If you’ve decided to write the story of your life (memoirs), there are a few things to consider which may be useful.

How much you want to write will help you decide what to create. An autobiography is your entire life story – your childhood, family life, teenage years and so forth. Writing this could be a lot of fun, but may not be of wider interest.

Instead, you may choose to write a memoir, which focuses on a period of your history that could be of interest to an audience. Perhaps you’ve had an unusual job, or lived abroad during a turbulent time. Or maybe you had an ordinary job made special by the people you met.

How Much Should You Include in Memoirs?

Sometimes you might have had more than one experience that you’d like to share. In this case, think about producing several memoirs, with each one dealing with a particular time frame and experience. Depending on the topics, each memoir could appeal to a different readership.

You should try to be as honest as possible when writing your life story – don’t embellish the truth to make yourself more exciting, or say that you experienced something first hand when you didn’t. Apart from not sounding convincing, you can be caught out in a fib, and this is even easier in the time of quick internet searches.

However, you can amalgamate some personal events for dramatic effect, change names or combine two people into a composite, or even write under a pseudonym. This can be one option if you’re worried about betraying a confidence or hurting someone’s feelings.

Finding Readers for Your Memoirs

A recent article in Writers’ Forum magazine had some good suggestions on finding people who will engage with your story. You could write your memoir in shorter sections and submit these to magazines. There are a number of regional and national magazines which look back fondly on the past and are always happy to receive people’s recollections. See if there’s one in your area which may like to share what life was like a couple of decades ago.

Similarly, a specialist magazine for your field or industry may run a series of articles or columns from a retired expert, or if there has been renewed interest and media coverage of the type of work you did (the NHS is topical again at the minute) this could be another angle.

You could produce a series of articles, get paid for them and build a following who will then by your book, which will be a collection of the articles.

The saying goes that we’ve all got a story inside us. Rather than struggling to come up with an idea, why not write about yourself? Fact is often better than fiction!