest child in a chaotic household above the family tavern in a Chicago neighborhood with two charismatic alcoholic parents, four younger siblings; and a colorful extended family close by. As a teenager, after recovering from an eating disorder, she knew she wanted to be a therapist to help others heal from traumatic childhoods. Her experiences as a student at an all girl’s school were influential years in her life. Kelley’s opportunities from ages 15-18 provided her an outlet to develop competence, confidence, resiliency, and take initiative and responsibility for her own future inspite of her dysfunctional family dynamics. She immersed herself in service projects and developed passions for social justice and spirituality.

At 17, she earned the WGN Extra Effort Award for dedication to service, for riding her bike from Minnesota to Chicago to raise money for AIDS research, and for her work as a camp counselor for people with Muscular Dystrophy.

In college, after spending a month in Guatemala working in an orphanage through her university’s Campus Ministry Program, Kelley felt called to move to California to be an Americorps volunteer for City Year. She spent her “off-year” working with immigrant inner-city youth and their families developing programs for educational success. After completing the service year she earned a scholarship and studied abroad in Spain with hopes of becoming fluent in the Spanish language that she might better serve the populations she worked with. Kelley went on to studying at the University of Illinois at Chicago and earn a Bachelors and Masters degree in Social Work. Kelley was a caseworker in child welfare, traveled to El Salvador to build Solidarity, ran and coached marathons, and worked at her parents’ bar to pay cash for tuition to avoid student loans. She survived personal adversity when her parents divorced shortly after she first left for college, and again at age 22 when she experienced a random act of violence and a sexual assault which ultimately impacted her development as a woman, a person, and a professional counselor. Her capacity for resilience remained steady.

She married her husband in 2004 and moved to Santa Monica; again taking a leap of faith to try something new. In Southern California she was grateful for the experiences of living blocks from the beach and working 4 years at a Catholic High School as a counselor, religion and health teacher, starting her own family, and starting her first private practice. Three children later with a desire to be closer to the “village” to help raise her energetic children, she and her family moved back to Chicago.

Kelley specializes in women’s mental health motivated by her own personal struggles with substance abuse that began at age 12 and her postpartum anxiety after each of her four pregnancies. She’s committed to leaving a legacy of healthy family dynamics in her own nuclear family and in all the lives she impacts.

Her friends, family, and colleagues describe her as authentic, genuine, focused, motivated, inspiring, driven, compassionate, and empathic. She has a gift to “tell it like it is” in a gentle, non threatening way. Kelley seeks the privilege of sharing her energy and expertise through 'MY self' with national motivational speaking engagements at treatment facilities, media appearances, social media,-blogging, and clinical work.

Her autobiography is a story of adversity and trials in youth, lessons learned as life was lived courageously, and triumph and healing as an adult. The decades of turbulent years of navigating addiction in her self and her extended family inform the woman in recovery and the counselor she is today.

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my autobiography of my self

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50 Eye-Catching Autobiography Titles (+ How to Write Your Own)

POSTED ON Oct 12, 2023

Shannon Clark

Written by Shannon Clark

You’ve written your life story. 

You’ve laid your heart bare before the world

So, what’s the best title for your one-of-a-kind masterpiece?

“____________: An Autobiography”?

Seriously, unless you’re a household name, using “autobiography” as part of your title might not work in your favor, but not to worry. You don’t have to be famous to write an autobiography , but you do need a title that will grab a buyer's attention, so they know your book is worth a second look.

Book Title Generator

Don't like it?

The purpose of this article is to break down what makes a standout autobiography title and the process for creating your own. 

Need autobiography titles? Let's dive in!

The secret sauce for writing an amazing book title.

The process of creating an autobiography book title that gets noticed starts with a marketer's mindset.

Yes, it all boils down to strategic book positioning in the marketplace. Creativity is a big part of it, but that’s a small part of the bigger picture. After all, if your book doesn't get in front of the people who would be most likely to read it, you can't change lives with the content inside!

Unlike fiction books or other types of nonfiction books (e.g. business books or textbooks) where there’s a specific category or genre expectation, autobiographies play by their own set of rules—the more creative the better. 

How to think like a marketer when creating your title

If you are self-publishing your book, then you’re probably already aware that marketing is a key component of your book’s success, but what is marketing exactly? 

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. 

When marketing your book, knowing how to write a good book title matters, because, along with your cover, it’s the first thing a potential buyer sees (reads) before making a buying decision. A casual search for “autobiography” on Amazon pulled up over 700,000 results. This doesn’t mean that every book belongs in the category, but it’s still a lot of books.

You might be asking how you get your book to rise to the top of search results.

Start with a great title. 

