Create Your Life Story : Helping You Record a Lifetime of Stories

It’s been a great experience but time to move on.

It’s now been 2.5 years since I started Create Your Life Story but really the story goes back to 2006 when  I discovered podcasting and spent the next couple of years learning how to produce my other podcast at Your Story. Very soon I realised I needed to find a business model to continue, so I learnt from the internet & content marketers all about finding a niche and selling to it.

In order to pull that off I had to find something in sync with my passion and ethics, which is where recording my uncle’s Life Story gave me the idea of teaching the same to others with Create Your Life Story. It was a great mix as it satisfies my interests and I know I’m doing good for the community and maybe I can make some income if I produce a quality product.

It’s been a great ride.

Over the course of the last 2.5 years I’ve produced:

* 200 posts of educational content somewhere in excess of 100,000 words or equalivant to 3 novels

* 72 podcast episodes – Close to 40 hours of audio

* 2.5 hours of instructional video

* 3 self-published E-books

This is still the best content on the internet to help people know how to produce a personal (audio) biography of yourself or someone else. There is nothing that even comes close but that doesn’t mean I’ve been a commercial success.

It’s about community.

Old media feeds the public information and entertainment as incitements to sell You as the product, to the advertisers. There is no need to communicate with the old media producer other than an occasional letter to the editor as really you’re not at all important to them, the advertisers are!

I’m not the old media, and neither are all the hard working new media producers out there on the internet.  I’m someone you know or yourself, working from home, wanting to help and make a difference, but without feedback it’s like working in a vacuum and screaming into the void and only possible for a period of time without some return of energy. Now, I didn’t expect a huge interaction with the greater world and I knew things wouldn’t happen overnight but it’s only possible to keep up the enthusiasm needed to create quality content for so long before it feels like no one is listening.

Above everything else, I’ve desired to build a community here with the feedback being more important than the income. An email, comment here on the site or on any of the social channels motivates more than you can imagine and with enough feedback (even without the income), this episode would never happen.

Income for survival.

I’ve put in thousands of hours to produce all the content you see here while receiving in return all but nothing, except knowing I’ve done well for the community. But this is what I wanted to do! Have a shot at the title, do some good and see what happens. Maybe good things could come of it?

Unfortunately it hasn’t really work out as I hoped. Maybe people don’t really care about this topic, maybe I’m incompetent at sharing the information or as I really suspect, maybe I’m just very bad at self-promotion and marketing.

Marketing & Self-Promotion.

I despise the manipulative marketing practices used today and feel it’s an insult to our intelligence, so it goes against my ethics to use them to convince y...

A Social Voice for your Community.

Now with the modern digital age it’s even easier for people around the world to keep the stories of a lifetime alive long into the future for others to hear, read and see. One person I’ve meet through producing Create Your Life Story is Kevin Farkis of The Social Voice Project. With a long interest in personal stories starting with capturing those of his relatives and moving onto gathering the quickly disappearing stories of returned Veterans of his community, Kevin is now working with others on Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh.All of the archived content from the Social Voice Project is available for you to listen to is here on Archive.org. Take some time to listen to some great stories and understand the subtle nuances of his story telling style to draw the best out of the people he records.

In this interview here on the podcast with Kevin he mentions a video story of a father who went to war, never to meet his daughter and the thousands of letters he wrote over his time away. Take the time to have a look at the great work Kevin’s been doing including the video, All My Love, Always . . . A Thousand Letters which helps to share the story of a missed father.

We discuss some great tips for your project but more importantly use Kevin’s inspired story to help inspire you with your project.

Many thanks to Kevin for being on Create Your Life Story and the excellent work he’s doing for the community at large.

The best method to remember what you’ve forgotten.

A LifeStory, memoir, biography or autobiography is agreed by everyone as a great idea but a moment later when someone starts to make it happen they’re challenged with where to start and, “What would I talk about?”

I constantly hear requests for Prompts and Topics on  the survey associated to the download of your free copy of Recording Life Stories, so I’ve created a new approach to an old problem.

