Plenty of people want to write down the story of their life and never get past the first page. It is rarely a shortage of memories. A whole life is simply too big a thing to start on, and nobody knows where the beginning is. Here are a few plain ways in that need no special tools.
Start in a house, not on a birthday
"I was born in such a year in such a city" is a good line for a form and a poor one for a book. Start somewhere you can stand instead: the house you grew up in, your street, your school. Walk into one room of that house in your head and write what you see, what it smells like and who is there. One memory brings the next.
One memory at a time
Do not try to write your whole life at once. Write one short memory at a time: a day, a person, a thing that happened. Half a page is plenty. Write a little every day and in a few months you will have something no single sitting would ever have produced.
If writing is hard, talk
Many people sit down with a pen and go blank, then cannot stop once they start telling it. If that is you, record yourself on your phone the way you would tell it to a friend, and transcribe it later or have someone do it. Your voice, your jokes and the phrases only you use are all in the recording, and they are exactly what tends to disappear when you write at a desk.
Sketch a simple timeline
Take one sheet of paper and write the chapters of your life across it: childhood, growing up, school and university, work, marriage, children, a move to another country if there was one, grandchildren, travel, and what you enjoy doing these days. Jot a few words under each. Then write the memories in whatever order they come. The timeline is what lets you put them in order afterwards.
Let your photographs help
Open an old album, the trips, weddings, parties and ordinary days, and for each picture write what happened that day, not only who is in it. Photographs bring back things you have not thought about in years.
Let someone ask you questions
Answering a good question is far easier than facing a blank page. Ask one of your children or a friend to send you one question a week. Our list of questions to ask your parents was written for exactly this and works just as well for yourself.
Write the way you talk
Your book does not need to read like a novel. Write simply, the way you would tell it, so that anyone reading it feels you are telling it to them. Editing means fixing mistakes, not changing your voice.
When the writing is ready
If you write in a right-to-left language such as Persian and live outside Iran, the file has to be typeset right to left and the book bound on the right. Printing a Persian book outside Iran covers what goes wrong.
If you would rather just talk
That is what Moonray is for. Moonray is an AI interviewer, and it says so in its first message. On WhatsApp or Telegram it asks you one question at a time, in English or Persian (Farsi), and you answer by voice note or text whenever you like. It asks the next question from what you just said and comes back later to anything that was skipped. Your memories are written in your own words and put in the order you lived them. You read every one, change anything you want, and nothing prints until you say yes.
$149 gives you a year to tell your stories, a digital book and one full-colour printed hardcover, with shipping to most countries included. The first two weeks are free and need no card.