How to Write about Your Own Life

Lifewriting is a fairly modern term for some forms of creative non-fiction, although writing about your own life, and the things that touch it, has is actually one of the oldest genres known to reading man. Even now, it grows all the time on the web, especially in the form of blogposts continually expanding the genre and (hopefully) enhancing its quality. 

With this expansion comes all the many sub-divisions.  People used to just talk about 'biography', 'autobiography' and the travel writer', but non-fiction, in its broadest sense, includes all writing that is not entirely of the imagination. Lifewriting is factual writing with literary form, flowing out of a desire to create writing that can speak to the heart, as well as the head. 

The story of the writer’s life can take many shapes and forms, from a simple diary, usually written every day or so, to a full-length recollection of an entire life and times.

Writing about your own life can be extremely liberating; it can develop your voice, add to range and depth and free up new ideas. 

• Try keeping  a journal for seven consecutive days. Use freewriting to enter your daily routine, (you can find out about it if you click on this link) your thoughts on your relationships with the people round you and what‘s happening in the outside world. If you can, continue to keep this journal as you go through the course. It will help generate ideas for your life writing.

Penelope Lively

In a chapter entitled ‘The Children in the Sampler’ from her book A House Unlocked, the novelist Penelope Lively uses the furniture and artefacts from the house she loved as a child to take the reader on a journey of social history, widening each chapter into a personal essay. In this extract, she tells us of the London evacuees who stayed in the Somerset house:

  

  Sitting on the carpet in the Golsonscott drawing-room, I heard a thin dry man’s voice coming from the wireless and wondered why we all had to sit in silence and why everyone looked so solemn.

    At Wiliton station, four miles away, the war had begun two days before. Four hundred school children and their teachers arrived, allocated to the Watchet area; a similar number went to Minehead...

    My grandmother took it on the chin and set about reorganizing the house. The old nursery and night rooms were made over to the party, along with the attic rooms that had formerly been servants’ quarters. The evacuees ate in the servants’ sitting-room next to the kitchen. At night the children must have lain staring up at the night-nursery ceiling on which Margaret Tarrant fairies flew around a midnight blue sky spangled with stars. The children came from Stepney, a borough where around 200,000 people lived at an average density of twelve per dwelling. From there to Golsoncott. I assume that they did the normal and natural thing – howled for their mothers and wet their beds...

    A woman such as Joyce’s mother may well have had too many children because advice on birth control was not readily available. She was very likely anaemic – out of a sample of 1,250 women questioned by the Women’s Health Enquiry Committee of 1933, 558 had been diagnosed as anaemic...anyone who has been temporarily anaemic knows what it feels like – continuous lassitude, being out of breath if you climb the stairs or walk uphill, permanent fatigue. Before the war, huge numbers of working-class women felt like that all the time. Joyce’s mother may have suffered from headaches, constipation and haemorrhoids, rheumatism, carious teeth, gynaecological problems, varicose veins, ulcerated legs, phlebitis – conditions all found to have a high incidence among this sample of women. She was lucky if she sat down for half an hour between rising at 6.30 a.m. and winding up at 9 p.m.

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  Look at how Lively used her own memories to expand her story. Try this technique to free up your imagination and tap into the deepest levels of your thought processes. Choose a topic, and write freely about some event that you remember being caught up in. It doesn’t have to be a ‘great event’ – you could use the memory of being in a New Year’s crowd or attending a wedding. Try to create a piece that picks up the atmosphere of your event and your feelings about it.
• Allow the words to freewrite themselves onto the page – try not to think at all about what you’re going to say next.
• When you come to a natural end, read your work through. Sort out the free flow of your thoughts, working at balancing logical facts with the emotion of the piece.
• If any of the exercises stimulate painful or conflicting thoughts or memories, take a break. Bear in mind, though, that these sorts of memories will often produce the most powerful writing.
• Put the original draft away and begin a little research on the event itself, both that personal experience and events like this; their history and meaning. Go back to the draft and see in you can widen and refresh the piece without it ever looking as if you've 'seeded' the information you've gained into it. Wilton is a past master of doing this, but you can learn from the masters. 