The traditional method of long lists of questions to prompt the conversations was both boring and generic and simply didn’t work. It missed the personal and didn’t promote the real passions someone has in their life. Over the years I had been using a different method when I connected with people which I knew had real power but I had to get it across in a way for you to understand.

A new strategy

A Topic will have some stories of your life and

the Prompt is a reminder of that topic.

The normal strategy to help people remember the topics they want to talk about is to start at birth and list out a lifetime’s experiences chronologically or copy one of the long… Loooong… list of questions and prompts. And there are plenty of these lists on the internet. The problem with them is they are general, often asking questions biased from the point of view of the interviewer or subject. This is not you! They’re simply a chronological list of your life.

After months of mulling the ideas of how we communicate, particularly when we first meet someone and start to explore and understand their life I hit upon the idea of approaching Life Stories in the same way.

A totally new, innovative way of personalising the prompts and topics for a Life Story biography or autobiography using simply, natural methods we all use every time we meet someone and want to learn more about them.

It’s about the reminders of life

This new book is not about telling stories or how to edit them but many ideas for that will evolve by understanding this new way of approaching your Life Story.

Prompts & Topics for Your Life Story is a way of jogging your memory, of all the interesting experiences in your life. It’s a strategic approach to re-explore your life in much the same way as someone would get to know you.

Rediscovering your life!

Too often we forget events only to be reminded when something appears in our life. The goal of Prompts & Topics for Your Life Story is to jog your memory of the things you’ve forgotten or things you didn’t even think of as important. Even the mundane memories are fascinating to the younger generation.

By following the advice in Prompts & Topics for Your Life Story you’ll create a long list of prompts to remind you of the interesting topics of your life. Then with these memories you’re away telling the stories and sharing your lifetime.

Start big then dig into the details

When you meet someone you’re introduced to a broad generalisation of who they are, then over time you get to know them better and in more detail through listening to the stories about the topics of their experiences.

This is the same approach Prompts & Topics for Your Life Story uses. Start with a generalisation of who you are then work down through the shared and person...

Collect the content, then share your project!

You need content for a Life Story project. Not just the content you’ll generate yourself in the recording or the shoe box of old photos you have stashed under the bed. You also need that photo album you’re Great Aunt has stashed away. Or the old Super 8 films Uncle Bob shot back in the ’60’s. But you also want the new digital images your grandchildren are taking on their new fangled smart phones. You have an idea of what you want to create but you have to pull it all together to make it work. Producing the Life Story is for later but how do you collect the scattered information?

Herding Cats

Getting information from relatives is akin to herding cats. Everyone has their ideas of what they want to do. What works for me is to give them clear and concise instructions of what I want depending on the skills of who I’m talking to. For some people you may need to go to their home and scan the photos, while others can use email and online sharing services.

* What do you want?

* Who has it?

* What form is it in?

* Can it be digitised?

* Can they convert it to digital?

* How do you want it shared?

* Do they have the skills to share it?

* Do others near them have the skills?

* What are the alternatives?

And if all else fails you may need to travel to them and do all the work in gathering the information.

Sharing the finished Life Story Project

Once you’ve finished your masterpiece of this persons Life Story you’ll eventually want to show it to everyone involved so the same will apply but in reverse.

Types of information

First of all you need to decide what information you need, what’s available and in what format…

Physical – Analog

Tapes, cassettes, films, photographs

Physical – Digital

CDs, DVDs, Thumb Drives, Hard Drives, SD Cards, Floppy discs, In built memory in cameras, etc,.

Once you’ve decided what you want, who has it and where it is you have to decide how you’ll get access to it for your project.

Transfer methods

You know what you want and where it is, now you have to get it to you using one of these systems.

Physical

Post or hand deliver the physical items to who needs the information.

Email

Limited size of attachments could need multiple emails for a project. Okay for a couple of images.

Digital internet transfers

Digital transfer services for large files such as DropBox etc.

