Writing an autobiography is a dream for many people.
It’s a way to gather together your life events and make meaning from them.
A way to leave a legacy behind for those you love.
A way to pass on your experiences and life lessons to others.
Before putting pen to paper, it’s a good idea to learn the basics of autobiography writing. In this article, I’ll set out 12 steps to help you write a compelling autobiography.
How to Start an Autobiography
Sitting down to write your autobiography can be an overwhelming experience.
So much so that it’s common for new writers to decide the only way they’ll achieve their goal is if they just start writing at page one, without a plan, and see what happens.
And that’s not always a bad idea: it works for some writers.
But you may find you get stuck half-way through.
Or you may even get stumped for ideas after the first page.
Or, you may finish the draft but find it rambling and unstructured as you read through.
What you don’t want is to end up hiding your draft away in a drawer, for it never again to see the light of day.
Let’s look at the steps you can take to prevent this from happening. After all, your story deserves to be shared.
Step One: Should You Write an Autobiography?
Before writing an autobiography, decide if an autobiography is the correct format for you. Ask yourself:
Question One: Are you writing an autobiography primarily in order to make money?
If you’re famous, your autobiography might sell well.
If you’re not famous, be warned: it’s very hard to sell well in this genre without a degree of fame, or without having achieved something extraordinary. You might be better off writing a memoir, or a novel about your life (auto-fiction).
If you’re not writing an autobiography to make money, but because you have a story you’d like to impart to others, that’s great.
If you’re not famous or highly successful in your field, you’ll probably need to look at self-publishing your autobiography. This allows you to give your book to family and friends, and, if you invest in marketing and advertising, perhaps to reach a wider audience of interested readers.
Question Two: Do you want to write about your entire life up until the present day, in a relatively chronological order?
- If yes, great! Autobiography is the right genre choice for you.
- If no, you might actually be wanting to write a memoir.
Question Three: Do you want to relay the truth?
- If yes, great! An autobiography should deal with true events.
- If no, consider writing an auto-fiction book or a novel instead.
Step Two: What Story Are You Telling?
This is important.
One can easily assume all that’s needed is to set out your life events in correct order with dates and events, and then your autobiography will come together.
This would be a mistake.
Although an autobiography is a work of non-fiction, a well-written one will still tell an effective story. The overall book should contain a story arc, and individual chapters and scenes should also tell cohesive stories.
Firstly, consider: which aspects of your life will most engage readers’ interest?
Then, think about the main theme or themes of your story.
To do this, think about the times in your life when you’ve most changed or grown, especially if these developments arose from times of adversity. How did these changes lead you towards your achievements? Or alternatively, how did your failures to learn important lessons lead to further struggles?
Step Three: Read Other Autobiographies
Once you’ve an idea of what story you want to tell about your life, you can learn a huge amount from reading other people’s stories.
Read plenty of autobiographies, looking at how these writers structure their life stories, how they convey feelings and emotions to their readers, how they develop their authorial voice, and so on.
Explore what type of writing you like as a reader, and examine how the autobiography writers you love tell their stories.
Step Four: Research Your Life
No-one has a perfect memory. You can learn a lot from going through old photographs, records, letters, diaries, e-mails, possessions and so on, using them for reminders of who you were all those years ago. How have you changed since then?
It’s interesting to examine the story of your life from the perspective of others in your life. Consider interviewing your friends and family to see what they remember of your life story, how they saw you then, versus how they perceive you now.
Another interesting avenue can be listening to the music you loved at different life stages, re-connecting with favoured scents, clothes, foods and possessions from different times of your life.
Try to write down dates and chronologies of events correctly. And think about how you will portray other people in your life as you write. Will you need to get their consent to write about them? Will you risk causing severe offence, or even worse, might someone take legal action against you?
It’s worth considering all this now, before you start writing.
Step Five: Draft an Outline
Even though this is your story, if you want people to enjoy reading it, you need to think about what aspects of your life will most engage readers.
That means you need to consider bringing out story elements such as pacing, tension, conflict and goals within your narrative.
Whilst it’s traditional to write your autobiography in chronological order, to draft a narrative in such a way that readers will actually enjoy reading it, you can’t simply give every event in your life the page-space you feel like giving it.
To tell your life story in an engaging way, I recommend first gaining a strong understanding of story structure.
One of the simplest, most enduring methods of story structuring is the Three Act Structure. This is the structure we teach at Fictionary. I’ll go into this in more depth below at Step Eight.
A great way to gain in-depth understanding of how to outline your story is to take Fictionary’s online course in Outlining Your Novel.
This course is available for free to Fictionary subscribers, and will help you create a workable outline for telling your life story.