Here are some best practices:

  • Make your title relevant – You can never go wrong with a title that reflects the theme of your book . This will clue buyers into what to expect. You can also go with a significant statement or quote drawn directly from your story. Clever titles also work, but try to stay away from the cheesy ones that confuse buyers.
  • Appeal to your ideal audience’s needs – Every book is not for everyone. Target a specific reader type when creating your title. For example, meteorologist and television personality Ginger Zee titled her book Natural Disasters. This title works well for her because her book’s content is about the unpredictable “storms” of life she has faced and she also covers storms in her reporting. 
  • Stay away from clickbait – Or anything that leads readers to believe your book is about one thing but it’s something else. This only frustrates readers and could potentially lead to bad reviews. 
  • Use a primary keyword in your title if it fits – First Gen by Alejandra Campoverdi and Cooked by Jeff Henderson include keyword(s) that are relevant to buyer searches. 
  • Invite the reader into your story – This can be done by asking a question like the autobiography title What Are You Doing Here? by Baroness Floella Benjamin. Or, create an image in their mind like The Ugly Cry by Danielle Henderson or The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish. 

Hint: Keep it short. According to Amazon, “Customers are more likely to skim past long titles (over 60 characters). There are exceptions to the rules. You’ll see some in the list that follows.

Don’t forget about writing a subtitle for your book . They are optional but a great way to add a splash of flavor. 

50 eye-catching autobiography titles that inspire

After an exhaustive search in the autobiography categories of the top online book retailers, I selected 50 incredible autobiography titles as a starting point for creating an amazing title for your autobiography. Note: Memoir titles listed under the autobiography category are included in the list.

Autobiography titles about celebrities

  • What Are You Doing Here? – Baronness Floella Benjamin
  • Tis Herself – Maureen O’Hara
  • F inding Me by Viola Davis
  • Not That Fancy: Simple Lessons on Living, Loving, Eating, and Dusting Off Your Boots By Reba McEntire
  • Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories by Kelly Ripa
  • Thicker than Water by Kerry Washington
  • We Were Dreamers by Simu Liu
  • Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today by Valerie Bertinelli
  • Just as I am by Cicely Tyson
  • A Promised Land by Barack Obama
  • Making It So by Patrick Stewart
  • Inside Out by Demi Moore
  • In Pieces by Sally Field
  • The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish
  • Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder by William Shatner
  • Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini
  • Look Out for the Little Guy! By Scott Lang
  • I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons by Kevin Hart, Neil Strauss
  • No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality by Michael J. Fox
  • Scenes from My Life by Michael K. Williams
  • The Way I Heard It by Mike Rowe
  • I Came as a Shadow – John Thompson

Autobiography titles about authors

  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings  by Maya Angelou
  • Lit by Mary Karr

Autobiography titles about family

  • The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
  • Mott Street by Ava Chin
  • The Girl in the Middle by Anais Granofsky
  • All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
  • The Ugly Cry by Danielle Henderson

Autobiography titles about immigration, culture, and race

  • Good Morning, Hope: A True Story of Refugee Twin Sisters and Their Triumph over War, Poverty, and Heartbreak by Argita Zalli, and Detina Zalli 
  • Negroland by Margo Jefferson
  • First Gen by Alejandra Campoverdi
  • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
  • Heart of Fire: An Immigrant Daughter’s Story – Mazie K. Hirono
  • The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clementine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil

Autobiography titles about beating the odds

  • Cooked by Jeff Henderson
  • The Pale-Faced Lie by David Crow
  • Thunder Dog: The True Story of a Blind Mann, His Guide Dog, and the Triumph of Trust by Michael Hingson and Susy Flory
  • When the Tears Dry by Meredith Hawkins
  • Reaching for the Moon by Katherine Johnson
  • 80 Percent Luck, 20 Percent Skill: My Life as a WWII Navy Ferry Pilot by Ralph T. Alshouse

Autobiography titles about faith

  • Like a River: Finding the Faith and Strength to Move Forward After Loss and Heartache by Granger Smith
  • The Barn by David Hill
  • All My Knotted-Up Life by Beth Moore

Autobiography titles about journalists, reporters, and media

  • Natural Disaster: I Cover Them. I am One by Ginger Zee
  • Going There by Katie Couric
  • Rough Draft by Kati Tur
  • The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day

Use a free tool to generate your own autobiography title

You obviously can't use these published autobiography titles for your own book – but you can use our free book title generator to come up with suggestions that you could use.

It's really easy to use, and instantly gives you an unlimited amount of working titles – or even final titles – to use for your book!

1. Select nonfiction for the book’s genre in the drop-down menu

my autobiography of my self

2. Fill in the details

For the next question, if you have a book description, type “yes” and add your description in the text box.

If you don’t have a description yet, answer “no” and fill out the questions. Eventually, you will need to write a book description , but this is often something our authors do after they complete their manuscript .

Incredible Biography Titles - Book Title Generator Description Question Section

3. Click “generate”

That's it! Get ready for some unique autobiography book title suggestions. Remember, if you don't like the one that you see, you can continue to generate as many as you'd like.

Final thoughts

Your autobiography title can be the difference between someone scrolling past your book on Amazon or stopping to read a sample. Whatever title you choose, remember that it’s just as much about you as your reader. Make them want to read your story by giving them something unique that piques their interest. 

Are you ready to take the next steps with your autobiography? We have a professional publishing team ready to guide you through the book development process. 

