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Blog • Perfecting your Craft
Posted on Jun 05, 2024
How to Write an Autobiography: The Story of Your Life
About the author.
Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.
About Dario Villirilli
Editor-in-Chief of the Reedsy blog, Dario is a graduate of Mälardalen University. As a freelance writer, he has written for many esteemed outlets aimed at writers. A traveler at heart, he can be found roaming the world and working from his laptop.
Anyone who’s lived a long, interesting life (as many of us have in one way or another!) may dream of someday turning their life into a book. However, the practicalities of how to write an autobiography can be daunting — especially to those who don’t have much writing experience.
If you feel ready to write your autobiography but aren’t sure where to start, this guide will take you from opening lines to (hopefully) publishing your autobiography for all the world to read.
1. Understand what an autobiography entails
When asked to picture an autobiography, you might think of a celebrity tell-all or political memoir. This isn’t inaccurate ; a memoir would definitely fall under the autobiography umbrella. But to be really precise, there are a few key differences between memoirs and autobiographies:
- Memoirs tend to be more thematic and focus on a central narrative (similar to a novel), whereas an autobiography is highly factual and reads more like “classic” nonfiction.
- Memoirs focus on a specific period or theme in a person’s life, while autobiographies aim to give a complete, chronological picture.
- Lastly, many memoirs are written while the writer is still young. An autobiography, though, should be written later in one’s life — at a point where one’s life story can be told comprehensively.
An autobiography is also different from a biography in that it is always narrated by the subject. Note that we’ve said “narrated” instead of “written” because, indeed, many autobiographies are created with the help of ghostwriters!
Ghostwritten autobiographies aren’t just for celebrities, either. People from all walks of life work with ghostwriters to record their stories or simply guide them through the process.
If that sounds like you, have a look through our vetted ghostwriters on the Reedsy marketplace . You might just find your dream collaborator!
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Should you write a memoir or an autobiography?
In other words, if you’re still young (be honest here!), and/or if the book you want to write is more a series of vignettes revolving around a central theme, you may have a memoir on your hands. If that’s the case, check out our guide to how to write a memoir for more tailored advice.
But if you’ve already lived a long, interesting life — one that you feel prepared to share chronologically and completely — then an autobiography is the medium for you.
2. Outline your life's main “beats”
You might think you don’t need to be too picky about what to include in your autobiography since it’s supposed to be a “complete” account — and you’d be mostly right! That said, even in a fairly exhaustive autobiography, it’s still useful to identify the key “beats” before you begin.
What should you include in an autobiography?
While each person’s autobiography will be unique to them, readers expect certain “beats” to be covered. To get the ball rolling, here’s a list of classic autobiographical beats to hit:
- 🐣 Your birth and family background – possibly including how your parents met, where they were living at the time of your birth, whether you have any siblings, etc.
- 📚 Your early days at school – including the friends you made (whether long-lasting or not), your academic achievements (and failures), and any critical moments related to your future goals/actions.
- 🧑🏽💻 Your first job – this is often enlightening for readers, particularly if it had some bearing on your later career; whether because you realized that you loved the work or, more likely, that you didn’t want to work your first job forever.
- 👩❤️💋👩 Your first relationship – similar to your first job, this is often a major stepping stone into adulthood and understanding your priorities.
- Moving house;
- Having children;
- Getting promoted;
- Receiving an award;
- Traveling somewhere new;
- Or discovering anything significant about yourself.
- 💼 Your retirement – if applicable, this will likely be one of the last beats you cover; it might include why you decided to retire, how you are spending your time nowadays, and any plans for the future.
Remember that each beat you include should contribute to a holistic portrait of your life — whether it’s something that shaped your character or lends context to another parallel moment later on.
But not everything will be relevant. There’s no need to include random things that have no bearing on any other event or important element of your life; that said, the lucky thing about memory is that you likely won’t recall most of those things anyway!
Need some help outlining your autobiography? Check out our Biography Outline Template below — while not entirely chronological, it’s a great starting point for any aspiring autobiographical author.
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Biography Outline Template
Craft a satisfying story arc for your biography with our free template.
3. Try to write in chronological order
Having come up with a solid outline, you should now feel (somewhat) prepared to start writing your autobiography… and, ideally, to start writing it in chronological order.
