I recently read a small book espousing a start entirely different from what I have suggested, so here for your consideration, are ideas from Immortalize Your Life by Marc Van Buskirk. He recommends starting with your earliest memories and writing, decade by decade, the highlights of each ten years. Throughout the (brief) book, the author gives illustrations from his own book and suggests that you duplicate them. “All you have to do is change the time, places, people, things, and events.”

By all means use this approach if it works for you. There is no one way to start writing about your life. Based on the experience of helping my parents, I suggest starting with your most vivid memory, the story you tell most often, the recollection that haunts you, the happiest or saddest or most traumatic time. As I have written elsewhere, my father got hung up starting his story exactly right and wrote that beginning over and over.

The important thing is START!

I’ll be gone camping to the Columbia River in Washington with Zumwalt cousins until July 8. Meanwhile here’s another hint to get you started writing your own memoir or helping someone else write theirs.

Carry a small notebook so whenever a memory comes you can jot it down. Just a word or two will do for now. You might want to start by dividing the notebook with post-its or paper clips. Maybe “early”, “mid-life”, and “later” will do for now. Or before and after big events such as marriage, divorce, children, etc. My memoir was first divided into “Colorado”, “Mexico”, and “Arizona”, three places I’ve lived.

Use whatever divisions work for now, knowing they can be changed. Divisions serve simply to remind you that memoir doesn’t have to be composed chronologically. Think of one story at a time for now. Don’t be intimidated by the idea of writing an entire book.

For anyone who has urged a parent or other relative to record their memories before it’s too late, or who has considered writing their own memoir, I want to offer suggestions from my own experience.

Family members for years encouraged my parents to write or at least record details of living through the dust bowl days in eastern Colorado, struggling through poverty and hardship to achieve their dream of a ranch in the mountains and then Dad’s calling to be a minister. When Dad knew his time was limited, he started his life story over and over. He was using a word processor, but didn’t understand how to edit the same pages as much as necessary.

Before he died, Mother sent pages and notes, poems and scribbling, pinned together with straight pins, since she was constantly sewing. When I got it pieced together it covered only about the first 20 years of his long life, plus some later poems and a few other incidents.

My first hint would be not to worry about how to start. As I urged Dad, write one story at a time. Start with a vivid memory or a story you have often told.

More later–my own memoir, In Pursuit of Dreams, has just been sent for proofing.