Huminz Guide

How to Write a Life Story

Almost nobody gives up on a life story because the writing is hard. They give up because “write my life story” is too large a thing to face on any given evening. This is the method we recommend instead: stop treating it as a book, and treat it as a collection of single memories, written one at a time, in any order.

1Lay down the milestones first

Before writing a single paragraph, list the dated events of the life. Born. Moved. School. First job. Married. Children. The losses. Retirement. Fifteen or twenty lines is plenty to begin with.

This takes an evening, requires no writing talent whatsoever, and changes the nature of the task. A blank page asks you to invent a structure and fill it at the same time. A list of twenty dated markers has already done the first half, and every gap between two markers is a small, specific writing job instead of an enormous vague one.

Do not try to be complete. You are building scaffolding, not an index. Things you have forgotten will arrive later, and they arrive more easily once there is something for them to attach to.

A milestone is one line, and it is allowed to be dull:

1946 — born, Manchester Royal Infirmary
1958 — Saturday job at the butcher on Stockport Road
1967 — married Sarah
1971 — Ruth born
1983 — the move to Leeds

That is five minutes of work and it is already a spine. Notice that none of those lines is writing: there is no description, no reflection and nothing you could get wrong.

2Put them in order and see what surfaces

A list is useful. A list in chronological order does something a list cannot: it shows you the shape of a life, and it reminds you what sits between the entries.

People almost always add three or four events they had forgotten as soon as they see the years laid out. The ordering also settles a question that otherwise recurs constantly — where does this memory belong? — so nothing has to be filed twice, and you can stop keeping the sequence in your head.

This is also the moment to notice the empty decades. A life with nothing between 1974 and 1983 is not a life in which nothing happened. It is a decade nobody has asked about yet.

3Write one memory, not a chapter of a book

Pick the memory you would tell a friend over dinner, and write it the way you would say it out loud. Four hundred words is a real chapter. Two hundred is a real chapter.

Nobody reading a family story wants a complete, balanced account of a decade. They want the afternoon your father taught you to drive in an empty car park, and what he said when you stalled it. Write the afternoon. The decade takes care of itself once enough afternoons exist.

This is also the honest answer to writer’s block: the block is almost always caused by the size of the thing being attempted. Nobody is blocked on “describe the kitchen of the house you grew up in”.

What the difference looks like

Most first drafts of a life story read like a summary:

“My father worked hard to provide for us and we didn’t have much, but we were happy.”

Every family has written that sentence, and it tells a reader nothing. The same memory, written as one afternoon:

“He came in at six with the smell of the foundry still on his jacket, and my mother would make him take it off at the back door. On Fridays he brought a bag of broken biscuits from the factory shop, and we were allowed to choose in order of age.”

The second version is not better writing. It is simply closer to the ground. Specifics are easier to write than generalities, not harder, because you are remembering rather than composing.

4Let photographs do the remembering

A photograph is the most reliable memory trigger there is. Put one in front of you and write what is outside the frame: who took it, what happened an hour later, what the room smelled like, who is missing from it and why.

Doing this also solves the commonest regret in any family’s collection — a box of faces nobody can name any more. A photograph with its story attached survives the people who remember it. A photograph on its own becomes decoration within two generations.

If you only ever do one thing from this guide, do this: go through the shoebox, and for each photograph worth keeping, write three sentences and the names of everyone in it.

5Ask the people who were there

Other people hold pieces of the story you simply do not have, and they hold them from a different angle. Ask specific questions rather than “tell me about your childhood”, which nobody can answer. What did your mother do on a Sunday? What was your first wage, and what did it buy? Who did you share a room with? What frightened you?

Ask two people about the same event and expect the accounts to differ. That is not a problem to resolve — both versions are worth keeping, and the disagreement is often the most human thing in the story.

If you want the questions themselves, we have written out a hundred of them, grouped by era: 100 questions to ask your parents.

One technique outperforms all the others: put an object in their hands. A photograph, a ring, a tool, a medal. People who have nothing to say about “the war” have a great deal to say about the tin they kept their tobacco in.

6Record the voice, not just the words

If you are writing an older relative’s story, record them talking. Transcribe it later, or never — the recording itself is the valuable artefact.

Grandchildren who never met the person will listen to two minutes of a voice far more readily than they will read twenty pages. A voice also carries the hesitations, the laugh and the accent that writing flattens out. Phones are good enough; equipment is not the obstacle.

Label every recording the same day you make it. Unlabelled audio on a phone is the modern version of the unnamed photograph.

The practical side of this — permission, the setup, running the session, and what to do with the file afterwards — is its own guide: how to record a relative telling their story.

7Write down the places precisely

Streets are renamed. Houses are demolished. Borders move, and villages empty. Name the places exactly — the town, the street, the factory, the school — because in fifty years that detail is the part a descendant cannot reconstruct from anywhere else.

Precise places are also what make a story legible to someone who never knew the person. “A terraced house in Moss Side” tells a stranger more than “our old house” ever will.

8Put the life back into its era

No life happens in isolation. The songs on the radio, the news, the films, the prices and the politics of a year are all part of what a person lived through — and they work as memory aids. Seeing what was playing in 1956 reliably shakes loose memories that direct questions do not.

Historical context is also what turns a private account into something a reader who never knew the person can feel. A chapter about a first job in 1962 reads differently when the year is in the room with it.

This is the part Huminz does for you: for every year you write about, it shows what was happening in the world beside your chapter — news, music, film, television, sport and science — in a panel called Meanwhile. You can see what that looks like without signing up for anything.

9Decide what to leave out, then share it

A life story is not a confession and not a legal record. You are allowed to leave things out, and deciding what to omit is part of the writing rather than a failure of nerve. Write the version you are willing to have read.

Then share it, earlier than feels comfortable. A link to one sibling, one chapter at a time. Work that is read gets finished, and nothing sustains a long project like one person asking what happened next.

How long does this actually take?

Honest answer: the milestones take one evening. A chapter takes twenty minutes to an hour, depending on how much you fuss. Most people who finish write one or two chapters a week, and at that rate a life with thirty chapters in it takes about four months.

It almost never happens in a single concentrated effort, and projects run that way are the ones that stall. Two chapters on a Sunday evening, kept up over a season, beats a fortnight of good intentions every time.

What if the person has already died?

Many people start at exactly this point — which is the hardest version of the job, and still worth doing.

Work outwards from documents and photographs rather than memory: certificates, letters, service records, the backs of pictures, anything with a date on it. Build the milestone list from those first, because dates are the part you cannot guess, then ask every surviving relative the same few questions and write down each answer separately, including where they disagree.

Where you do not know something, say so in the text. “We think they married in 1951, though nobody is certain” is a perfectly good sentence, and it is far better than a confident invention that someone later discovers was wrong. A story with honest gaps in it stays trustworthy; one with invented detail does not.

Writing about a parent rather than yourself changes the job in ways worth knowing before you start — the facts come from documents, the gaps have to be admitted, and the siblings have their own versions. That has its own guide: how to write your mother’s or father’s life story.

If you take three things from this

• Scaffolding before prose. Twenty dated markers in one evening, and not a sentence of narrative until they exist.
• One memory at a time. Four hundred words, written the way you would say it.
• Every photograph gets its names and its three sentences. This is the part that cannot be done later by anyone else.