While many books can be drafted non-chronologically, an autobiography is not one of them. This is because each new chapter quite literally builds on the last; this is different even from a memoir, which often skips around in time and leaves out details. The best way to ensure you’re not missing anything is to write your autobiography as chronologically as possible!
How to start an autobiography
On the note of starting your autobiography, it’s pretty straightforward: begin either with your birth or slightly before, e.g., with your parents. Unlike a memoir, which can start in medias res ( in the middle of the action ), an autobiography should start ab ovo , or “from the egg.”
This is one of the biggest benefits of writing chronologically: you always know where to start, and indeed, what should come next. Here are two strong autobiography openings to give a sense of how yours might sound:
I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb
When I was born, people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my father. I arrived at dawn as the last star blinked out… I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.
Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca and William Novak:
Nicola Iacocca, my father, arrived in this country in 1902 at the age of twelve — poor, alone, and scared. He used to say the only thing he was sure of when he got here was that the world was round. And that was only because another Italian boy named Christopher Columbus had preceded him by 410 years, almost to the day.
Though each opening takes a different tack — Yousafzai’s autobiography begins with her actual birth, while Iacocca’s begins even earlier, with his father’s arrival in America — both serve as effective starts to their respective books and set the tone for what’s to come.
4. Include plenty of detail
In case we haven’t drilled down on this enough, let’s reiterate once more: an autobiography should be a complete overview of your life from beginning to end. That means that as you get into properly writing it, you should include as much detail as you can remember.
Taking one of our previous suggested beats — “your first job” — as an example, here are a few questions you might ask yourself to recount your memories in more detail:
- How did you get your first job?
- What made you want to work there?
- What was the environment/atmosphere like — physically and emotionally?
- What was your greatest accomplishment at this job? Your greatest failure?
- What did you learn from working there? How did it affect your later career?
As you can probably tell from these questions, the natural corollary to the advice of “be detailed!” is to also be honest . Don’t shy away from your failures or regrets — an autobiography without mistakes is not an autobiography, but rather a puff piece.
Examples of strong biographical detail
For those wondering how to inject detail into their writing, here are two examples from great autobiographies that do exactly that. Each takes a different approach to engage readers — perhaps you can pick up some descriptive techniques to suit your own life story.
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
There was no natural light in my cell; a single bulb burned overhead twenty-four hours a day. I did not have a wristwatch and I often thought it was the middle of the night when it was only late afternoon. I had nothing to read, nothing to write on or with, no one to talk to [...] After a time in solitary, I relished the company even of the insects in my cell, and found myself on the verge of initiating conversations with a cockroach.
This passage’s evocative details — the single lightbulb, Mandela’s loss of his internal clock — convey the crushing loneliness of solitary confinement, yet also add levity with the bit about cockroaches.
This give-and-take style may be useful if you, too, are writing an autobiography which includes difficult or traumatic elements. Don’t shy away from the hard parts, but don’t let solemnity overpower your personality and voice!
Becoming by Michelle Obama
When you’re little, a piano can look like it has a thousand keys. You’re staring at an expanse of black and white that stretches farther than two small arms can reach. [...] The keys on Robbie’s piano had a subtle unevenness of color and shape, places where bits of ivory had broken off over time, leaving them looking like a set of bad teeth.
This passage uses sensory details and an intimate tone to draw readers in, describing not just how the piano looks, but how it feels to play. All this makes for a very compelling narrative style — almost like that of a novel. If you want your autobiography to flow this way, try reading more nonfiction in this style (indeed, many memoirs read quite similarly).
📚 Looking for more examples of brilliant biographical writing? Check out this list of The 30 Best Biographies of All Time to inspire you.
5. Do research to fill in the gaps
No matter how carefully you rack your brains, you won’t be able to recall every detail of your life. That’s where research comes in! Here are a couple of things you can do to learn more about yourself and your past.
Interview friends and family
While you’ve likely retained the core of each important life memory, some details will still elude you. For these, you might call on friends, family members, and anyone else who was in your life at the time — interviewing them should help flesh things out in your autobiography.