Internet and Web

Place the content to share with others on various sharing services. Some have ability to have private accounts while others are public only.

* Everything – Archive.org, Facebook, Google+.

* Images – Flickr, Panorama, Photobucket & many others

* Video – YouTube, VIddler, Vimeo.

* Audio – SoundCloud.

* Everything – Your own website.

* Everything – FTP. (If you don’t know what it is don’t worry, if you do, consider it)

Audio as prompts & atmosphere for your personal story!

The most obvious audio you have, will be the recorded conversation and the most obvious prompts for getting that audio are questions. But there are other types of prompts, including audio.

When editing a Life Story there is nothing better than music for setting the tone. In your world you’re immersed in music from the radio, television, records, live performances and now all their digital versions. It’s impossible not be affected by the music that’s around you and often just hearing a snippet will remind you of  your past or that of your culture.

Audio to remind, other than music.

Some families are fortunate to have audio from private sources. These could be tape recordings, film or video of people when they were younger or the atmosphere of events. The audio reminders of you life, like music, can also be the sounds that take you back to the times long ago. Are you lucky enough to have audio of a wedding, a child’s first words or the sounds of an overseas trip?

The audio not normally considered is the background to the home movies you shot decades ago. Stripping out the audio track and using it as a prompt will remind you of things that are missing from the video, then you can build on the video with your stories.

Record your own atmospheres

Maybe as you wander through your life working on your Life Story project you’ll have access to audio to help explain the era being talked about. If you happen to visit a museum, workplace or performance you could record some contemporary audio to use as background for a historical period. For example visiting a steam-powered machinery day would give you a chance to record the sounds of traction engines to lay under the background stories you tell if relevant. The sound of an old telex machine working in a museum could be used to explain office life. Even a treadle sewing machine or manual type writer could be laid under audio of the relevant story.

Cultural audio to jog your memory.

You’ve been immersed in sound all your life. Consider the sounds about a time you want to talk about.

The internet with the power of search now gives you access to sound recordings to prompt and enhance your Life Story. Search for an atmosphere of a work period of your life, or an event you participated in and use that to create the prompts to talk about. Then you can lay the atmosphere or effect into the Life Story to enhance the audio of the stories as they’re talk about. Audio from your life to consider could be from the following areas.

* Work atmospheres

* Clubs and organisations

* Hobby sounds

* Events and celebrations

* News broadcast

* Film, television and radio broadcast

* Historical events

* Natural atmospheres

Take the time to think of the audio that you’ve had in your life from the sounds of a holiday to the theme of your favourite television show.

Not only will it remind you of a time from your life, it will enhance the stories you tell and strengthen the reality for those listening to Your Story.

Action:

* What historical recording do you have?

* Record some audio of your own – Be creative

Transcribe your audio biography for as little as 20€ per audio hour and help people around the world.

A biography is not a book. A biography is a recorded story of someone’s Life Story using any system that is appropriate.

But a biography can be a book!

Once you’ve recorded your audio Life Story in conversation or as self directed storytelling you may choose to convert the audio into text. The advantage of text is, most people still think of a biography as a book and with the addition of photographs and diagrams you can tell the story in a richer more edited style, instead of the rambling of raw audio. An alternative is to also edit the audio to be more interesting and concise and possibly blending it with images into digital storytelling.

The problems of transcribing

The advantages test is to enable people to follow along with the audio or evolve it into a book with some editing and story structure.

The issues normally start with the process of transcribing the audio. Unless you’re trained, transcribing is time consuming at a rate of about 8 hours per audio hour and  frustrating task. Alternatively you could outsource the work but for most people it can often be prohibitively expensive. Sadly this is where most people stop as there are normally no alternatives.

One day machine transcription will make it possible for any audio to be converted into text but for the moment the best we can hope for is an accuracy of 97% with fully trained transcriptions software. If we use untrained  software on a normal conversation particularly with two people, the performance plummets making it unusable. So for the moment we need to contend with manual, human transcription.

Millions of trained professionals without work.