Interested in self-publishing? Click below to find out more.

FREE BOOK OUTLINE TEMPLATE

100% Customizable For Your Manuscript.

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Author Lucy Sante photographed at her home in upstate New York for the Observer New Review by Mike McGregor, March 2024.

‘I was having a much better time as a girl in that parallel life’: how an app sparked a late-life gender transition

In an extract from her memoir, Lucy Sante reveals how she lived with the feeling of being the wrong gender into her 60s, when a smartphone app gave her the inspiration to take action

  • ‘This secret that crippled me for 50 years has been lifted’: read a Q&A with Lucy Sante here

Between 28 February and 1 March 2021, I sent the following text as an email attachment to around 30 people I considered my closest friends. The subject line was : “A bombshell.” I smirked at the unintentional pun and wondered whether anyone else would. It was simply titled: “Lucy.”

T he dam burst on 16 February, when I downloaded FaceApp, for a laugh. I had tried the application a few years earlier, but something had gone wrong and it had returned a badly botched image. But I had a new phone, and I was curious. The gender‐swapping feature was the whole point for me, and the first picture I passed through it was the one I had tried before. This time it gave me a full‐face portrait of a woman in midlife: strong, healthy, clean‐living. She also had lovely flowing chestnut hair and a very subtle makeup job. And her face was mine. No question about it – nose, mouth, eyes, brow, chin. She was me. When I saw her, I felt something liquefy in the core of my body. I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch. I guessed that I had at last met my reckoning.

Very soon I was feeding every portrait and snapshot and ID‐card picture I possessed of myself into the magic gender portal. The first archival picture I tried, contemporaneous with my first memory of staring into a mirror and arranging my hair and expression to look like a girl, was an anxious, awkward studio portrait of a tween. The transformed result was a revelation: a happy little girl. Apart from her long black hair, very little had been done to transform Luc into Lucy; the biggest difference was how much more relaxed she looked.

And so it generally went – I was having a much better time as a girl in that parallel life. I passed every era through the machine, experiencing one shock of recognition after another: that’s exactly who I would have been. The app weirdly seemed to guess what my hairstyle and fashion choices would have been in those years. And the less altered the images were, the deeper they plunged a dagger into my heart. That could have been me! Fifty years were under water, and I’d never get them back.

My high school graduation portrait became an impossibly delicate almond‐eyed fawn (age 17 was indeed the summit of my beauty, which is probably why my male incubus immediately grew a beard). Ten or 12 years later (there are regrettably few photos of me in my 20s; I’ve always been camera-shy), I am a Lower East Side post-punk radical lesbian feminist with a Dutch‐boy bob and a pout. Here I am at a Sports Illustrated junket in Arizona, age 33, looking demure in a white sweater over a red polka‐dot dress.

There are many reasons why I repressed my lifelong desire to be a woman. It was, first of all, impossible. My parents would have called a priest and had me committed to some monastery. And the culture was far from prepared, of course. I knew about Christine Jorgensen [the first person widely known in the US for having gender reassignment therapy] when I was fairly young, but she seemed to be an isolated case. Mostly, what you came across were vile jokes from Las Vegas comedians and the occasional titillating tabloid story. I kept searching for images or stories of girls like me, without much luck.

Over the years I consumed an impressive amount of material on transgender matters, from clinical studies to personal accounts to journalistic exposés to porn. Not much of the porn, though; it grossed me out. I researched the subject as deeply as I did any of my books, but my notes all had to be kept in my head.

I immediately disposed of all materials, because I was terrified of being seen. Until browsers made anonymous searching possible, I wiped the search memory on my computer every day. Why, you may ask, did I feel it necessary to go to such lengths? The short answer is because my mother regularly raided my room, reading anything in my handwriting and vetting all printed matter for anything that might even remotely allude to sex. I extended that caution to my friends, most of whom would surely have been sympathetic, because of the notion I long possessed that women would be disgusted and repelled by my transgender identity. Where did I get that one? It may be because until I was in my late teens I didn’t know many women, as an only child of isolated immigrants, and I didn’t have a female friend until I was 17.

Needless to say, I was awful at sex. I did not know how to act like a man in bed. I wanted to see myself as a woman in the act of love, but I also had to repress the desire, while simultaneously trying earnestly to please my partner (because I almost never slept with anyone I didn’t love, at least at first).

I was not at all attracted to men, and I spent enough time in gay environs in the 70s to be sure of that. At puberty and afterwards I was uncertain how to construct a masculine identity. I hated sports and dick jokes and beer‐chugging and the way men talked about women; my idea of hell was an evening with a bunch of guys. Over the years, from force of necessity, I created a male persona that was saturnine, cerebral, a bit remote, a bit owlish, possibly “quirky”, coming very close to asexual despite my best intentions.

Another reason for my repression was my sense that if I changed my gender it would obliterate every other thing I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to be a significant writer, and I did not want to be stuffed into a category. If I were transgender that fact would be the only thing anyone knew about me. Over the years, transgender people became gradually more visible in the media, and the coverage became a little bit less snide. I lived in New York City, so I saw transgender people often. I was close for a while to the photographer Nan Goldin , who would have been certain to understand my story, but I never breathed a word.

