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

What I got from creating a Life Story for my family!

In 2010 I originally record the Life Story of my uncle for entirely selfish reasons only to discover that I could do so much more for others and myself than I could have every imagined.

In 2007 when I started Your Story I decided that I needed to take the time at some stage to record my eldest remaining uncle in my father’s family before it was too late and learn of the history that only he knows. But you know how it is? Life got in the way and the months turned into years only to be reminded from time to time that I needed to act soon but then again I became distracted. Well in February last year I decided that I just had to book a date to travel and make the time to sit with Bill or else one day it would be too late and I’d curse my procrastination. Fortunately for my family I did, as we now have all of his stories to listen to and share and fortunately for us he’s still in our lives and can share in his own Life Story and what it means for us.

What I wanted

I started this project with the idea of getting information. The people, places and understanding of our greater family type information. During the process of recording Bill, I did managed to get that information. Not everything, somethings he didn’t want to discuss or he’s forgotten but what I did learn was more than we had before so my initial goal was achieved but there were other things that I didn’t expect to come from the whole experience that possibly may be of more and greater value than just getting information.

As Jane mentioned about the unexpected surprises of what she achieved from her fathers Life Story there are things that aren’t expected that can develop from taking the time to record someone’s Life Story.

I managed to spend a considerable amount of time with Bill, which gave us an opportunity to connect in ways that we had never been fortunate to do in the past. You can’t rush someone in their late 80’s so we lived by the body clock that suited him, with plenty of tea and the occasional nap but over the days Bill got used to me being around and slowly we recorded the six hours of audio that became his Life Story. In amongst that time I scanned photos and documents from his life and spent some time videoing him around his home and interests. All of this brought us closer together and gave me a connection to him in ways that I didn’t expect.

What it means to them

As is the case with the therapeutic use of recording a person’s Life Story, things were shifting also for Bill. After I completed the initial recording his daughter mentioned that he’d said to her, “I don’t know why Ian want to record me, but oh well…”.

At the time the recording didn’t seem that important but I know he enjoyed having me around and telling his story but couldn’t see what we would see in his stories.

This past week-end it was time to bring it all together for Bill’s 90th birthday celebrations. All the usual family members assembled with his friends from the local community to wish him a happy birthday, where I revealed two videos for everyone to see for the first time. These videos you can see below are the assemblage of snippets of audio associated with the images that I had available to tell the visual story of his life along with a little of who he is today. We played these videos on the large screen to absolute silence bar the occasional sniffle and wiping of eyes.

What is a vase? The container or the space within?

Silence is like empty space, it doesn’t seem to be anything. But in actual fact, without the silence, the void, or the margins, the space around things is needed to make sense of the thing.

Imagine for a moment walking up to your home, putting the key in the lock and opening the door only to find another door. Then unlocking that to find another, and another all the way. Imagine if the outside of your house looked fine but was a solid block of “house”, without any space inside it. Would you even call this a house? No!

A house is the external shape, the internal walls and fittings – but also the void between each of these items. It’s in the space that you actually live your life and just as important as the box that holds that space.

Silence is like the space within you house, or inside the vase, or the white space on a written page. Silence is what parentheses the spoken words and silence can do two things.

* Create a void

* Parentheses emphasise before and after content.

The Void

Silence is where you consider and ponder your thoughts and reflect for a time before starting some new part of your Life Story. This isn’t a time to be rushed but a time where a process is happening and in time something will come of the void.

If you’re telling your own story, just let it be. In a moment something will come to mind and you’ll be on your way again or if you’re recording someone else give them the space to allow whatever, to develop for them. By creating this void sometimes amazing things happen.

Other times a conversation will come to a natural end where there is no more to be said. This is where silence signals that it’s the time for you to reach for your list of prompting topics  and choose a new line of conversation.

The Parenthesis Pause

There are times where something is said, maybe long convoluted stories going into detail and building to a conclusion, then it ends and there is silence. There is often no need to hurry to the next points but simply take time to let the echos of the story ring into the silence as you contemplate what was said and the significance of it within the whole Life Story.

Or there will be silence first to set the scene, creating the tension for what is about to come. Maybe looking at photos, some tears welling up in your eyes or just a moment of contemplation that builds until the story starts. Allowing the tension to build will create what is needed to bring about the significance of the story and to interrupt it too early, will remove the power from the moment.

Much more detail of all the different pauses was covered in Episode 44 where we talk about the power and strategies of different pauses.