In the second world there are millions of university qualified people who aren’t using their skills but forced into menial, untrained or manual labour work, just to earn an income. They want to use their skills but don’t have any opportunity. This is like spending 4 years to qualify in something just to end up as a waitress.

What if there was a way of giving intelligent, qualified and skilled people in developing countries an opportunity to earn a living and help us in the first world deal with the cost of  transcribing our audio.

A cheap alternative to transcribe audio to text.

Transfair‘s creator Stephan de la Peña tells us in this episode of Create Your Life Story about how he’s developing the market and talent to transcribe your audio for much less than normal costs while helping less fortunate people to have a future closer to their skill base.

What Transfair is achieving is

* Coordinating skilled workers with clients.

* Testing skills before assigning work.

* Assess tasks before assigning.

* Checking completed work.

* Coordinate payment.

Enhance your skill & confidence while recording your LifeStory.

Getting started is often the hardest part of recording a life story and getting started isn’t all the preparation. It’s starting to record audio. Your Audio!

A good place to get some motivation is with the free Quick Start Mini-Guide PDF.

This useful information will help your overview but if you want more, can get the complete Quick Start Guide which will get you started today while helping keep Create Your Life Story producing all this valuable content.

But what about the actual audio?

What are your excuses?

We often use one or a blend of several reasons not to start recording.

* Don’t know what to talk about.

* Don’t’ know how to tell the stories.

* Don’t know how to use the equipment.

* Haven’t got the correct environment.

* Don’t like the sound of your voice.

Any one of these can be enough to stop you from starting and a few of them is enough to paralyse you.

A simple system to get you started

Like all things in life, be it learning to walk as a child, dealing with the issues of adulthood or recording your Life Story, it’s all about starting and practicing. Here is a system to get you started with recording snippets of your life and with that, you’ll practice and gain confidence to continue.

Getting your confidence in 4 easy steps

* Get a recorder. Phone with built in recorder or app, computer based recording software or portable recorder.

* Record your thoughts about one (only one), topic you have on your mind.

* Listen back to it uncritically but learn from the experience.

* Pick a new topic and repeat daily or at least 5 times a week.

Repeat and learn until you have confidence and possibly recorded your entire life story and contemporary opinions while your at it. It’s really that simple

Your Life Story is far more important than you realise.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been travelling through Europe, spending time with family in Megève in the French Alps where you can see a short video I produced at my other podcast at Your Story.

This video and the other content that I’m producing as I travel are all part of the 2012 method of journaling a Life Story as it’s lived. I’m taking photos and sharing them on twitter and facebook with my friends while having discussions. All this content will one day be the story of my life, permanently digitally recorded forever. These are the new prompts that are currently developing to remind all of us of our lives in the future.

During my visit to Megève I had the opportunity to talk with people on topics that have recently been brought up in discussion with me via email regarding what’s happening in their Life Story projects.

Travelling through time.

I’ve realised the stories of our lives, shared as oral history from person to person, or recorded as audio as we’re doing here at Create Your Life Story, manage to take us to their distant past. We vicariously time travel, using the stories as vehicles to hear of another time. Often these stories aren’t written down either because they seem too trivial but they still have great value when heard spoken, not only because of the direct information in them but also through interperation of the back ground information that is too often gloss over. We can get a great deal from the tone of voice, pause and extraneous information that is associated with a story. Far more than what we could get from just the raw information.

There will always be surprises.

The surprises that come of producing a Life Story can’t be anticipated. Time and time again I hear of Life Stories that evolve into unexpected unfolding surprises. I mention in this episode a wonderful story of Keri, here it is.

You have a story also.

Sadly people constantly reference to other’s stories as being of value without realising that they too have stories.

Too often people take their own story for granted or don’t think they have anything to say but on reflection (and often a little assistance), the stories start flowing, creating wonder for others in their world as they reference to the stories of their life. Everyone has an amazing story, at least to their family but possible also the greater community.