I would hear rumours that this or that person “dressed up” and I would be forever ill at ease in their presence as a result – from envy, of course. My office in the late 80s and early 90s was a block from Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, but I never so much as peeked in at Wigstock, the annual Labour Day drag festival that took place there. It was also half a block from the Pyramid Club – the centre of New York’s drag scene at the time – but I never went there, either. In those days the club had a black menu board on the sidewalk outside that read “Drink and be Mary”. I trembled every time I passed it.

I was terrified of finding myself confronted by what I am confronting now. I wanted with every particle of my being to be a woman, and that thought was pasted to my windshield, and yet I looked through it, having trained myself to do so. Now that the floodgates have opened I am consumed by the thought in a new way. When I uploaded my first picture to FaceApp I felt liquid and melting in the core of my body. Now I feel a column of fire.

That should not, however, imply a steely resolve. The idea of transitioning is endlessly seductive and endlessly terrifying. I take at least one selfie every day and transform it, and it feels as though the pictures are becoming ever-more plausible. With a bit of makeup, a course of oestrogen, and a really nice wig I could look exactly like that, maybe. But will the fact that I can’t grow my own hair make me feel like a fake for ever? And I am soon to turn 67. What if I look like a grotesque? Or merely pathetic?

It’s a vast decision, with the power to affect every aspect of my life. Would I inadvertently destroy important things in my life as a consequence? I keep wanting to be forced to transition by some circumstance, maybe my therapist telling me that it is crucial for my sanity. Anyway, I’m starting here, by writing it down – something I’ve never done before – and by sending it to a very few people whom I trust and who I think will understand. My name is Lucy Marie Sante, only one letter added to my deadname. 26 February 2021

Luc Sante photographed in New York.

T hat was written from within a whirlwind. I am astonished anew every time I consider the chronology. The first FaceApp manifestation occurred on 16 February. Ten days later I came out to my therapist, Dr G, who didn’t blink, but merely said she thought transitioning made sense and was a good idea. The following evening, after I’d written the letter, I came out to my partner, Mimi, which was the single most difficult thing of them all, and the day after that I came out to my son, Raphael. The fortification of secrets I’d spent nearly 60 years building and reinforcing had crumbled to dust in a little over a week.

The reaction was immediate: emails, phone calls, texts. Everyone was nice, although there was a range. There was “unexpected but not surprising” and “surprised but not surprised” and “shocking but not” at one end, and at the other were a few people who reacted as if they’d been hit by a train while they were looking the other way. Those tended mainly to be guys who over the course of many years’ friendship had come to think of me as a sort of mirror or alter ego, so re‐evaluating me meant having to re-evaluate themselves. Everybody on the “not surprised” end was female, as were the three persons who wrote to say they had happy tears in their eyes as they read my letter.

I was prepared for some kind of pushback, softly and judiciously expressed, of course, but it never really came, then or later. Most responses were yay, go for it, you do you.

So now here I am, just shy of 18 months of hormone replacement therapy at this writing. I am legally Lucy, certified female, out to every single person in my life, however remote. I’m totally normal, the same person as ever, while also quite different. I’m socially at ease as never before. I’ve been stared at plenty, but have faced zero aggression, because I don’t represent a threat: I’m old, white, and reasonably privileged.

I can honestly say that I’m happy, in a way I’ve never been before. I am finally inhabiting myself, the shadow me once hidden under the floorboards. I actually feel free of the neuroses that plagued me for ever. I can and will of course be sad, for many reasons, but depression is at least at bay for now. I naturally wish I could have transitioned in my teens, or my 20s, or any age earlier than mine, but there are compensations: being left in peace, being able to nestle my changes into a life that was already structured, having outlived all the censorious elders. I genuinely like who I am – I’m turning out better than I’d imagined, or feared.

I’m more conscious of others and I find it far easier to bring up emotional matters with them. Often, in varied circumstances, I experience a kind of serenity, a general rightness with the world. I don’t hate myself any more, am no longer apologetic for my very existence. I walk with pride. I feel grateful to whatever force cracked my egg before it was too late. I was saved from drowning.

  • Autobiography and memoir
  • The Observer
  • Transgender
  • LGBTQ+ rights

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8 Things You Might Not Know About Oscar Nominee Da'Vine Joy Randolph

The 37-year-old actor, nominated for a 2024 Academy Award for her role in The Holdovers, has had a nontraditional path to stardom.

davine joy randolph smiling at a camera and waving as she holds a screen actors guild trophy in her other hand

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The 37-year-old has already won trophies at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild awards for her supporting role as Mary Lamb in the 2023 holiday flick, starring Paul Giamatti. She can win the biggest honor of all on Sunday during the 96th Academy Awards : the 2024 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

Although The Holdovers has put Randolph in the public eye in a major way, the Pennsylvania native has steadily absorbed more of the spotlight during her decade-long-plus career. Here are a few things you might not know about Randolph—one of Biography ’s People You’ll Know in 2024 —ahead of what could be her biggest moment yet.