You might try a few different interview strategies, depending on what you’re hoping to achieve:
- Ask specific questions based on what you can’t remember/don’t know (e.g. “Whose wedding was that again?” or “Why did Dad quit that job in Pasadena?”);
- Ask your subject to recount everything they can about an event (e.g. “Tell me how you remember our high school graduation”); or
- Ask them if they have any key memories of you which they would like to talk about.
The first interview style will be the quickest, but the latter two might yield more interesting results. If you’re prioritizing thoroughness, we’d highly recommend calling up a few old friends or close family members, sitting down, and recording your interview for a few hours.
Do “traditional" research if needed
Having written as much as you can, and interviewed other people to add their stories, you might still find yourself missing information. If applicable, this is where you could turn to “traditional” research — that is, looking up relevant records and documentation, or even taking a field trip or two to previous neighborhoods.
It’s up to you how far to go with this; just don’t go mad, and try to avoid any rabbit holes that tempt you to write an entirely new book. (Then again, that could always be your next project! Check out our post on how to write a nonfiction book to learn more.)
6. Give your draft a discerning edit
You’ve finally finished a detailed draft — congratulations! Even if you don’t do anything else with your autobiography, your friends and family will be wildly impressed, and your descendants will have a fascinatingly thorough record of your life.
But if you want to publish your autobiography — or even if you suspect it hasn’t turned out quite as expected — you’ll now need to enter the editing stage. There are a few different types of editing to consider for your autobiography, including:
- Structural editing to heighten the impact of your key beats;
- Line editing to improve the syntax, flow, and clarity of your sentences; and
- Fact-checking and proofreading to ensure your book doesn’t contain any errors.
Again, it’s up to you how extensively you want to edit your autobiography. If you’re doing it yourself, we’d suggest going top-to-bottom — first structural editing, then line editing, then proofreading — to avoid unnecessary work. ( Check out this post on how to self-edit your book for key tips!)
And if this all feels overwhelming, you can always work with a professional editor to get your autobiography in tip-top shape . Autobiography and memoir specialists can help turn your work into an Iacocca-worthy masterpiece.
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7. Format and publish your autobiography
Now comes the really fun part, if you so choose it — formatting and publishing your autobiography for everyone to read!
Biography fans out there will know that auto/biographies often contain a selection of personal photos within the text. If you’re envisioning this, it will require specialty formatting; you’ll either need to intersperse photos throughout the text or format your book with a “photo section” in the middle (the more common option).
You can do this with free book formatting tools like Reedsy Studio . Or if you’re not confident in your formatting abilities, consider hiring a professional typesetter to help !
As for publishing, many autobiographers choose to self-publish their books to get them out as quickly as possible, and to have more control over the process. However, if you’re interested in selling your autobiography to a publisher — a reasonable option if you are a businessperson, and especially if you already have a decent following — we’d suggest this post on how to write a non-fiction query letter to get you started.
Whatever path you take, whether you decide to publish it or not, writing the story of your life is an incredibly enlightening endeavor. If you're interested in novels instead, check out this advice from NYT bestselling author Caroline Leavitt ! We hope this guide has helped you on your journey; indeed, as autobiographical writing teaches us, the journey really is the greatest reward.
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How to Write an Award-Worthy Autobiography in 5 Steps
Savannah Cordova
Table of Contents
1. make a list of life events, 2. try to recall all the details of each one, 3. write chronologically from your birth (or earlier), 4. weave in the wisdom of your older self, 5. wrap things up on a contemplative note.
An autobiography, in the simplest terms, is a full account of your life that you write yourself. Many of us have read great memoirs in recent years—bestsellers like Educated and Crying in H Mart —but autobiographies, specifically, are more elusive than you might think.
This is because a true autobiography contains every detail you could possibly include about your life, in chronological order. A memoir, on the other hand, revolves around a particular theme or time period in someone’s life, describing only select memories in service of this goal.
So, if what you’re really after is advice on how to write a memoir, I’d recommend this “memoir method” post from Joe Bunting . But if you’re ready to lay out the entire story of your life—warts and all—read on for how to write an autobiography in five (relatively) simple steps.
Since an autobiography must be comprehensive, you can start by listing out all the events that your book will include—that is, every major event of your life (and some minor ones too!).
