“Where do I start?” (Looking for the newsletter? Sign up here.) That’s the first question I hear from people when they’ve decided to record their life story. And it’s no wonder, considering that the raw material for a life story book consists of a lifetime of memories—all those people and places and experiences we want to share with our family and friends. How do we wrastle it all onto the paper? We don’t. Just because something happened doesn’t mean we should write about it. This may seem like a contradiction to what we talked about in the last episode. That's when we talked about gathering all the random fragments of memory. But not all of those will lead to a story, or be developed into a story in their own right. Instead, think of your memories as a smorgasbord, a buffet of tasty dishes. You don’t expect to eat everything. Instead, you pick and choose. “But that still doesn’t answer my question. Where do I start?” Right. Sorry. I was distracted by the word “buffet.” It made me think of my high school father-daughter dance, going through the buffet line with my friends Lori and Tina and their dads. The strange sight of grown men dancing to Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock n’ Roll.” The weird vending machine in the bathroom that shot out a cloud of perfume for 75 cents. We angled ourselves to get maximum coverage, then spent the rest of the evening trying to wash it off. This was St. Louis, 1982. If I were writing my life story, maybe that mini-anecdote would make it onto the page, maybe not. But I shared it with you as an example of how “Where do I start?” isn’t the question we should be asking. If you’re thinking about writing your life story, I promise, you’ve already started the pleasurable part—recalling your memories. You’ve likely thought of experiences or events you want to include, important people, places, traditions, reflections. Maybe you’ve even jotted down some of them. But even if you haven’t picked up a pen or a laptop yet, the real question isn’t “Where do I start?” but “What do I do next?” Gather and Sort There’s this cool thing in classical rhetoric called inventio, and it’s all about finding what you want to include in a piece of writing (or, that speech you’re giving over at the Forum). We life story writers have it much easier; all our material is right there in our head. Still, we can learn something from Aristotle and his gang. One of the tools they used during the inventio phase was the topoi. Otherwise known as commonplaces, topoi are the questions rhetors asked themselves to expand their thinking about something and prompt new insights. Topoi, which translates roughly to “places,” is a metaphor. Picture an empty cargo ship traveling along the coastline, stopping at ports to take on cargo. The ports are the topoi; the cargo is the stuff the rhetor gathers to use in a speech or essay. It’s a helpful concept for life story writing, one that we can employ both metaphorically and literally. In my newsletter—and by the way, if you haven’t signed up for it, but you’d like occasional emails with tips on how to write your life story, or the life story of a loved one, you can do that at thestoryscribe.com. You’ll see a email newsletter signup form. Or look at the show notes for this episode to find a link. For now, I’m sending something every three to four weeks, so you shouldn’t feel overwhelmed. I respect your time and I don’t want to flood your inbox. Today’s writing activity In the last newsletter, I suggested you draw a simple timeline and populate it with the events of your life. Today, I’m going to ask you to create an additional layer, the placeline. This can be part of your timeline or a separate line altogether. Or, if you don’t have a good memory for dates, scrap the timeline and use this instead. You’ll still have a rough chronology for your life but without the burden of trying to remember exact years. Now, mark the line with the major locations of your life (your literal topoi).

Photo courtesy of Sam Erwin Transcript: Hi, listeners, welcome to this episode of "Your Story, Your Legacy." I’m Amy Woods Butler, founder and owner of The Story Scribe. I’ve been helping people write their life story and family history since 2010. And I want to help you write yours. Or help you write the life story of a beloved family member, so that future generations can know about the people and the family they come from. In the last episode, I explained what I do as a professional personal historian, and how I help clients who want a book written but don’t want to tackle the writing themselves. From this point forward on the podcast, the focus is going to be on you doing the writing, and the things that I’ve learned along the way that can help you with that. Because I get it, writing your own life story can be overwhelming. But you can do it! It’s a matter of taking it a step at a time. And I’m going to be giving you suggestions on what those steps can be. The writing suggestion from last time was to take a look at your first or middle name, and jot down some story or memory related to it. We didn’t want to include the last name, because when you do that, it’s too easy to slip into the territory of genealogy. I love genealogy, I think it can be great fun, but genealogy is about gathering the data—names and places and dates birth, etc—and what we’re doing is gathering the STORIES. I told you I’d give you an example with my own name. I come from a family of two kids, my older sister and me. My sister was born in 1964, and the family history has it that my mom got to pick her first name, and my dad got to choose the middle name, and then the same for me two years later. My sister is Stephanie Cassandra—Stephanie from my mom, Cassandra from my dad—and I’m Amy Celeste. Mom’s choice, Amy, Dad’s choice, Celeste. Now, you’re probably thinking, that’s not a real story, or who cares? It’s just a trifle. And we all have them. You’ll see when you