Thinking about your life up until the present will help you to write an autobiography. Writing a biography about yourself, or an autobiography, can often become a challenging task. When you're assigned to provide the details of your life to a professor in college, or even your peers in the class, you may feel hesitant to include the main parts of your history that you don't feel very proud of. However, with an autobiography, you can learn a lot about yourself that you did not know before by seeing the events in your life within a certain context. Separate your life into a few categories, such as childhood, early adulthood and college years you need to provide a comprehensive overview of your life in as much length as you've been given. For instance, if in your childhood you had to deal with poverty or sadness, you can use those as themes.

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If you felt that your young adulthood was filled with happiness or pride, list those themes under the appropriate heading. This exercise will help you to picture your life in a whole new light and realize the themes that have so far encompassed your time on earth. For example, getting into college can be a very dramatic moment in a person's life so are the death of a family member and getting a first girlfriend or boyfriend. Remember to keep the themes you came up with in mind when deciding on moments in your life that you'd like to present in further detail for your readers. Place the special moments you came up with in step 2 under the specific year they happened. Include in the timeline any other events that are important to your life, and that fall in line with the themes of your life.

You can either write the autobiography in a linear, chronological style as charles dickens did in david copperfield or you can choose to write in a more fragmented style, starting with one moment and going onto another while filling your readers in on the happenings that came between those moments. Although you must present your full life experience, but that doesn't mean you can't play with different styles of presentation. Write the autobiography without concern for the typical five paragraph essay format.

Instead, you'll want to be creative and write a narrative that keeps your reader's interest with fascinating anecdotes and musings that answer the question of why you are the way you are. Use the particular style you've chosen in a way that doesn't confuse the reader, and always edit and revise once you've finished writing. Although they do not want to meddle with things or your business, i still want to know more about them. One thing about my life is that i am very honest and simple i can’t even remember what did this or what event happened in my life that made me this way. I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings about my childhood like a golden mist. When i try to classify my earliest impressions, i find that a fact and fancy look alike across.

Whether writing an autobiography yourself or helping someone else write one, the steps here offer a practical way to begin, with a particular focus on narrative structure. The topic sentences in the paragraphs below provide enough information to proceed. When writing an autobiography, as when writing anything else, it's good to begin simply and add details as they come to you. If you go easy on yourself, you'll recount more memories each time you sit down to write.

before writing an autobiography, read a variety of autobiographies published by mainstream publishers.

if you have a sense of how others have successfully presented their stories, writing an autobiography yourself will be easier. Find a style you like, and notice the life events other authors include, the order in which they present the facts, the level of detail they provide, and the length of each tidbit, scene, or chapter. an important step in writing an autobiography is choosing the focal point or theme, discussed in detail on the page about learning how to write an autobiography. If you succeed with this step, your story will have the dramatic thrust that hooks readers and keeps them reading. Was your aim to succeed as a businessperson? to be the best parent you could be? to amass wealth? to become a musician? to find love or security? whatever your goal, think of it as the unifying thread that drives your life, shows the failures and complications you overcame, and demonstrates how you ultimately achieved some form of success as the person you are today. If you can complete this part of writing an autobiography, your story will not be vaguely about you.

Which book would you rather read, one about helen keller or one about how helen keller became the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree ? create an outline of the key obstacles in your life. this can be a simple list that names the key moments in your story, with a focus on the challenges you've faced and your response to them. Obstacles interest readers more than a catalogue of happiness and success, however tempted you are to remain always positive. This is not to say that you should ignore the happy moments, only that the main story thread will be more interesting if it's supported by your movement toward a goal and the difficulties encountered as you attempted to achieve it. This dramatic movement is crucial to any story and particularly useful when writing an autobiography. once you have your initial list, elaborate on each key event in your outline. if you're using the autobiograa. Fill in the blanks, and then write anything you remember about that point, a little or a lot, whatever springs to mind. Later, you might choose a single event that best illustrates each point in the outline and describe the event, using your theme statement to guide your description.

For example, let's say you wrote, from the age of ten, i knew i would become a concert pianist. What specific event triggered this determination? can you describe that one event in a paragraph or two, using all the senses available to you 151sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell? using all five senses will help readers imagine the moment as if they were present with you. This vicarious act of reliving events arouses more emotion in readers than simple summary. And if you can master it, you are well on your way to writing an autobiography! sensory description: the narrow plank felt warm and smooth beneath my bare feet.

I caught a barely there flash of metal just before i landed hard, all my weight on my front foot. Then pain like a red hot poker jammed through my arch, and the gleaming tip of a three inch nail as it emerged through the top of my foot. summary: that day i jumped on a board with a nail in it and it went through my foot. either way, this jump is disturbing, but the description likely caused you to cringe more than the summary. And doesn't some part of you want to know what happened next? who came to help? how quickly they reached a doctor? if all had turned out well in the jump, you would not have the same compulsion to read on. If you can't think of any details, write a line of summary and return to fill in the details as you remember them. train yourself to use concrete details rather than abstract concepts. take another leisurely look at what you've written. Replace these abstract words or phrases with something concrete, such as my hands shook and my mouth felt stuffed with cotton or we drank chardonnay on the chatterley's sailboat, and as the sun set rachel and i walked hand in hand along the boardwalk. Was it a hot day, or was the asphalt so hot that your flip flops stuck to the tar ? you might go back to the professional autobiographies you're reading and type out a few passages from the books for practice.

Most ordinary readers won't think about whether or not you've used abstract or concrete terms. review your outline again and imagine that is is a web becoming ever more intricate. every spider web begins with a single supporting thread that anchors all others. Then the spider lays key connecting threads, to which it attaches many, many smaller lines. Your initial scenes of obstacles and failure make up the supporting threads to which all others in your story web connect. What else happened after each of these main events? what was important to you at this time? did you have any special friends? a pet? a romantic partner? a spouse? what specific event will best show the relationship you had with this person or animal? was the best friend who helped you through a difficult time a kind and gentle soul? what single act of kindness most stands out when you think of this person? write about that. She set a wet glass on the table, so you placed a coaster under it, and remembered how your mother used to crochet pretty little coasters and starch them.

This is the action/reaction sequence i saw first: action: 'i'm a wheel moving along the ground,' she said, making a playful flamboyant gesture. When she was slightly drunk she spoke in a singsong voice that was both childlike and belligerent. reaction: monica said sharply, 'and the rest of us aren't, in your opinion?' action: 'the rest of you aren't required to be,' sheila said. reaction: monica felt at this moment the woman's sense of her natural superiority, as casually revealed as if she had tossed a coin on the table between them. But she had no reply, no declaration of her own 151 she sat mute, staring. joyce carol oates. These two sets illustrate how you should show the entire action and then show the entire reaction. Write your entire book in this way 151 action and reaction, one complete set after another. If you're writing an autobiography, or anything else, action/reaction sequences will make your writing lively and natural. Your chances of writing an autobiography that easily engages readers is greatly increased when you systematically alternate between an external action that motivates action, and an internal or external reaction to that action.