Once you’ve prepared your outline, you’re ready to start writing your autobiography.
In the next steps, we’ll look at how to turn your outline into a book.
How to Write an Autobiography about Yourself
Step Six: Plan Your Scenes
Since autobiographies are generally told in chronological order, it’s logical to start writing at the beginning, and this works well for many writers.
For others, it may help to start writing at a different point in the story, especially if there’s a key scene or scenes you want to structure your story around.
It can also help prevent you from getting stuck at that dreaded first-line. We all know first lines should constitute engaging hooks, and sometimes the determination to craft the perfect opening sentence can prevent us making headway into the story.
If you feel inspired to start writing with your Inciting Incident scene, or your Story Middle, or with the lesson you learned at your Dark Night of the Soul/ Plot Point Two, or the Story Climax, then start writing there!
The important thing at this point is to get started, keeping in mind your key themes and what it is that you want to say with your story.
Don’t waste time with scenes that do nothing to promote your story conclusion. We don’t need to know that you had a great time in your first year of school – unless this experience bears particular relevance to your life.
Step Seven: Write Immersively
You want your writing to engage your reader at once. While there’s no simple formula to make you a good writer, certain storytelling elements can help.
- Hooks should grab a reader’s interest and encourage them to keep reading your book.
- Sensory writing (using sight, sound, touch, taste and smell) can help your reader feel immersed in your story world.
- Bringing out your feelings – both past and present – in your writing (without making it melodramatic) can also help readers feel engaged with your story.
- Taking your reader deep inside your thoughts also helps readers connect with you.
Step Eight: Carry out a Structural Edit
Writing a first draft is a huge achievement. At this stage, you should feel justifiably proud of yourself for pulling this off.
Congratulate yourself. Celebrate.
Then get down to work.
First drafts are rarely masterpieces, and chances are, you’ll need to carry out a substantial structural edit.
This means looking at a wide-lens view of your narrative, not just at the prose on a sentence-by-sentence level.
A structural edit involves examining how well the scenes and chapters of your narrative work together:
- Have you chosen the best events to make up the key scenes in your narrative?
- Do all your scenes/ chapters follow on well from each other?
- Does your story arc meet the three-act structure, and/or an alternative story structure?
- Have your themes and goals been coherently developed across your narrative?
- Is your narrative well-paced and gripping, containing plenty of conflict and tension?
Because autobiographies are generally written in chronological order, as a full life story, it can feel frustrating to try to make real events fit the three-act structure.
You can’t change the dates of events, but you can decide how much page space to give to each event you narrate.
If you’ve focused your story around key themes of your life, and lessons learned, this can help guide you in figuring out how to decide the correct page space for each event.
Think of your key plot points within your autobiography as though they’re the structural supports of your narrative and its themes.
If, for example, your story is about overcoming adversity within your career, then you could assess your key plot points as:
- Inciting Incident (within the first 15 percent): The event which made you decide to choose your specific career.
- Plot Point One (20-30 percent): The day you committed to your career despite hardships.
- Story Middle (45-55 percent): A large hurdle you overcame which caused you to shift your perspective about the value of your work.
- Plot Point Two (70-80 percent): A low point in your career, when you learned your most important lesson about overcoming adversity.
- Climax (around 90 percent): The most difficult challenge you faced in your career, which you overcame as a result of learning the important lesson above.
This is just an example structure, not a rigid formula.
With this core three-act structure in mind, you can figure out how much page-space to provide the intervening events, in ways which hold reader interest as your story progresses. You don’t need to give equal page space to every key event in your life. The ones deserving of more page space are the events which advance your key themes and development.
Carrying out a structural edit is a substantial task, and one worthy of its own article. Check out my earlier article here if you’d like to read more on this.
Once you’ve written a manuscript of multiple scenes and chapters, a few hundred pages or so long, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees as you carry out your structural edit.
That’s why Fictionary Storyteller software was designed: to help you break down your manuscript into manageable chunks, and analyse each scene against certain objective story elements. If you’re interested in learning how to use Storyteller, come check out the online Fictionary community and/or sign up for your free Storyteller trial.
Step Nine: Carry out a Copy Edit
Once you’ve structurally edited and revised your manuscript into a cohesive, gripping narrative, you should carry out another edit, looking at the quality of your prose.
An autobiography must be written with a strong voice and writing style if it’s to grip readers.
For advice on how to write strong prose, I recommend Noah Lukeman’s excellent book, The First Five Pages.
Step Ten: Proofread your Manuscript
Carry out a full check for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and general accuracy at this point.