The style and structure of life writing can be as experimental and literary as you please. Acclaimed works include Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood (2001), J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood (1997) and Things My Mother Never Told Me by Blake Morrison (2002).

Andy Miller was embarrassed about all the great books he hadn't read, so he set out to bring reading into his day-to-day life. His  decided that he hadn't read anywhere near the number of great books that he habitually claimed to have read and needed to redress the balance. A heroic stance was adopted: "to integrate books – to reintegrate them – into an ordinary day-to-day existence". A List of Betterment was drawn up, a dosage worked out (50 pages a day) and soon his long commute to work was spent wrestling not with sudoku but Bukowski, Tolstoy and Lampedusa.

The late Hilary Mantel's autobiography Giving up the Ghost details her fight with chronic endometriosis among other life events. It is a great start if you'd like to read how other writers have examined and detailed their lives. 

    Boys are what I have to fight at school. If you can’t join them, beat them. I am out of the babies’ class and released from the stinking stone pen beside the latrines, out into the broad playground under the dripping trees. I come home and say, ‘Grandad, a big boy hit me.’ He says, ‘Lovie, now I’ll teach you how to fight.’ He teaches me fair tactics, nothing low. But when the next fight comes I walk away with a different result. It’s too easy! Punch to solar plexus, big boy folds. His head is within range. ‘As you please, now,’ Grandad says, ‘keep it easy, no need to make a fist. Try a big slap across the chops.’ I do it. Tears spring from the eye of the big boy. He reels, clutching his diaphragm, away from the railings. Oh Miss, she hit me, she hit me!

    I am amazed: less by my performance, than by his; his alarming wails, his bawls. I don’t want to do this again unless I have to, I decide. In only a year I will have to go to confession and learn to examine my conscience. What I am experiencing is the beginning of compunction; but is it the awakening of a sense of sin, or is it the

beginning of femininity? Do boys have compunction? I don’t think so. Knight errant? They have compunction for all the weak and oppressed. Shame is somewhere among my feelings about this incident. I don’t know who it belongs to: to me, or the boy I’ve beaten, or some ghostly, fading boy I still carry inside.

 Some autobiographies explore a remarkable experience. This might be a single incident or period in a person’s life, for example the moment they achieved their life’s ambition, or their part in a catastrophe. My Life in Orange by Tim Guest is a first-hand account of a child growing up in the Osho movement, whose members dye their clothes orange:

    The evidence has taken me years to gather together. I can look at these artifacts now and see myself; but in the late 1980s, as a teenager living with my mother in North London, after the communes ended, I had no evidence of our history. In a small fire out in our back garden my mother burned her photos, her orange clothes, her mala necklace with its 108 sandalwood beads and locket with a picture of Bhagwan. Despite my pleas to let me sell it and keep the money, she even burned the bright gold rim she had paid a commune jeweller to fix around her mala locket in the later, more style-conscious commune years. A week after the fire, I borrowed a pair of pliers, prised the silver rim off my own mala and threw the beads away.

• Think about the milestones in your life. These do not have to be world-shattering to make effective writing. Rather they will be events that are important – memorable – to you. Go for moments, encounters, events, experiences that still raise emotions in you when you think about them. 
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• Note down at least half a dozen of these, perhaps in rough chronological order
• Now adjust the order, putting the events that still raise the strongest emotions at the top.
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• Choose one of these milestones and freewrite about it for 15 minutes. Try to:

• write from the heart, from your own point of view

• include relevant imagery in any of the five senses

• engage the reader in how your emotions are re-emerging – and how they felt then

• slow down time as you describe the past, getting close up.

• Don’t be afraid to voice your opinion or perceptions.
• Return to your list and choose further options if this exercise is pertinent to your personal life writing.
  
  
  

Do post your thoughts on your own writing here, and let me know what you thought of my exercises, too.