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How
To Write Your Life Story
Well-known
author, teacher and ghostwriter, shows you how to turn your memories and your
family history into an unforgettable story. Excerpts reproduced here with the
author's permission. EXCERPT
#1 :
Reasons
for writing your and your family's life story
When you chose to read
these excerpts, you decided to embark on a journey-- a journey through the past.
This will be a unique journey, one that no one else has ever taken. That's
because the road you will travel is built from your very own memories and
experiences-- your very personal reactions to all the situations and events
you'll be remembering.
"How can that
be," you ask? "I've led such an ordinary life." Well, that's what
you think! In reality, your life is unique. It is a bridge to the past. Your
life story is your finest legacy and an invaluable gift for your family.
You may remember what it
was like to trudge out to the outhouse on a cold winter's morning or to stoke
the furnace with coal. You may remember party lines on the telephone. Your
grandchildren, waking in a climate-controlled house and e-mailing their friends,
have no understanding of the world that shaped you and your values. And that is
a great loss to them.
We live today in a
migratory society. Instead of three generations living in the same town-- even
the same house-- families are now separated, spread across the entire globe.
Grandparents may rarely see their grandchildren. There is little opportunity to
sip lemonade together on the front porch (if there even is a front porch).
There's little opportunity today to tell the youngsters stories of their
family's past. Today's young people not only don't experience the same
lifestyles their parents and grandparents lived, too often they don't even know
about them. Most of today's kids exist in isolation from their own pasts. So that brings us to the first reason for writing your life story: to create a legacy for your family. Certainly this begins with the recording of your life but the farther back you can go in your family's history, the better. "One of the best things you can do for posterity is to go home and write your life history." This is what Kentucky historian Dr. Thomas D. Clark told adults attending one of his seminars. "It is the only true way for future generations to know what your lifestyle was really like." Seldom does the average person get the credit for changing the course of history, but it is the average person who transmits it most clearly. As
we go through these excerpts and do the exercises, you, too, will recapture your
earlier years in a new and larger context... You may discover that your personal
mission is as family historian. If so, these excerpts will be the
beginning of your most important life's work. Or this may be only the
first stepping stone toward a life of greater awareness, fulfillment and
satisfaction in a work which you are yet to
Next installment: Purpose in writing your story
by
See Patrika's courses at Absolute Write University: http://www.absolutewrite.com/classes/Vaughn/vaughn.htm
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