Passing It On

It's the right time to do your timeline

 

Now that you’ve determined who you’re writing for, the time period you want to cover and have a general idea where the information on your life’s journey is coming from, it’s time to start organizing the memories of your life.

You’ll do that by constructing a timeline for the period you intend to cover. A timeline gives you a chronological checklist of memorable events or people that affected you. An accurately constructed timeline brings myriad facets of your life together. This allows you to examine them in the greater context of your whole life, rather than as isolated, separate events. The timeline will prove invaluable when you start writing, even if you choose not to write your story in a purely chronological fashion.

If you’re doing your work on a computer, it’s easy to insert material at the proper spot in your timeline. But, if a computer isn’t available, or desirable, at the location where you’ve chosen to work, use your loose-leaf binder. Even if you do the bulk of your work electronically, it’s often easier to read materials and do basic editing, like marking up documents to merge, on paper.

The expandability of the binder makes maintaining your timeline easy. During the course of your project, random thoughts from one portion of your life will pop up unexpectedly while you’re working on something else. By jotting those random thoughts down and inserting them into the proper place of your timeline, you’ll have a written record that you can come back to later.

To start your timeline in a binder, use a separate sheet of paper for each year and write the year in the upper right-hand corner to make it easy to identify. To begin, list one major event in your life for each year. Just one event per year. Then go back and write a few sentences about each event, explaining its circumstances of the event and its importance in your life.

This is just the start. Your timeline will be your road map throughout the project. You will be adding events and details as you tell your life story.

Tomorrow: What to do when your memory fails you.

This is Lesson No. 3 of a mini-course on how to write a personal history. The course will continue throughout May, which is Personal History Month. To get future lessons delivered to you, you may subscribe to our RSS feed or get e-mail delivery to your inbox. It’s easy. Details can be found in the column to the left of this post.

Flickr photo courtesy of  Krzysztof Urbanowicz.

Settle in, get ready to write

 

Now that you’ve found the perfect place to write your personal history and have carved out some quiet time in your schedule, let’s begin by deciding what you’re going to be writing about.

The assumption in this class is that you’re writing about yourself, but the techniques we’ll be using can be easily adapted to any family history project by asking the same questions of others instead of you. In any case, you’ll need to lay down a few ground rules.

First, who are you writing for? As you sort through the myriad elements of your life, it will help you decide what to use if you consider who your audience actually is. What do you think your readers will want to know about you?

Second, what time period do you want to cover? While it’s perfectly fine to cover your entire life, it’s possible that your intended audience is only interested in part of it. It may be a question of breadth vs. depth. Obviously, it takes longer to explore your entire life in depth than it would take to explore just a certain portion. Consider, then, the time you’re willing to commit to the project. It’s better to plan small and build than to plan large and not be able to deliver on your promise.

Third, where will the material come from? Even if you consider this a true memoir, welling up from your own thoughts and memories, you’ll need some prompting. We’ll go into prompts in some depth later, but it’s a good idea to make a list of those people, places and things that will evoke the memories you want to complete your project.

It’s a good idea to take these ground rules and put them in writing. Consider it a sort of mission statement. You can even write it that way, of you want. Then take your ground rules and put them at the front of a three-ring, loose-leaf binder. By being the first thing you see every time you open the binder, you have a constant reminder of what your task is.

In following lessons, we’ll be filling the binder with the memories of your life.

Flickr photo courtesy of  RBWright.

Good morning, class!

 

Welcome to Personal History 101. For those of you who stumbled into this blog looking for Greek Mythology or Famous Generals of the Civil War, you’re in the wrong blog. They are here and here.

This is where you’ll learn how to write your own personal history. Some might call it memoir writing, but that sounds a bit formal to me. You’ll find that in this class, there’s really no wrong way to do things. Personal history is, well, personal and it’s pretty much up to you how you shape it.

Throughout May, designated as Personal History Month on Chase’s Calendar of Events since the mid 1990s, I’ll be giving you tips on how to collect and organize material to write your own personal history.

My credentials can be found by clicking the “About” section in the left column, but for now, you can call me Professor Lehmer, an honorary title I just wanted to see in print once. Or you can call me Larry. I’m the founder and president of When Words Matter, Ltd., a personal history and business editing company in Des Moines, Iowa.

The course will cover the basics of putting together a personal history in what I hope is a very non-threatening way. There’s no registration requirement, attendance won’t be taken and there will be no assignments or tests. You don’t have to be a genealogy expert or accomplished writer, either.

The biggest thing you can bring to this class is a sincere desire to preserve your life’s story in writing. To be successful you’ll have to make a commitment to yourself to get it done. I’ll help by giving you the tools and tricks of the trade to be successful and, perhaps, a little inspiration. But, after that, it’s up to you.

The first things we’re going to tackle are the issues of time and space.

One of the bigger mistakes people make in a family history project is to get all gung ho at the start. They may spend several hours a day on their work, spurred on by the rush of doing something that is fascinating and new. This tactic is unsustainable, however, and they usually burn out quickly. Don’t let this happen to you. It’s better to plan to spend a few minutes each day on your project than to schedule unachievable mega-sessions. This should be fun, not an endurance test. So find a slice of your busy day that you can devote to your project and stick to it as best you can.

You also should be finding a comfortable space to do your project. Ideally, it will be quiet and free of distractions, well-lit and cozy, the kind of place where you can relax and think fine, uncluttered thoughts.

Tomorrow we’ll start organizing and shaping your project. Hint: think three-ring notebook.

  Flickr photo courtesy of finska.