Silence in Interview

Your roll in recording a conversation with someone is to simply provoke responses, through comments and questions, then to remain silent but never inactive! The audio recording needs to be their story, as spoken by them, clearly understood but your roll is to help them continue with the flow of the topic, using all the silent, non verbals cues at your disposal.

* Eye contact

* Facial expressions – smile, smirk, frown, quizzical

* Body language – lean forward, open position, hand movements

* Nodding

* Prompting – to items around you

All of these techniques will still fully engage with them while you remain silent for the audio rec...

LifeStory Designing your life in all the different ways.

Once you’ve recorded the audio of the conversations and it’s time to Create Your Life Story, what do you do with all the other wonderful things from you life? Just have a look at what you’ve managed to collect to help you with remembering and flushing out Your Story:

* Photos

* Documents

* Journals & diaries

* Videos & movies

* Souvenirs

* Awards & trophies

* Scrapbooks

* Brick-a-brac

Just as much as the stories that you’ve told are part of your life and add the all important personal aspect, the things of your life add an extra layer that tells more of the story than just your memories.

A Picture is worth a Thousand Words

You know that you can tell all the stories, taking the time to describe people and places. But with one picture all that you’ve been expressing can be revealed. This is even more so with movies and audio from the past. They all help to explain in ways that flush out the story and make tangible the stories of you life.

How much more real will those stories you’re thinking of telling be, when you include the items that were important at the time?

A Thousand Words are worth a Picture

Then the other side of the coin is when you look at those photos and wonder who’s in them and where were they taken. What are the stories in those old sepia images, if only they could speak! That’s the advantage of talking about the images while recording your Life Story. It adds to the images and helps others to make sense of them.

Too often it’s just an image but when the story explains the photo (or for that matter any item of memorabilia), then it comes alive and places it in context.

All the things of your life combined with your memories and stories don’t just add to each other but multiply the significance of everything. And it makes the whole process easier and a lot more fun because it’s all there together with real understanding of all of the components.

Get the ideas of what you can do

Today’s interview is with Kathy Tarochione of LifeStory Designers about how, out of her personal story, she has come to be a LifeStory Designer using her digital art skills, to help people express their Life Stories in bigger ways than they thought possible.

Working in collaboration with others in the LifeStory Designers Community, she’s helping people use the things from their life to tell fully formed, enriching Life Stories that will be shared with future generations for years to come.

If you like the idea of creating part of your Life Story as digital multimedia you will get many ideas from what Kathy and her associates have been doing along with others in the community.

Action:

* What are the general stories you want to tell?

* What supporting things do you have to flush out those stories?

* Pick one of them and consider how you could tell a bigger, richer story by incorporating multiple media types to include these items.

* Learn the skills that you need to wrap all this together or find people to help you with aspects of it.

What ideas could include with the audio to help tell your stories better? Let us know in the comments below.

Interesting Links from this Post

* LifeStory Designers

* LifeStory Designers Community

Use some of the ideas in the e-Book ...

This is how to edit your Life Story audio in Hindenburg.

Your Life Story biography should be all about getting the wonderful stories recorded and shared with family and the world. Everything else should get out the way of that result.

For that reason I suggest you use the Zoom H1 Handy Recorder with Giant Squid Audio Labs Stereo Lapel Microphones for ease and simplicity. Then once you have the audio recorded, the easiest method of tidying it up is with the Hindenburg Audio Editor from Nsaka.

As mentioned in Episode 51 : The Simplest & Best Audio Editor for Your Life Story the Hindenburg editor has everything you want, without being weighed down with all the additional features included in music editing programmes such as Garageband and Audacity.

This short video gives you an overview of how easy it is to use Hindenburg. There isn’t much more to the Basic version of the programme but the full Journalist version has additionally some equalisation and compression features and well worth the cost of $65.

The best, easiest and simplest audio editor for conversations.

Life Stories need little technology to edit but until recently there hasn’t been anything available that did the job to make the spoken word more interesting and engaging.

What do you need?

Most editing systems aren’t designed for the simplicity that we need for editing Life Stories. All we need an editor to do is…

* Removal of stammers, stutters, verbal and real pauses, umms and arghs

* Rearrangement of audio components to help tell the story

* Addition of music and effects

* Audio enhancement of compression and equalisation

I’ve been using Garageband for years to edit Your Story and Create Your Life Story but I’ve realised they have far more than I need and don’t do what I want. There are other programs like Audacity and all the heavy lifting professional, music editing programmes but the story is always the same. They all have too many bells and whistles that get in the way of what I’m attempting to do.  Tell a story in voice with minimal interference!