She is a trained opera singer

Randolph, who was born on May 21, 1986, in Philadelphia, had no dreams of acting growing up. “I knew that I wanted to be of service to people in some way, shape or form, and do something that made people feel good or better,” she told W magazine in March 2022.

She was, however, smitten with Motown, R&B, and—eventually—classical music. When she was around 16 years old, Randolph was inspired to pursue a musical career after watching an all-Black ensemble perform at a Christmas recital. “I went up to the woman who impressed me the most and said, ‘You gotta teach me how to do crazy riffs, sing really loud and really long,’” she said .

Randolph started taking voice lessons, where she listened to singers like Maria Callas and Leontyne Price, and found opera to be “the ultimate art form.” She decided to study classical vocal performance at Temple University.

Randolph began taking acting seriously in college

At Temple, Randolph was heavily involved in musical theater , participating in productions of Into the Woods , Ma Rainey ’s Black Bottom , Our Lady of 121st Street , and Aida , though her focus was still primarily on music. But one day while she was copying music, she heard screaming and went to check it out. “I peeked into this door and it was an acting class,” she said . “I stood and watched; it sounds so cliché, but it was this moment of recognizing something within myself.”

Randolph decided to pivot into an acting major her senior year, graduating with a degree in Theater, Film, and Media Arts. She then attended Yale University, earning her master’s degree in 2011, and was ready to embark on her career.

She was nominated for a Tony

da'vine joy randolph walks across a stage while lit in a spotlight, she wears a pink cheetah patterned skirt suit with ruffles, a beaded necklace and a microphone, she smiles as people sit in the foreground facing her

After departing Yale, Randolph hired an agent and traveled to Los Angeles to audition for a series of television pilots. But, her big break actually came back on the theater stage. Randolph earned the part of Oda Mae Brown for the 2012 Broadway run of Ghost the Musical , based on the 1990 film starring Patrick Swayze , Demi Moore , and Whoopi Goldberg .

“They were looking for someone 40 or 45 [years old], so everything on paper was no, no, and no,” she told Broadway Buzz . But the much younger Randolph fit into the role just fine and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

Al Pacino gave her important career advice

al pacino looking to his left and smiling as he speaks to a panel reporter

One of the first major Hollywood stars to support Randolph in her acting journey was Oscar- and Tony Award–winner Al Pacino , whom she met in a Manhattan café during her Ghost run.

After losing her voice and struggling to fully regain it, Randolph said she felt lost and depressed when Pacino grabbed her attention and invited her to sit down at his table. After listening to a frustrated Randolph, he offered words of encouragement. “I see you, and you are exactly where you need to be. Keep climbing the ladder,” she recalled him saying in a 2019 Instagram post.

Randolph did just that, earning her first movie role in 2013’s Mother of George and soon appearing in TV shows like Selfie (2014), This Is Us (2016), and Empire (2017-18).

She was starstruck on the set of Dolemite Is My Name

Randolph’s breakthrough movie role came in 2019, when she portrayed Lady Reed in Netflix’s Dolemite Is My Name . The movie, a biographical comedy about filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore, starred Eddie Murphy in the lead role—something Randolph wasn’t aware of at her audition.

“It was a blessing in disguise because if I would have known sooner, I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” she told Vanity Fair . Randolph allowed herself two hours to be starstruck by the actor and comedian, then decided, “I’m going to get to work.”

She was “overjoyed” at The Holdovers script

paul giamatti davine joy randolph and alexander payne all standing side by side

Before The Holdovers , Randolph had small parts in the animated movie Trolls World Tour (2021) and the 2022 comedy The Lost City . In Mary Lamb, she found the type of multifaceted character she’d been waiting for. “I’ve felt like I had to fight for fully realized characters with complexities or even start writing or producing myself,” she told Variety . “I was so overjoyed to read this character, someone who was really struggling, but also trying to persevere in spite of her situation.”

Randolph even compared the script for the film—about a teacher, student, and cafeteria manager stuck at a New England boarding school during Christmas break—to something written by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov .

Watch The Holdovers on Amazon Prime Video or Peacock

Randolph doesn’t like watching herself onscreen

Randolph has seen her performance in The Holdovers only once and not of her own accord. She told The New York Times she was required to watch the film in order to do press requests, but that she was “very uncomfortable” the entire time. “I was quiet the whole rest of the day, I felt so naked,” she said.

Randolph says she doesn’t watch her performances because she trusts her process as an actor. “If I start watching myself, I know myself enough to know I’m going to start judging myself. I love that I can actually work from a judgment-free zone. Most actors can’t, so I’m preserving it,” she explained.

She has two major upcoming movies

After showing off her full dramatic range in The Holdovers , Randolph has signed onto upcoming projects in distinct genres. In August 2022, Deadline reported Randolph was cast in the action-thriller Shadow Force , also starring Kerry Washington and Omar Sy. A year later, the outlet revealed she joined the Rebel Wilson –led comedy Bride Hard . Neither film has a release date yet, though Deadline reports Bride Hard has wrapped production.