If you’re not an expert in this area, ask a friend to help, or consider investing in grammar-checking software.
Step Eleven: Send to Other Readers/ Editors
At this point, you want to start getting reader feedback on your manuscript.
If you’re hoping to be traditionally published, you can opt to send your book to trusted beta readers or professional editors before submitting to literary agents.
If you’re planning to self-publish, seeking both beta reader feedback and one or more professional edits of your manuscript is absolutely essential.
A professional editor will be able to catch mistakes and provide advice which you simply don’t have the distance to see yourself.
Once you’ve received your feedback, revise your manuscript, and keep revising, until it’s the best book you can write.
Step Twelve: Submit to Literary Agents or Self-publish
At this stage, you’re ready to send your autobiography out into the world.
Congratulations!
Autobiography Format
There are no rules for how to format your autobiography, but there are some traditional practices you might wish to follow.
Point of View
Since autobiographies are written about the author’s own life, they are usually written in first person narration.
Chronology
As mentioned earlier, it’s traditional for autobiographies to be written in chronological order. Memoirs have more flexibility in this regard.
Autobiographies usually cover your entire life up until the present point, though that does not mean detailing every single event which has happened to you!
Opening Pages
Autobiographies typically feature:
- A Title Page
- A Dedication
- A Table of Contents
- An Acknowledgement
- A Foreword
- An Introduction
- Main Text
- Conclusion
- A Memorabilia Section, highlighting records, photographs, letters, maps etc.
- An Index
The best way to understand what each section might look like is to examine your favourite autobiographies to see how other writers set these out.
Writing an Autobiography: Tips
Tip One: Be Authentic and Vulnerable
Readers want to get to know the real you. If you hide important parts of yourself, they’ll feel cheated.
This means writing in your most authentic voice. Don’t get bogged down trying to create a literary voice: develop your own voice, and make it as strong and resonant as possible.
That doesn’t mean you should allow your prose to be clunky, unclear and filled with unnecessary adverbs, but within the confines of good prose, you want your real voice to shine through.
This is more likely to happen if you’re open about your flaws, mistakes, learning experiences and desires in life. Be someone your reader can identify with and root for.
Don’t try to be perfect. Be relatable. Be human.
Tip Two: Consider your Target Audience
If you’re primarily writing for family and friends, think about what these readers want. Think about the legacy you’re leaving them with your book. And think carefully about who you might offend with anything you write and how this will affect your readers’ attitude to your book.
If you’re writing for a wider audience: which audience in particular is your target?
Your audience will likely be inseparable from the themes you’ve chosen.
Let’s return to our example above, in which you wanted to show how you overcame adversity in your career.
Let’s say you’re a career musician. If you overcame adversity such as racism in your career, and you achieved this through prioritising your artistic integrity over and above fame and fortune, your likely target audience will be composed of musicians, music-lovers and people who care about racial justice.
Or, if you overcame racist obstacles through your strong Christian faith, then your target audience will likely consist of Christians who love music, and faith-based advocates for racial justice.
Unless you’re particularly famous, it can be risky to spread your net too widely when it comes to a target audience.
For example, if you tried to target the above example book at both Christian groups and racial-justice groups, not everyone you target will be interested in your overall story message. Atheistic racial justice campaigners might be put off by your religious themes, although if your autobiography is compelling enough, you may get away with this. And indeed, it may even be your hope to appeal to non-Christians with your message.
But, be aware that disappointed readers might leave bad reviews online, affecting your future sales potential.
It’s up to you to balance potential benefits and risk as you figure out how to approach your target readers through marketing and advertising.
Tip Three: Develop Main Characters
Although your autobiography is the story of you, other people will feature prominently in your life. A strong story can’t have only one well-developed character, since most compelling narratives are formed through scenes of inter-character conflict and reparation.
It’s a little trickier to develop your characters within an autobiography than it is with a novel. Within fiction, you’ve free rein to develop all your characters, and you’ll likely craft their personality traits in order to maximise the potential for story development.
In an autobiography, you can’t do this. You’re dealing with real people, who have their own feelings and perspectives about events.
So, I’d advise having extensive discussions with everyone involved as to how you portray them in your story, and if this isn’t possible (and possibly even if it is!), seek independent legal advice before publishing.
Plenty of autobiographies are written which place a variety of characters in a not-so-rosy light. But you need to be clear as to your facts, and to the potential consequences arising from publication.
Conclusion
Writing your autobiography could become one of your most rewarding life achievements.
But to increase your chances of bringing this to fruition, I recommend studying up on story structure, outlining and creative writing as much as possible.
The time spent will be well worth the investment once you start writing and editing your life story.