The earliest events might be your birth, the birth of any siblings, starting school, and coming to realize aspects of your personality and long-term interests that emerged in childhood. The “middle” events might include finishing school, attending college and/or getting your first job, and the advent of any significant relationships—both friendships and romantic relationships. The later-in-life events might include pursuing any other big jobs or degrees, getting married and/or having children, moving house, starting major hobbies, and perhaps even retiring and planning for your “golden years.”
Again, be sure to include all the important events in your career or in your personal life. Obviously, anything that changed the trajectory of your life should be added to the list. However, the nature of each event will depend completely on who you are and how your life has unfolded.
Indeed, going back to the idea of including “minor” events, it may be that some pivotal moments in your life could seem “minor” from an outside perspective. For example, say that one day you happened to spot an unusually shaped cloud, and it caused you to have a revelation about your life and change course somehow. The revelation is the key thing, but don’t leave out the circumstances that led you to it—no matter how irrelevant they might seem.
To be fair, it can be tough to remember every event of importance, especially when some of them happened a long time ago. In that vein, take your time to make this list before you get into actually writing the book. It should take at least a few hours (if not a day or two) to outline everything to include in your autobiography.
If you thought you were done after simply listing out those events, think again. Not to sound like a broken record, but this process is all about being thorough; in order to succeed, you need a solid foundation from which to work. So now, at this next stage, try to remember everything about the initial events you’ve listed.
Say that the average person has around 40 to 50 major life events or pivotal moments to write about in their autobiography. (If you have fewer than that, you may want to reconsider whether you’re really ready to write the whole story of your life —perhaps a memoir would better suit your purposes.) Now, brace yourself: before you start writing, you should put together at least half a page of notes on each of these points.
Sure, some events will warrant more detail than others. But this should still average out to around 20 to 30 pages to serve as the aforementioned foundation for your autobiography. And how should you expand on these events, you might ask—that is, which details should you focus on to ensure your “foundation” is truly useful?
Here are a few questions to jog your memory and help you identify what’s most important:
Which sensory details (still) stand out the most? That is, not just how each scene looked, but how it felt at the time, to the best of your recollection. For example, if you’re recounting the experience of starting school, don’t just say what your elementary school building looked like. Instead, talk about the fragrant leaves on the ground or the chill in the September air; the sounds of birds chirping and parents chatting at early morning drop-off; that first week when you skinned your knee on the playground; etc.
What were the people around you saying? Speaking of chatting, you’ll also need to recreate important “dialogue” in some scenes, just as you would when writing a novel . While you can’t take quite as many liberties as in a work of fiction, you are allowed to paraphrase what you can’t remember precisely. At this stage, just record the gist of whatever was said—you can finesse the details later.
Why was this moment important? Make sure to identify in your notes why each event or moment was so important. For many of the classic “life milestones,” it will be obvious. But try to dig deeper into exactly how each event affected you… even if you didn’t realize it at the time. Articulating this will make your autobiography all the better, allowing you to segue more smoothly between events and draw more resounding conclusions about your life.
Having written up these extremely detailed notes—basically an FBI dossier on yourself—you’re now ready to start drafting your autobiography.
You may have jotted down your notes in any order; indeed, you probably jumped around randomly as different memories came back to you. However, now that it’s time to actually write your autobiography, you should try to write it chronologically.
Why? Because if you want to refer to something that happened “in the past,” it’s best to know how you presented it to readers in earlier chapters. In an autobiography—as in life—each event depends on what came before it. If you jump around while writing, your autobiography could end up feeling messy and uneven, and you risk leaving out important elements simply because you skipped them on the list.
So as you draft, do it in order of events. Begin with the first life event on your list—likely your birth—or go back even further, if you wish. Many of the greatest autobiographies of the 20th century, like Lee Iacocca’s self-titled book and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, begin not with themselves, but instead with their family history. Mandela’s book technically opens with the meaning of his name, but he then doubles back to describe his father and the history of his tribe, the Thembu people. And Iacocca’s autobiography begins not just with his father, but his grandfather arriving in America.