What I want is a programme that will quickly and easily help me to tidy up the audio by removing the pauses, verbal stammers and blunders, simply rearranging of components and enhance with music and simple effects. That’s it! – If the programme has some compression and equalisation that’s all the better.

In the past I did all of this in Garageband but found it’s functionality difficult to deal with but with Hindenburg I now have a programme that is blisteringly fast in removing the edits in the audio. To date I’ve only had the free basic version, which I used to edit the audio then, I exported it into Garageband and added the music, compression and equalisation. This is no longer necessary as I’ve now upgraded to the Journalist version of the programme and can perform all these functions with ease in Hindenburg itself.

The best programme for Life Story editing

If you’re after a programme to simple tidy up your audio, have a look at Hindenburg. If you don’t want to spend the extra for Journalist, you can then export it to Audacity, Garageband or other programmes to perform the more fancy functions but if you want the all in one package the Journalist version of Hindenburg has everything you need including compression and equalisation as well as automatic level prior to exporting and profiling tracks to get the best sound with one click.

The main benefits of Hindenburg as a voice editing programme are…

* Small, fast and simply programme

* Everything you need for voice without the complexity of music editing programmes

* Fast removal of parts of track with instant shunting of what’s left

* Easy to understand level controls

* Everything that’s needed in the free Basic version with additional features in Journalist

If you need an audio editor you’ll find all that you want with Hindenburg and a lot more to make your life easy.

Action:

* Have a look at the video I’ve made for you.

* Download the free software version of basic.

* Have a look at the great instructional videos on nsaka.com.

* Record some audio and start fiddling.

* Get some confidence and know that you can make it sound a lot better.

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.→

You don’t live alone. You live with people in your family, community, culture, country and world.

From each of these groups you’ve been impacted by all the events that occur in them. Obviously family occasions tend to be very personal but event international events can impact you in ways that says a lot about you and the times you live in.There are individual stories in your life that you’ve forgotten that will be part of the greater story of the groups that you’ve associated with over the years. Take a moment to look at the history timeline of these different groups to remind you of some of the times of your own life.

Five historical groups of your life.

There are primarily five groups that you’re part of and their history is worth considering for it’s impact on you. To varying degrees some of these histories will tell stories of your life.

*

Family – Your intimate family

Community – People you live with in society

Cultural – How you identify yourself

Regional – Your macro community

Global – The big events of the world

Timelines to discover your forgotten stories.

Each of these groups have timelines of history. Some of these events you have memories and stories that you can share as part of your Life Story.

The obvious and most intimate of your history is enmeshed with that of your family. From your grand parents to your grand children, your family have participated in activities that you’ve been part of. Ignore for a moment your own personal history and consider the timeline of your family. Then consider the stories that are directly related to you. Maybe your family migrated and that is a catalyst to some stories of your life. Or there is a specific, unique family trait that that you all have which has some interesting stories from your life.

A community is whatever you want to make it. The obvious is the people who you associate with during a period of your life and as an example, it could be social, career or religious communities. You may have belonged to one group during a period then moved to another. All of these communities will mean different things during different periods of your life and with each of them stories of varying degrees will say what those eras meant to you. With each of these communities there is a timeline of history where events happened. What were you involvement with those events?

A culture is often handed down through the generations but it can also be the culture of an industry or a nation. Within a culture there is often a timeline of history that evolves over time. As these cultural events changed how did they impact you and what were your involvement with them.

As you have an impact on the more intimate communities around you, there is also the greater group we would call the regional group that is too large for you to have an impact on. These are the large scale provincial, national and ethnic groups that we all belong to at the more macro level. This is what we identify as when someone asks our nationality or heritage. These timelines of history affect millions of people and some of them will involve your personal experiences. What are the events from your regional group that you have stories of from your life?

Finally the global group is the international community that we all belong to. These are the global events that impact billions if not everyone on Planet Earth and with this timeline we have a...

Don’t forget the important insignificant people

Too often we look to the things of our life to talk about. The places, adventures, heartache, career even the family but we don’t take the time to consider all the people of our Life Story.

A story is not just cold information. As we look into the themes of our life we will talk about the things and automatically talk about the people associated with them, as they are often the facilitators of those stories but there are numerous other people who just don’t get mentioned. Instead, let’s start with the less important people, to help remind us of our stories.

Initially if you look over a period of your life you will see many themes, topics and events to tell stories from. Amongst these stories will be people who you can include, to flush out the topic and help us understand it. Because you’re focused on the topic and the people are only in the story to help that topic, many other individuals will be missed and not even remembered because they’re not important enough to include.

The unimportant people can lead to great stories

Systematically consider each person who you can remember during a time in your life. Now your focus has shifted from topics to people, with these people reminding you of stories within a topic.