start thinking about your life story, and the memories you want to share, these random bits will pop up. I like to think of our memory as a field of vision. And you know how you get floaters in your field of vision? The dots and squiggly lines? I think of these random bits as floaters in our memory’s field of vision. And I’m going to share with you a couple reasons why they can be valuable. Using random memories as openers In the case of the names, I might want to use this as an opener to the passage where I talk about my appearance on the scene. [On a side note: Don’t start your life story with “I was born on this date in this place.” It’s boring! You’ll turn off your readers. More importantly, it can lock you into the frame of mind that you have to give a factual chronolgy of your life. Chances are you’re going to tell your story chronolgically, but you don’t want it to be a “this-happened-then-this-happened” kind of story, the way small kids tell their stories or dreams or the plots of long kids’ movies. I’m going to circle back to this at the end of the episode and give you more thoughts about this.] Using random snippets of memory to trigger bigger memories and insights The other way these floaters on our memory’s field of vision, these random bits, bitlets of memory or story, can be useful is where things get exciting. Because the random things will often trigger more substantial memories or the impulse to reflect on the meanings of things that happened. For instance, with the names, this random memory might lead me to think about the reasons why my parents chose the names they did. Or the historical context—In the mid-1960s, when my sister and I were both born, women in the US were still staying at the hospital for a week or so after giving birth. That’s some historical context, and I could even build that out more, and talk about how women were put to sleep during the birth, what they used to call “twilight sleep,” or about the cockamamie ideas they had about forumula ...

It’s a question I hear whenever I tell someone I’m a personal historian. “What is personal history?” they ask. Picture this: It’s the end of the day. The dishes are done, the dog fed and walked, the house quiet. You settle into a favorite chair with a new book and soon you’re lost in the narrative, a story now funny, now sad, characters big and small. Just like in real life. And somehow all of it—the events, the people, the places—seem familiar. Because this is your mom’s story. Or your granddad’s. Or Great-Uncle Roger’s. This, dear reader, is personal history. Sitting down to read a book about someone you love, written by a professional, told in your beloved relative’s voice. What if you’re the storyteller? What is personal history for you? How about for you, the storyteller, the family member giving the gift of your life’s stories? Surprisingly, the focus probably won’t rest so squarely on the final book. Yes, you’ll happily anticipate the day you’ll hold the book in hand. There may be tears, there will definitely by smiles. But the really profound experience for you, the storyteller, the thing that will engage your heart and mind, is the act of telling your stories during our interviews. We’re all storytellers at heart; it’s a condition of being human. It’s how we pass down our understanding of the world, how we connect with each other, how we make meaning out of the chaos of everyday living. Not to mention, it’s fun. But the fires we used to sit around to tell our stories have died out and the family meals happen less and less. We don’t share the family stories as much as we used to because we don’t spend as much time together, and when we do, a million things pop up to distract us. When you hire a personal historian, you’re engaging the services of someone who wants to hear your stories—the stories your family knows by heart and the ones you’ve forgotten but will re-discover during our journey together. You’ll experience the profound pleasure of revisiting in your memory the people, places, and events that shaped your life and made you who you are today. You’ll have the chance, so seldom encountered in today’s busy, disconnected world, to reflect back on the welter of experiences that make up a lifetime, to draw meaning and sense from them, to see  long-ago events and how they led you to where you are now. And, you’ll do it all in the companionship of a caring listener. What does a personal history book mean for future generations? Honestly, we can’t know. But here’s a question you might consider: If you had the opportunity to read an account of your relative’s life—a favorite grandparent, a great-grandparent you’ve only heard about but never knew—how would you feel? Most likely, you’d be eager to find that favorite chair and curl up with your ancestor’s book, right? To learn about what their life was like seventy-five or a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. What was life like in America during World War I? Russia before the Revolution? Life on a farm, on a reservation, in a far-flung village? How did your ancestors cook their meals? Travel? Celebrate holidays? What was it like attending a one-room schoolhouse? Or working in a coal mine? A factory? Who was their first kiss? How did they choose whom to marry, and how did they raise their kids? How did they build the family business? How did they know what they needed to know to live? And if they didn’t, how did they learn? We’re closer to our ancestors than we realize. But if their stories aren’t preserved, both the stories and the people remain a mystery to us. What is personal history to me, a personal historian? I still recall the first time I heard about the growing field of personal history. I was talking to my friend, Betty, a historian. Betty knew I loved to write, and that I was looking for something meatier than the assignments I’d been doing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other newspapers.