How to structure your life story -

Part one of a guide to structuring your story to give it direction and purpose

In this post I use the term ‘story’ to mean your life story. This may take the form of an autobiography - a chronicle of the events of your life, usually in chronological order, or a memoir - a book about a particular aspect or period of your life.

What do we mean by story structure?

Structure, in fiction, or life story writing, is the way the different elements of your story are organised: the order in which they come, and what gets grouped together. Things like the individual events and incidents; descriptions of people and places; conversations you had and your reflections about them.
 

Structure is created when, instead of just saying ‘This happened, and next that happened, etc, etc’, your story is organised with a clear sense of it ‘going somewhere’. That the protagonist–you!–has a purpose, for example, a journey of self-discovery, or triumph over adversity. That, over the course of your story, something will change; wanting to know what that change will be makes the reader keep reading.

Why does my story need structure?

As a ghostwriter, I like to use the term ‘life story’ instead of ‘autobiography’ or ‘memoir’, since both are also forms of storytelling. Aside from the fact that your story is based on real life, they’re no different to a fictional story. The best autobiographies and memoirs are as good a read as a novel–they grab the reader’s attention and make them care about what happens to the central character. They make them want to know what happened next, and how the story ends. Writers do this in a number of ways (use of dialogue and vivid descriptions among others) and by structuring their stories effectively.

At the simplest level, story structure avoids the ‘and then, and then’ syndrome. If you started writing your story one anecdote at a time (see my previous post), even if you’ve written some connecting pieces, and don’t go on to give it structure, there’s a risk that it will become dry and dull.

If you did use the one anecdote at a time approach, after writing several anecdotes you may have noticed a theme emerging–for instance, a particular interest you pursued, how you coped with loss or failure, or the kinds of people that influenced you. Creating a structure to your story will help you focus on those aspeccts and make it a much more compelling read.

Let’s be clear, there’s no rule that dictates you must do anything more than record the events of your life in chronological order if this suits your purpose. If all you want is to create a record of the events of your life for family history purposes, for example, then this simple structure may be quite adequate, but giving your story a shape will give it more momentum, and pull the reader along through the narrative.

Knowing your purpose

The issue of how you structure your story is intimately linked to your purpose in writing it. Which brings us to two important questions: 

      1. Who are you writing your story for?

          and

      2. Why are you writing it?

 
The answers to these questions, and their implications for structure, are inevitably intertwined, so answering the first often answers the second too. There are three possible answers to this first question: yourself, your family, a wider public:

 

1. Writing for yourself

Many people write their life story with no intention of sharing it with anyone. Perhaps it’s part of a process of reflecting on your life at a time of change or stability, when you’re reflecting on your journey to this point. Or maybe it’s a way of processing difficult or confusing experiences–and by the way, research shows that writing about our experiences can have powerful therapeutic benefits. Structuring your writing will undoubtedly help in this process, bringing out themes and patterns.

 

2. Writing for your family

As I mentioned above, if you’re writing your story as an exercise in preserving family history, a simple chronological structure might be perfectly adequate.

But perhaps you have a bigger purpose in telling your story for your family. Perhaps you want your children and grandchildren to understand your personal journey, how the events and influences of your life made you the person you are. Or maybe you want to set your story against the context of the time in which you grew up. It’s also likely that, by the time you’re undertaking this enterprise, you’ll have gained a fair bit of life experience and wisdom to pass on to future generations - how you dealt with the difficulties you encountered, what you’ve learnt about the world and people in general, for example.

These messages will all be easier to bring out with a structure that supports them as the focus of the story.

3. Writing for a wider audience

Many people who write their life story will come into one of the first two categories. But another group of life story writers are those who would like to get their story out to a wider public. Perhaps because they’ve had an unusual life, or have overcome difficulties and want to help others facing similar troubles by sharing their story. Or as a piece of social history, to throw light on a particular period in history through a personal story or to highlight a wrong or a political issue.


Be aware that this is a crowded market; there are many people out there self-publishing their life stories, and many of these sell very few copies. This particularly applies to autobiography. But you don’t know until you try, and if this is your goal, you most definitely need to create a story structure that engages readers’ attention and leaves them feeling changed by the end of your book.



In my next post I’ll be looking at some simple story structures you can use for your life story, so look out for it soon!