"When we go, the stories go too, unless we've passed them on."
Brian Byrne, author of Mariseo's House and Other Stories

 

If you are better at talking about your life than writing about it, you can leave the writing part of a memoir or autobiography project to an experienced writer. A personal historian is someone who specializes in assisting people in recording their life stories. Twelve to fifteen hours of interviewing with you will be sufficient to put together a full-length book.

You probably have a lot you want to talk about, focusing on the core of your life story and your favorite anecdotes about good times, amusing moments and the challenges you've faced. A personal historian will prompt you to remember further details about scenes and characters in order to fill out the story and make it more readable, capturing the atmosphere of places and the nature of people's personalities. You will also be prompted to reflect on your current understanding of how and why events in your life unfolded as they did.

The goal is to present your life as an engaging story, not merely as documentation of what happened through the course of your years. Good memoir writing develops a chosen theme, and engaging story telling has a plotline. An experienced writer can help you develop your life story using these features of good writing. You may want to focus on key lessons you've learned in life that you now want to communicate to others, or you view your life as a pilgrimage and want to write a spiritual memoir, or life for you has been a challenge in which you have prevailed over adversity. With the help of a personal historian your life story can be composed to capture not just what happened but how you were changed by events in your life. Your quest for understanding of how and why your life turned out as it did can itself be a plotline.

Furthermore, a personal historian can help bring to the task the reader's point of view, developing the story of your life in a way that keeps the story moving along, holding the reader's attention. By following these links, you can learn more about Jack Nelson, a personal historian living in Charlotte, N.C., and the writing services he offers.

 

Jack E Nelson
Personal Historian
(704) 243-4447