In summary: while your birth is a tried-and-true starting point, you’re allowed to briefly touch on your parents and/or family history first. That said, once you’ve established these elements, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. Dive into writing about your life, and try not to deviate from the chronology—no more family history, flashbacks, flash-forwards, or anything else that will distract you or your reader. You can still keep things interesting and “readable” by using those elements we discussed: sensory details, dialogue, and organic transitions between events.
And if you happen to remember something that would work well in a different part of the book, don’t switch gears to that part right now. Instead, just jot it down in your notes and come back to it later. You want to preserve the “flow” of writing chronologically—otherwise, again, you risk choppy prose and a subpar reading experience.
Of course, just because you’re writing chronologically, that doesn’t mean your insights in each section should be limited to the knowledge of your past self. On the contrary, one of the most valuable elements of an autobiography is the injection of present-day reflection and wisdom. Without this extra layer, your autobiography could be written by anyone .
So this is where you’ll incorporate those previous answers to the question of: “Why was this moment important?” Here’s a great example of “wisdom weaving” in the early pages of Mandela’s autobiography:
“I learned my lesson one day from an unruly donkey. We had been taking turns climbing up and down its back, and when my chance came, I jumped on and the donkey bolted into a nearby thornbush. It bent its head, trying to unseat me, which it did, but not before the thorns had pricked and scratched my face, embarrassing me in front of my friends [...]
“Even though it was a donkey that unseated me, I learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonoring them.”
While the younger Mandela may not have been able to articulate (or even consciously identify) this lesson, the older Mandela understands it as a crucial moment for his moral development. Yet he explains it so smoothly that it does not take the reader out of the narrative at all—only paints a more detailed picture of the boy and man he would become.
As you’re trying to inject some wisdom of your own, here are some more thought-provoking questions to ask yourself:
How did I feel about this at the time, and how do I feel about it now?
Can I draw parallels between events at different times in my life?
How have I affected the people around me, and how have they changed me?
Is there anything I wish I’d done differently?
What do I want readers to take away from this?
If you’re struggling to articulate what something meant to you—even if you know it was important—running through these questions might help you out. Sometimes your takeaway will be a simple moral lesson; other times, it will be a more complex tangle of emotions.
Whatever you discover about yourself, don’t shy away from putting it down on the page. Your autobiography is the place to be clear-eyed and candid. If you’re not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about your life, there’s little point to writing this book at all.
As your autobiography draws to a close, you may find yourself struggling with how to end it, especially if you are still relatively young. But rather than trying to fight that feeling, the best strategy is to lean into the uncertainty and end on a note of contemplation.
Consider the following: How do you feel having completed your autobiography? What’s next for you? What are you most looking forward to—or, indeed, dreading? How will you use the lessons you’ve learned to tackle the rest of your life? Will you be writing multiple autobiographical volumes, à la Karl Ove Knausgård?
You might think the answers to these questions are best left off the page. But if we’ve established anything over the course of this guide, it’s that an autobiography should strive for comprehensiveness.
On that note, remember that it doesn’t matter if you don’t have it all figured out or if you’re unsure of what’s next. Once again: Just lay it all out on the page. Readers will appreciate your honesty, and you’ll feel much more satisfied with the final result.
Speaking of which: if you really want to write a satisfying autobiography, but feel intimidated by the lengthy process, consider working with a ghostwriter to get your story on the page. What’s great about this kind of project is that you can involve another writer as much or as little as you want. They might simply advise on structure and chip in to edit the occasional chapter—or they can conduct in-depth interviews with you and take on the lion’s share of writing. Basically, your main goal is to get your autobiography out there, and a ghostwriter can (and will) help you out.
You can also use autobiography-specific editing tools to get your draft into tip-top shape. ProWritingAid is particularly useful for elevating those sensory details we talked about, with the help of its Sensory Report. You can also use ProWritingAid to improve your pacing, sentence structure, and other elements that will turn your autobiography from good to great—not just great like “better than good,” but like Mandela-level great.
Sure, it might sound like a tall order, especially for the novice writers out there. Yet with enough time and effort (and the tips in this article), you’ll find that anyone can write an autobiography—one that not only captures their life story, but also engages readers in a profound way. If you’re willing to put in the hours, your own story could be next. Good luck!
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