write my autobiography

I think the first step for me is going to be a general outline + stories I want to be sure to include.

... so an autobiography would just be one big summary of my diaries. Well-written, hopefully. I don’t write much so it’d be good practice.

As I grow older, I find that I lose memories of special events, objects, people, etc. and I want this to not only help me with my identity, but also with my memories.

.....up to 26,000 words. I’d like my final autobiography to be around 65,000 to 70,000 words. However, by final I mean final. Hopefully a few more chapters of life remain.

The hardest part is definitley starting. I am away in France at the moment with my family and every night I write and so far I am up to 43,000 words. I expect to get 50,000 completed by the end of this week.

Unfortunately I left diaries and work books at work in 1990 and they would have been very helpful!

Thought I would sign on and comment as there ws a dear lady al on her own – b encouraged!!

Tim

Autobiographies can be tricky. Some people are able to describe themselves adequately (at least in their own mind) with their epitaph, such as Thomas Jefferson. Others need 200,000 words. So I set out to survery some autobios and memoirs so I can get a better grasp for how long my own should be. I found Amazon’s supremely helpful “text stats” page, and did far too much research. Here’s what I found. The percentage given is the percent of books with fewer words. From this we can derive that the average memoir/autobiography at Amazon is roughly 70,000 words.

Elie Weisel….......32,000 26%
Benjamin Franklin… 64,000 48%
Jimmy Carter…..... 82,000 64%
Johnny Cash…...... 94,000 71%
John McCain…..... 114,000 80%
Ulysses S. Grant… 119,000 82%
Richard Feynman…..125,000 78%
Frederick Douglass..129,000 80%
Mark Twain….......142,000 88%
Frank McCourt…....148,000 85%
John Glenn…...... 149,000 90%
Malcolm X…....... 152,000 90%
Vince Lombardi….. 244,000 93%

“If you would not be forgotten,
as soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write things worth reading,
or do things worth the writing.”
-Ben Franklin’s Autobiography

My life’s first important book has become the inspiration for summarizing it.

Well, I haven’t even started this goal yet. I don’t know where to start. Well I mean, the beginning would be the obvious place to start…I think that’s the most difficult part of writing though-starting it. This may be one of my goals that’s gonna have to roll over to next years list…oh well :)

Anyone else want to join me in working on this goal? I’m going to end up filling the entire page alone otherwise!

I feel like I haven’t made all that much progress during week because I’ve generally been too weary to do much work so I’ve been working hard this weekend to compensate. My word count has gone up quite a bit (now on 31000 words) but it’s all raw. I need to do a lot of editing and reordering but that’s less fun than writing and after a long day/week at work it’s one of the last things I want to do.

I will have a week to myself between finishing working at starting back at University, so hopefully I can use that time to edit and feel more motivated about it. My aim is to have my life up to and including the age of 16 written and full edited by the end of the summer, but not transcribed. Transcribing will take a lot of time but it will be less tiring so that’s something I can do during whatever free time I get during term time.

I also don’t know when I’ll get chance to finish up this goal. The worst-case scenario is that the project gets abandoned between September and the following June, but I don’t really want it to come to that. I know that I’m more likely to finish it if I’ve broken the back of it already; it’ll be a less daunting task then.

...but I seem to be the only person working towards it at the moment. I’m feeling a little guilty about cluttering up so much of the “write my autobiography” page alone!

Anyway, back on topic. I’m on about 18,000 words now. I was worried that it wouldn’t all fit into the book I bought by the time I finished, but after a quick calculation I reckon that I’ll need 80,000 words to fill the book. I might reach that, but I don’t mind spilling over into another one, I just didn’t want to end up with a “volume 3 of 10” type situation.

I realised today that if I actually want to get this goal ticked off within the next year then I’m going to have to write the bulk of it over the next two months because when University starts again I won’t have enough time. Problem is, I’m working full time during the holidays as well so I just don’t have enough time to devote to this as I’d like.

I am enjoying writing it though. I’ve been digging out old books and diaries for inspiration and it’s quite fun reading through them. I’ve stumbled across a few things that I’d completely forgotten about!

Every morning during the commute to work I write. I pick an area of my life that I haven’t covered yet and write down everything that I can remember about it. I often don’t finish it, but that gives me something to edit and to work from later.

I’ve covered the first seven years of my life so far (although I have no memory of the first two and a half years, and my other memories from that age are far more fuzzy and faded) and I’m already on around 12,000 words. I’m trying to write in chronological order and I want to get stared on the write-up, now that I’ve already written about the earliest years of my life, but the problem is that I’m still thinking of new things to add. I’m raring to go but I also don’t want to write it all out and then remember something that I should have added.