Some of the people (like some topics) will matter little to you, whereas once you consider others in their own right, you’ll realise that there is a story that stems from your relationship to them.

From a superficial point of view, these people may be unimportant but if you focus for a moment on them you may realise that there is a story worthy of mentioning. Maybe that kid down the road, who you never played with and you had never thought of until now, said something once, that lead you to be aware of an event that taught you a lesson. Without remembering this person you may never have remembered the lesson and chances are there is a great story wrapped up in learning it.

As an exercise, remember a time in your life, say one specific holiday as a child.

Normally you would talk about how you got there, where it was, what you did, what it meant to you and the like. In amongst those stories will be people.

Now look at the same holiday but instead of the topics and events of it, remember all the people.

* Who did you travel with?

* Who did you meet?

* Who did you participate in activities with?

* Who did or told you something that you remember?

* Who did you find attractive or who did you have a falling out with?

* Who was involved in adventures with you?

* How did you feel about these people?

* What were their personalities like?

* How did everyone interact together?

* Do any of them fit into you Life Story in a more significant way?

By focusing on the people you will add a more personal aspect to your stories but you will also discover new topics to talk about that wouldn’t have been considered without using the people as the prompt to take you deeper into that topic.

Action:

* Choose one of the existing topics that you will tell stories about.

* Change your focus from the stories of your topic to the people who populate it.

* What are the stories that stem from each of these people in this topic.

Who do you now remember by placing people first? Please let us know in the comments below.

More ideas on prompts are in the e-Book Recording Life Stories. Download it from the side bar form.

To automatically receive this free podcast, click on the iPhone image to the right or search in iTunes for ...

What is the cost and the benefit of recording a Life Story

Value, cost and worth are all interesting terms. Most of the time we associate them with the financial cost of something but when we’re talking of a Life Story it’s important to consider the emotional and physical effort along with any financial cost.

This is not only the cost of the actual production of the Life Story but also the cost of what a Life Story means emotionally to you and those around you. Take a moment to look over all of your life, what has been of value, in all the different forms and compare it with the relevant costs of producing a life story to ensure that those things aren’t lost.

Costs of producing a Life Story.

A Life Story produces several benefits and the associated costs from three main groups.

* Financial out of pocket expenses

* Emotional issues and benefits

* Physical effort and time

And the costs can be paid before or after it’s too late to capture a Life Story, with the cost and benefits being different depending on if you have acted earlier or not.

Insignificant financial costs

Often the first consideration is the financial cost of a Life Story particually if you intend to use the skills of a professional.

Just for a moment consider what has been your income over your lifetime and what have you spent all those hundreds of thousands of dollars on? How many meals, clothes and holidays have you spent money on because it was important? How much money have you given away out of good will, invested and grown in worthy projects and how much have you spent on whimsical things, just because you could? What are the things that all that income has been spent on?

As a very loose comparison of what is earned over a lifetime… Based on income of $50000/year, over say 40 years, in today’s dollar value, a lifetime’s earnings is somewhere around 2 million dollars. When you look at the financial cost of recording a Life Story, even if you were to contact a professional, it’s insignificant to the money that has moved through you hands over that lifetime. And if you were to use some of the stratigies and ideas that are mentioned here at Create Your Life Story the cost can be considerably less. Compared to a lifetime of income and expenditure, capturing a Life Story is an insignificant financial cost.

Emotional costs are expensive

A higher price and one that is impossible to measure is the emotional cost of a Life Story. What are you going to have to face up to in recording a Life Story? Are there issues that need to be discussed or avoided and how do you feel about these points? Maybe these emotional issues are too expensive to pay and you have to let it be or maybe the benefits out-way any angst that you will feel.

Effort of finding the time

At it’s most simple, the physical effort of recording a Life Story is just several hours of conversations captured while an audio recorder is located nearby. That’s it – Sit down, have a chat and let the recorder do it’s job, game over. Or you can take some of the ideas that are here on the site and in the free e-Book Recording Life Stories to help you and with just a little more effort, produce a much better quality recording worthy of sharing. The highest physical cost is in finding the time to set aside.

Costs for not paying early

But there’s a price for inaction.

Until a certain date all costs will be a blend of financial, emotional and physical, with a return of a story to share forever. After that date though, it’s no longer possible to pay any price to get the story, it’s forever gone. The cost of your inaction will have to be paid with regret of lost opportunit...

The excuses driven by underwhelmed motivation

You know that capturing a Life Story in some form is a great idea and maybe even occasionally at 2:30am you have had a little panic attack knowing that you need to get underway, NOW!