Watch the 2024 Academy Awards on March 10

See if Randolph can take home her biggest acting prize yet at the 96th Academy Awards, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel , on March 10. Coverage begins on ABC at 6:30 p.m. ET before the ceremony starts at 7 p.m. Also competing for the Best Supporting Actress trophy are Emily Blunt , Danielle Brooks, America Ferrera, and Jodie Foster .

Headshot of Tyler Piccotti

Tyler Piccotti joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University, an avid sports fan, a frequent moviegoer, and trivia buff.

Academy Awards

martin scorsese smiles at the camera, he wears a cream suit jacket with a bright blue collared shirt unbuttoned at the neck

Greta Gerwig

cillian murphy posing for a photograph at a premiere event

Cillian Murphy

kate hudson smiling and looking to her right for a photograph

Kate Hudson

brendan fraser smiles at the camera, he wears a gray suit jacket and purple collared shirt that is unbuttoned, behind him is a blurred out blue background

Brendan Fraser

nicolas cage at renfield premiere

Nicolas Cage

jamie lee curtis

Jamie Lee Curtis

topshot us entertainment film award oscars pressroom

Michelle Yeoh

the cast and production crew of oppenheimer standing together for a photo at the films premiere

The 2024 Oscar Nominations in Major Categories

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Austin Butler

adele at the the brit awards 2022 red carpet arrivals

Lily Gladstone

my autobiography of my self

The ache of weaning myself off my smartphone

First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide .

my autobiography of my self

Illustration by Juliana Neufeld

An acquaintance recently told a story about her small daughter.

She said to her toddler, “Hey, call me,” holding up a thumb and baby finger in the classic gesture for “telephone.”

The tiny tot cocked her head quizzically, and responded by holding her small hand palm up, flat against the side of her face. The child had no experience with a landline – and certainly not with a rotary dial – and the cellphone was so firmly ensconced in her lexicon that she’d developed her own shorthand.

It was this insight, together with a few other little nudges, that had me questioning my own dependence on my smartphone.

Even if you haven’t read Camp Zero , Michelle Min Sterling’s dystopian novel set in a future where citizens numb their pain and deny their crushing reality with a tiny implant known as a “Flick,” well … you probably get the picture.

I’m not alone in pondering the harms of all this screen time.

In his excellent book, On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft , Stephen King advises aspiring novelists: “Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.” Here, he was referring to succumbing to the powers of television, but his assertion could equally apply to our pocket-computers.

To wean myself off my smartphone’s wiles, I settled on a conscious uncoupling à la Gwyneth Paltrow: an amicable separation with appropriate contact as required.

A clean break wasn’t a reasonable solution for something as integral to my daily life as a refrigerator or washing machine. Sure, people made do without those conveniences. But just as I am unwilling to keep my ice cream in the snow, or beat my linens on rocks, I’m also loath to return to the era of my hot pink Razr flip phone, hunting and pecking out texts, and receiving pixilated images the size of my thumb nail. (What even is that?)

My self-imposed parameters included permission to text, talk and check the news (in a measured and moderated manner, not at all times during the day.) I could Google specific queries, let’s say about a lump behind my ear, or a power outage, and I could purchase an item (a book, for example) that I had already settled on buying.

On the other hand, I could not doom scroll or fall down curated advertising rabbit holes. Online window shopping was verboten; ditto scanning celebrity gossip sites. But my No. 1 rule was even simpler: Do not pick up the phone as a matter of reflex, to banish boredom or dull nascent anxiety. For the short term, at least, Facebook and LinkedIn were also off limits. I don’t use any other networks.

Full disclosure, I’ve never been much of a poster or commenter, but I’ve watched plenty of videos about the application of the perfect foundation, hemmed and hawed about purchasing yet another luxe loungewear item, and taken disproportionate interest in whether Bâton Rouge chicken tenders or Mr. Pretzel Bites (salted, not cinnamon) are back in stock at my local Costco .

If I could turn back time and dedicate those minutes, nay hours , to something meaningful, I might have, oh, I don’t know, finally finished my novel, or learned how to play violin.

If our time is truly our most valuable commodity, then maybe we should marvel at how willingly we while it away. The result of my screen time cleanse (minus the cayenne pepper-lemon water) has been quite interesting.

I’ve read that when smokers kick the habit, their lungs begin to repair themselves almost right away. It may also be true of the synapses of our brains, which have been dulled by hours of letting our habits, proclivities and preferences be mined as data. Once they are awoken from their slumber, they slowly stretch, and then, when fully awake, begin to pop and fizz with unbridled excitement.

In just a few days of deliberate (almost) abstinence, I’ve read two books – if you love a good essay collection, they don’t get any better than Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days ; I’ve incorporated 20 minutes of evening stretching into my nighttime routine; and I’ve had more ideas for writing projects in the last week than I had in the preceding year.

Coincidence? Maybe.

But what’s even more interesting, I’ve also had more deliberate and positive interactions with strangers, whether it’s doling out a compliment, laughing at a shared absurdity, or taking an extra few moments to hold open a door.

