#All my life story archive
I get to my desk every morning and I hear these little voices saying, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing!’ and I raise my arm and I just sweep, I sweep them off the desk.’įind your own way to silence any fear, be it changing key figures’ names or even fictionalizing your life entirely.Īny one person’s life is a massive archive or trove of significant experiences and memories. Lee goes on to describe how the biographer Richard Homes coped with this feeling. Hermione Lee, interview in ‘Hermione Lee, The Art of Biography No. But in order to arrive at that feeling you have to deal with, and master, your apprehension. While you’re doing it, I think you have to feel that she is yours and you alone understand her. The fear has to be channeled somehow into the energy of the work. When the acclaimed biographer of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee, was asked whether fear is a useful emotion for a biographer, she replied: This is often particularly acute when writing about more personal experiences where you don’t have the protective veil of fictional characters. Many writers feel daunted when embarking on a new project. You could start with a significant event that happened later in adulthood, for example, and circle back to past scenes that illuminate backstory and help the reader to understand what led up to later events.Īs you plan how you’ll write time in your life story, ask, ‘What would provide the strongest dramatic effect?’ 3.
You can also, however, experiment with time in writing your life story. It’s a common narrative approach in many bildungsromans (coming-of-age stories). This approach to time gives a linear sense of the way a life progresses, from childhood. My father’s eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or ‘thereby,’ as they say in Scotland. 5 (1992 Wordsworth Editions).Īfter detailing the day and time of his birth, David goes into closer setting detail: To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.Ĭharles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), p.
#All my life story how to
Time is an interesting element to consider when deciding how to write your life story.įor example, will your book cover birth to the present day? Or a few weeks or months spanning either side of a momentous life event?įirst-person narrators in fiction give us examples of narrative approaches to time we can also adopt in writing about our lives.įor example, the title character of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield begins his story by describing the setting for his birth: The memoir is told very much in the voice of a theorist and scholar of language. Yet in their fragmentary, third-person presentation (without narrative), they become like brief, philosophical musings, rather than a traditional linear ‘story’ with character development. Troubled by the humiliations of others, whenever a victory appears somewhere, he wants to go somewhere else.ĭescribing himself in the third person, Barthes gives the reader insights into his views and values, as an ordinary autobiography might. He has no affection for proclamations of victory. For example, in one fragment titled ‘Arrogance’ he writes:
It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.īarthes proceeds to give the reader fragments written in the third person, alternating with captioned photographs from his youth. The French theorist Roland Barthes begins his memoirs with a preface that reads: Experiment with elements of fiction and a playful approachĮxample of experimental life writing: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.Protect your identity or those of others while writing about trauma or difficult subject matter.
This approach to life writing may be useful if you want to: You could follow a non-fiction approach and set down dates, facts and memories as close to events as they occurred as possible.Īnother option is to fictionalize and blur the line between fact and fiction. There are many ways to approach life writing. Decide whether you’ll write non-fiction or fictionalize Aspiring autobiographers often mail us asking, ‘how can I write my own story?’ Try these 7 life writing tips to start: 1.
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