How to Write a Book About Your Life: From 'I Want To' to a Chapter Plan

Who is your life story for?

Before you write a word, answer one question: who do you picture holding this book? Your answer decides almost everything else: how much to include, how to organize it, and even how to sound.

If you picture your grandchildren, you're writing for readers who already care about you and want to know everything: where you grew up, how you met their grandmother, what you did for work. If you picture a stranger in a bookstore, you're writing for someone who needs a reason to keep reading, so you'll tell less and go deeper.

And if you picture only yourself, that's allowed too. Many people write their life story to understand it. You can decide later whether anyone else reads it.

Memoir, autobiography or family history: which one are you writing?

'A book about my life' can mean three different books. Pick one now; you can always write another later.

Step 1: How do you build a timeline of your life?

Take a large sheet of paper, or a spreadsheet, and make one row per five years of your life, from birth to today. In each row, write down where you lived, who you lived with, what you did all day (school, work, raising children), and anything big that happened.

Don't write stories yet. Just facts and fragments. '1968–1972: Apartment above the laundromat in Queens. Dad driving a cab. Started school, didn't speak English at first.' Twenty minutes per row is plenty.

Fill the gaps with help: old photos, letters, calendars, your résumé, school reports, a quick call to a sibling. Put a question mark next to anything you're not sure of and check it later. Mistakes in dates are easy to fix; a missing decade is not.

• Places: every home, town and country you lived in.
• People: who was at the kitchen table in each period.
• Work: jobs, studies, businesses, caregiving.
• Events: births, deaths, moves, weddings, illnesses, wins.
• Objects: the car, the coat, the piano that anchor a period.

Step 2: Circle the turning points

Now read your timeline and circle the moments after which life was different. A turning point can be large (emigrating, a diagnosis, a divorce) or small (a teacher's comment, a phone call, a book someone handed you).

Say you're 68 and grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Your turning points might be: the winter your father got sick and you ran the milking at 14; leaving for the city; meeting your wife at a union meeting; the plant closing; opening the hardware store; your first grandchild. Six turning points, and you already have the skeleton of a book.

Most life stories have somewhere between six and fifteen. If you have forty, you're listing events, not turning points. Ask of each one: did something change for good afterwards?

Step 3: Turn turning points into chapters

Give each turning point its own chapter, then add chapters in between for the ordinary life that surrounded them. For an autobiography, go in time order. For a memoir, keep only the turning points that serve your one story. For a legacy book, you can also group chapters by theme: work, love, faith, food.

For each chapter, write three lines: what happened, what changed, and what you understand about it now. That third line is what makes a life story more than a list of events. Here's a template for a 12-chapter life story you can copy and fill in.

Working title:
Who it's for:
One sentence (what this book is about):

Ch 1 - Where I come from (place, family, the house I grew up in)
Ch 2 - Childhood: one scene I've never forgotten
Ch 3 - Turning point 1:
Ch 4 - Growing up: school, friends, first work
Ch 5 - Turning point 2 (leaving home?):
Ch 6 - Love, partners, friendship
Ch 7 - Work: what I did all day and what it taught me
Ch 8 - Turning point 3 (the hardest year):
Ch 9 - Family: raising children, caring for parents
Ch 10 - Turning point 4:
Ch 11 - Now: what my days look like
Ch 12 - What I want you to know

For each chapter:
  What happened:
  What changed:
  What I understand now:

Step 4: Write the first chapter, not chapter one

You don't have to start at the beginning. Start with the chapter whose memory is sharpest, the one you've told out loud a dozen times. It will come easily, and finishing one chapter changes how you see the whole project.

Write it as if you're telling it to one person across a kitchen table. Use your natural words. If you'd say 'we were broke', don't write 'we experienced financial hardship'. Your family wants to hear you, not a textbook.

Aim for scenes: a place, a moment, people speaking. 'We were poor' is a summary. 'Mom cut the one orange into eight pieces so everyone got some' is a scene, and it's the scene your grandchildren will remember.

What if you think your life isn't interesting enough?

Almost everyone who sits down to write their life story thinks this. It's rarely true. What makes a life story interesting isn't drama; it's detail. The price of bread in 1962, the name of your first boss, the way your street smelled in summer. Those are things only you know, and they disappear when you do.

If you're writing for family, remember that they're not comparing you to famous memoirs. They want to know you. A plain, honest 60-page book will be read and re-read long after a grand, unfinished one is forgotten.

How do you keep going until it's finished?

Set a small, regular target: one chapter a week, or 30 minutes a day. At one chapter a week, a 12-chapter life story is drafted in about three months.

Don't edit as you go. Keep a note of things to fix ('check the year we moved', 'ask Linda about the wedding') and keep writing forward. Revision is much easier when the whole book exists.

Decide early what you'll leave out. Not every relative needs a chapter, and not every painful memory needs to be on the page. A good test for each story: does it help the reader understand who you are and how you got here? If the answer is no, save it for a conversation instead.

Finally, give yourself a reason to finish by a date: a birthday, an anniversary, a family reunion. Tell one person the date. A deadline and a first reader waiting for pages turn 'someday' into a plan.

How can Novelleo help you write your life story?

In the Novelleo app (iOS and Android), choose "My own story" and answer a few questions about your life and who the book is for. Novelleo sets up a title, premise, the people in your story and a 4–20 chapter plan, and you can adjust the plan to match your turning points.

The AI drafts each chapter with you. Before each next chapter, you choose to follow the plan or add a memory, and you edit every line so it sounds like you. When you're done, export it as a PDF or Word file to share with family or take to a print shop. The first AI chapter is free.