We’ve given the little computers in our hands far more of our time and attention than they deserve. They’ve become crutches and catchalls, given us exits and excuses. But the funny thing is, when we put them down, we’ll inevitably find other ways to fill our time.

And we may just discover a renewed enjoyment of old pleasures, or entirely new ones, that don’t dull our senses and numb our brains, but reanimate and reinvigorate us in ways we’d almost – but not quite – forgotten.

Suzanne Westover lives in Ottawa.

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'All by Myself' singer Eric Carmen dies at 74

The news was confirmed in a post on his website.

Eric Carmen, the singer/songwriter known for hits like "Hungry Eyes" and "All By Myself," has died, his wife Amy announced on his official website. Carmen was 74.

"It is with tremendous sadness that we share the heartbreaking news of the passing of Eric Carmen," she wrote . "Our sweet, loving and talented Eric passed away in his sleep, over the weekend. It brought him great joy to know, that for decades, his music touched so many and will be his lasting legacy. Please respect the family’s privacy as we mourn our enormous loss."

Amy Carmen then quoted her husband’s song "Love Is All That Matters," ending the post with, "Love Is All That Matters...Faithful and Forever."

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Ohio native Carmen first had success as the lead singer of the power-pop band Raspberries, scoring hits like "Go All the Way," "Let's Pretend," "I Wanna Be With You" and "Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)."

He began a solo career in late 1975, and his first two solo singles were big hits in 1976: "All By Myself" and "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again."

American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and keyboardist Eric Carmen, former member of The Raspberries, performs at Alex Cooley's Electric Ballroom on November 10, 1975 in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. (Photo by Tom Hill/WireImage)

During that time, Carmen's songs began to be recorded by other artists, including Shaun Cassidy, who reached the top 10 with Carmen's compositions "Hey Deanie" and "That's Rock and Roll." Carmen continued to chart singles as an artist himself but took a break from the music industry in 1980.

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After co-writing the 1984 “Footloose” soundtrack smash "Almost Paradise" -- recorded by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson -- Carmen reemerged in 1985 with a comeback hit, "I Wanna Hear It From Your Lips." But it was the 1987 movie “Dirty Dancing” that really brought him back to the fore: His contribution to the soundtrack – "Hungry Eyes" – was a top 10 hit, and he reached the top five with 1988's "Make Me Lose Control."

In 2000, Carmen toured as part of Ringo Starr's All Starr Band. In 2013, he released his first new song in 15 years, "Brand New Year," part of a 2014 best-of compilation.

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Eric Carmen, Raspberries Frontman and ‘All by Myself’ Singer, Dies at 74

He sang on the power-pop pioneers’ 1972 breakout hit, “Go All the Way,” before launching a successful solo career as a soft-rock crooner.

A man with 1970s-styled hair sings into a microphone. He is wearing an unbuttoned blue shirt with a gold chain.

By Ron DePasquale and Alex Williams

Eric Carmen, whose plaintive vocals soared above the crunching guitars of the 1970s power-pop pioneers the Raspberries on hits like “Go All the Way,” and whose soft-rock crooning later as a solo artist propelled anthems like “All by Myself” and “Hungry Eyes,” has died. He was 74.

His death was announced on his website by his wife, Amy Carmen. She did not give a cause or specify where he died, saying only that he died “in his sleep, over the weekend.”

The Raspberries formed in Cleveland in 1970. With the preternaturally melodic Mr. Carmen churning out hits and serving as frontman, the band represented a throwback of sorts, in terms of both sound and image.

Emerging at a time when FM radio playlists tilted toward the thundering blues-rock of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple; the orchestral pomp of progressive rock bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and the glittery glam rock of T. Rex and David Bowie, the Raspberries recalled the intricate songcraft and lush melodies of the mid-’60s pop masters.

“I had spent my youth with my head between two stereo speakers listening to the Byrds and the Beatles and later on the Beach Boys,” Mr. Carmen said in a 1991 interview published on his personal website.

Even more retro was the band’s look: They initially wore matching suits — a concept that had seemingly gone out of fashion with Herman’s Hermits, although in their case the suits looked more like harbingers of John Travolta’s discowear from “Saturday Night Fever.”

To Mr. Carmen, the relatively square look was a cheeky way to stand out in the landscape of 1970s rock. “Almost every band had hair down to their waist and beards and ripped jeans and they looked like a bunch of hippies, and I wanted to get as far away from that as I could,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Observer.

It all worked. The band burst onto the rock scene in 1972 with its debut album, titled simply “Raspberries,” which included a raspberry-scented scratch-and-sniff sticker, a hint of the sugary pop hooks contained within.

The album’s biggest hit, “Go All the Way,” contained lyrics about an implicitly young couple moving haltingly toward intercourse, which Mr. Carmen considered riskily suggestive for the pop charts of the time. “Either it’ll get banned because it’s dirty, then maybe people will buy the album to check it out,” he recalled thinking, “or if it ever gets on the radio, I think it’ll just be a hit based on the title alone.”