There are stories in all of us that will interest others. Stories that we’ve forgotten that may need a little help or a prompt to remind us. The people in your life also have great stories but may not think so requiring you to take the action to encourage them to open up. This can be done by taking the time to sit and engage in conversations with them, setting the agenda for collecting their stories or asking for help to get the stories of their life.

If you need help to get underway with your Life Story project check out the Quick Start Guide to Your Life Story to help you understand what you need to do to get underway so that you follow through to completion of your project.

Christmas and a time to connect with family

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Christmas and the holiday time that we have at this time of year, is often about family, catching up and talking about what has been happening over the past year. In this episode of Create Your Life Story I want to urge you to spend time with your family members to ask those interesting questions to understand and show your interest in their lives.

Normally we’re too busy with our lives to ask about their’s, but when we’re on task to record their life story we change our attitude to one of interest in them. Why not try the same during this time when you get together for these seasonal gatherings?

In doing so you’ll give them the opportunity to be heard in ways that people rarely are and what a wonderful to gift to give someone, that of being genuinely heard for a change.

Ask and listen

* Ask inquiring questions

* Listen intently

* Be genuinely interested in their stories

* Know that you’re giving them a gift with your attention

Thank-you from Ian

On a personal note, I’d like to thank everyone in this little community that we’ve here at Create Your Life Story and all the connections that we’ve made over the last 18 months. I get a great deal of satisfaction from producing this content and sharing it with you but the rewards often come from hearing of how you’re using this information to help you create the Life Stories in your own life.

Merry Christmas everyone! Please feel free to make a comment below.

 

Use some of the ideas in the e-Book Recording Life Stories. Just sign up for it in the side bar form.

To get a kick start, get the Quick Start Guide to Your Life Story by clicking hereand be underway in just an hour.

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Hindenburg makes editing your Life Story simple so you can concentrate on the Story

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I know the feeling of getting bogged down on the details of Creating a Life Story. There are so many things that can take you attention away from what a project is all about… The Story.

One of the things that people get far too hung up about is, editing the raw audio. Nick Dunkerley of Hindenburg Systems gives us a bit of the background philosophy on Hindenburg and why it’s perfect audio editing software for our Life Story projects. Go and get your free 30 day trial version of Hindenburg to see what it’s all about.

Why edit?

We all know that the most important thing is to get the conversations of your Life Story recorded, but then what!

Yes, it’s paramount to record but ultimately, it’s about having the stories heard by others. What’s the use of the whole recording exercise, if afterwards they aren’t listened to?

You should at least consider editing the audio to remove the unwanted interruptions to make it an enjoyable listening experience for others.

Within every conversation there will be distractions that are unnecessary for the listener to hear and spending some time to remove these will improve the listenability significantly. Then if you want, you can go as deep down the rabbit hole as you like, all the way to a full radio documentary if you choose.

Which editing software to choose.

There are many audio editing programmes available, from the expensive high end professional programmes to free systems possibly already on your computer. All have there place to suit specific applications but until now there hasn’t been a programme that is all about getting the job done for editing voice, for use in telling the story. This is exactly what we’re about with our Life Story.

Most other programmes are designed to be all things, to all people and are bloated with too many bells & whistles, making them a challenge to find the few functions that we need to edit the voice, tweak the quality a little and add additional audio (music & effects), making it a listening pleasure.

I’ve mentioned Hindenburg in the past, as my preferred audio editing programme but it’s worth having an understanding of the philosophy that has gone into it’s design and how well that’s in sync with our task of creating audio biographies, using all the skills of storytelling, while still having all the technology necessary to get the job done ,while not getting in the way.

What I love about Hindenburg

Originally I used Garageband but found, as it’s designed for music production, to be more complicated than I needed. Hindenburg is designed for what we do, without the fat that is unnecessary.

* Fast editing – Removing stammers & pauses is a breeze.

* One click voice profiler – Makes you sound good without having to be an engineer.

* One knob compression – More or less compression is so simple it’s obvious when it’s right.

* Easy to view timeline to see exactly what’s going on.