…But then the moment passes and, well, you just feel a little underwhelmed again. There’s always time to do it later anyway.

The underwhelm is really just having a lack of motivation to do what you know needs to be done. If you had the motivation you’d be excited and you’d find every opportunity to get the job done and all the excuses would fall by the wayside.

The underwhelm is the motivation, the overwhelm is the excuse.

Welcome to the Overwhelm

The lack of motivation is the crux of the matter but it’s the excuses that drives that lack of motivation and the excuses can be overwhelming giving you a justification to procrastinate.

* No one really cares

* I won’t get any return from my efforts

* I don’t understand the technology

* I don’t know what to talk about

* My life doesn’t matter

* I have too many things to talk about

* Where do I start?

* It’s too hard

* I don’t have anyone to talk to

* There is still plenty of time

* There are more important things at the moment

* I’ve done nothing noteworthy

…And the list goes on.

4 types of excuse

We all make excuses for what we’re not motivated to do. Often it all seems too hard and we feel completely overwhelmed but really there are only four categories that the above list falls into and there are ways to resolve each of them.

Content

You may not have done anything noteworthy to the greater world but your family, above all else will care about your life and what you know. Even the lives of the larger than life individuals are primarily made up of everyday events with just the occasional grand adventure. Everyone has a life time of stories to talk about and the younger generation is always fascinated in those stories.

Support

The technology is now simpler, cheaper and easier to use than at any time in history but if you still find it too challenging, look around your family and community for some assistance. There are also people you know who may also be able to sit in conversation with you to discuss you Life Story. It is always easier to record a Life Story with someone else.

Reward

Take a moment to consider why you really want to record this Life Story. I don’t mean all the issues about the importance of capturing it but the actual return that you’re going to receive for all this effort. Things like praise, respect, understanding, immortality, forgiveness, etc. These are the “return on investment”, of your time and energy and if you don’t understand what you need and that it may be some time before you receive it, your motivation will fade.

You may never, Ever, get this return on your effort! Are you happy to know that it may only be appreciated long after you’re gone, much as you would appreciate discovering an old 78rpm record of a long departed r...

A life story for your family and the world

So you want to produce a life story of someone… Maybe your own story, maybe someone else. And you want to record this life story because there is some information that you feel is worth capturing for posterity.

Maybe they were involved in some interesting events in history, or saw many and varied things that few people have the chance to see or maybe they know somethings about the people in your world that no one else knows. All good reasons for wanting to capture the memories of a person but what is the ultimate reason for going to all this effort?

After it’s recorded, then what?

Once the recording is captured you have half the project completed but if this is all you do, you may as well not have started in the first place.

The reason for creating a Life Story project is ultimately to share the information with others, enabling them to hear and learn about someone else’s world.

A Life Story is for other people to know.

It’s in the sharing and hearing a Life Story, where the real value exists. Without being heard a Life Story has no value but in sharing, these stories will live for as long as people listen. If you think recording a Life Story is a good idea it will be because you want to have others hear it, that’s the only valid reason for it’s existence.

Three groups want to hear your story

Peoples interest in your Life Story will vary, depending on interests and fall into one of three groups

* Immediate family

* Relatives and close friends

* Greater community

Initially those interested will be the immediate family who know and care about you and their involvement in your Life Story. These are the family members who are most emotionally involved with you and have the most detail knowledge and interest in your Life Story.

Then there will be your more distant relatives who share in the same heritage or the associates of your life who mixed and shared events with you during your lives. They don’t need to know everything but they have a general interest in how life has been for you.

Lastly, the greater community who aren’t emotionally involved and possibly don’t even know you but are keenly interested in the experiences of someone, “On the ground” during the events of a particular time. These are the historians and social scientists of the future who will be looking through this information to understand how life was during particular eras.

Locking a Life Story away

If you have concerns for privacy and feel that your Life Story is something that you want to keep close, to only your immediate family, you have several options for sharing. These include sending the digital files via email, sharing on removable systems such as CD’s and USB thumb drives or similar or using a private web site that requires password logins to access.

Some people never think that anyone, beyond immediate family would be interested, so never consider having a Life Story available for the greater community. What a shame to lock a story away only to be available to the few who know about it and not be available for the many who may be looking for information but will never find it because it secreted away.

Unless you’re active in physically distributing your Life Story it will simple fade from existence over time as components are lost. This will never happen with a fully maintained web site.

If privacy is of serious concern it’s also possible to use a combination of publicly available information while keeping any sensitive information held back until a future date or only shared in private using limited sharing techniques.