The song was a hit, all right, climbing to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1972. It became “the definitive power pop song of all time,” as Dave Swanson wrote on the site Ultimate Classic Rock in a 2017 appraisal. Power pop, pioneered by the early Who and others, was an emerging style that grafted bright 1960s-era vocal harmonies onto the driving guitar riffs of the ’70s.

“‘Go All the Way’ was a perfect melding of Beach Boys, Beatles and Small Faces, all delivered with a Who-like attack,” Mr. Swanson wrote. “Right here is where power pop was born.”

One of Mr. Carmen’s idols apparently approved of the band: John Lennon was photographed around that time wearing a Raspberries shirt. The band’s influence would only grow over the years, with acts as diverse as Cheap Trick, Kiss and Nirvana citing the Raspberries as an influence.

The Raspberries’ second album, “Fresh,” also released in 1972, would be their highest-charting, reaching No. 36. It featured two Top 40 hits, “I Wanna Be With You” and “Let’s Pretend.”

The Raspberries broke up in 1975, but Mr. Carmen’s time on the charts was far from over.

Eric Howard Carmen was born on Aug. 11, 1949, in Cleveland to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia and grew up in Lyndhurst, an eastern suburb of the city. Showing a keen interest in music early on, he was studying violin with his aunt Muriel Carmen, a member of the Cleveland Orchestra, by age 6. By 11 he was playing piano and writing his own songs.

His musical destiny changed forever with the arrival of Beatlemania when he was in his midteens. “After seeing the Beatles film ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’” he later said, “I dropped everything and immediately decided I wanted to do that!”

Within months, Mr. Carmen had taught himself to bang out chords on a guitar, and he spent the next few years bouncing from band to band. While a student at John Carroll University in suburban Cleveland, he joined a popular local band called Cyrus Erie, which included the future Raspberries guitarist Wally Bryson and opened for major acts like Who and the Byrds.

Mr. Carmen and Mr. Bryson eventually joined forces with the guitarist and bassist Dave Smalley and the drummer Jim Bonfanti, veterans of another prominent local band, the Choir, to form the Raspberries.

When that band’s run finally ended, Mr. Carmen went solo with the intent of showing off his full range as a songwriter and performer.

“Unshackled from having to write for three specific guys and myself, my brain just kind of opened up,” he told The Observer. “Also, I didn’t want to make a record that sounded just like the Raspberries, because I thought, Jesus, everybody will go, ‘Oh, here he goes again, he’s just repeating what he already did.’”

He clearly accomplished that with “All by Myself,” a lush if lachrymose ballad from his first solo album, released in 1975, that was, as he put it, “certainly as far away from ‘Go All the Way’ as you could get.” The song soared to No. 2 on the Hot 100 and was eventually hailed as a soft-rock classic.

The follow-up single, “ Never Gonna Fall in Love Again, ” with its nods to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, made it to No. 11.

In the 1980s, two of his biggest hits came from soundtracks. For “Footloose” (1984), he wrote (with Dean Pitchford) “Almost Paradise,” which was recorded by Mike Reno of Loverboy and Ann Wilson of Heart; for “Dirty Dancing (1987), he sang “Hungry Eyes” (written by John DeNicola and Franke Previte), which became an MTV staple . Another of his songs, “Make Me Lose Control,” was a No. 3 single in 1988.

Mr. Carmen’s songs would be covered by artists as varied as Shaun Cassidy ( “That’s Rock ’n’ Roll” ), Celine Dion ( “All by Myself” ) and Mr. Travolta ( “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” ). In 1989, he began touring with Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band.

The Raspberries reunited in 2004. A show from that tour was featured on a 28-song live album, “Raspberries Pop Art Live ,” released in 2017. The album’s liner notes were written by the filmmaker and former rock journalist Cameron Crowe, who showcased “Go All the Way” in his 2000 movie, “Almost Famous.”

Complete information about Mr. Carmen’s survivors was not immediately available.

Late in his career, Mr. Carmen was sanguine about the impact of the Raspberries.

“Rock critics got it and 16-year-old girls got it, but you know, the 18-year-old guy who liked Megadeth was never going to like the same record his sister did,” he said in the 2017 interview, before recounting the first time he met Bruce Springsteen.

“I walked in his dressing room before a show and he was writing out the set list, and we both looked at each other for a couple of minutes — I was very uncomfortable being on the fan end, so I felt a little stupid. But Bruce looked at me and he goes, ‘You know, while I was writing ‘The River,’ all I listened to was Woody Guthrie and the Raspberries’ greatest hits.’”

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the song “Go All the Way.” It was not written from the point of view of a young woman.

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly at one point to the song “All by Myself.” As noted elsewhere, it was released in 1975; it is not a “1980s anthem.”

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated who wrote the song “Hungry Eyes,” which was a hit for Mr. Carmen in 1987. It was written by John DeNicola and Franke Previte, not by Mr. Carmen. The earlier version also misstated the name of the Raspberries’ debut album. It was “Raspberries,” not “The Raspberries.”

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