This is the seventh installment of our serialisation of our upcoming book The Recordalife Guide to Creating Your Memoirs. Every post will be a section from this book, which we will make available at the end of the serialisation.

Click here to read the previous parts of our Guide.

Who Are You And Why Does It Matter?

If you are looking to sell you autobiography, then knowing your market and your marketing knowing you is fundamental. Marketers are taught very early in their career to always define exactly who you are so that your reputation and social footprint matches the information that you are attempting to market.

For example, if your social footprint shows that you’ve been successfully selling horses for living, it would not make sense to people who are interested in your autobiography if you tried to convince people to do something drastically different such as basket weaving.

Who you are does matter, so keep things like your social footprint, Facebook page, Twitter, YouTube etc. congruent with the message that you are attempting to deliver.

Not only will this attract like minds but it will be far easier for you to convince people to want to purchase your autobiography, if it is in the same related field that you have expertise in.

As mentioned in previous episodes, people are smarter than you might give them credit for. You must absolutely prove what you are saying to them and then you must do it in a way that is not insulting and that is interesting and exciting for them to see what happens.

If you are an expert in handling horses, this should really come through in your autobiography. Social media should match this as well. People want to find out more information about you, so the first thing they will do is check out your Facebook page and Google search you.

It is important that you reflect a social footprint that matches exactly what your autobiography is all about. For example, the autobiography of Col. Sanders should most definitely discuss how he became a multimillionaire and founded KFC; not that he was an expert at tiddlywinks!

Help People Experience Your Life Through Their Eyes

Experiencing life can be a very subjective thing. People want to experience life through their eyes so when writing your autobiography you must paint a picture in their mind’s eye.

This means that you must use descriptive words that create imagery in people’s minds as well as emotions.

Up to this point, we wanted to get you focused on how to organise content and prepare your memoirs and then begin to write your final draft.

Now we’re going to begin to explore using emotions so that people will also experience some of the same highs and lows that you did in your life.

Not only should you use emoticons but you must organize them so that people experience certain feelings when certain events take place.

For example, Steve knows that people who want to go metal detecting for gold really want to find that first big nugget. Since this is a critical event when someone discovers gold using a metal detector, the story will benefit much more by using the motion:

No Emotion basic memoir entry:

“I finally found that large nugget of gold that was over 10 ounces. This was the largest piece of gold that I have found to date.”

This is minimally informative and rather boring!

Emotion:

“I just knew that something amazing was about to happen as the palms of my hands began to sweat when the metal detector toned a high probability of an amazing target! I couldn’t believe it! I just found one of the largest pieces of gold in my entire career, and I did it using the skills that I will tell you now!”

Powerful Delivery!

Anyone can take a few boring sentences and add emotional embellishments. The same information is delivered but in a way that excites the reader because they can put themselves in the shoes of the person who just struck one of the biggest gold finds in their career!

Remember that you must always shape and mold events into informative information and then add a powerful punch of the motion.

This is why you want to first write down basic information, data and record events that happened and then go back and use emotion to rewrite each and every paragraph to make it an exciting and interesting read.

It is all dependent on the audience and what they expect to see when they read your content. Even in autobiography of a scientist should be filled with the emotion, highs and lows and of course additional data to support whatever claims that you are making. Make sure people will:

• Have similar emotional reactions that you did.

How do you accomplish this? By taking them by the hand in explaining exactly what happened to you and how it made you feel, think and react. Imagine that you’re telling a story to a bunch of five-year-olds. Most people actually prefer simplistic storytelling because it makes sense to them. This is because everybody can understand simplistic language when coupled with the motions but do not always understand complex language without an emotional framework. Re-write your memoirs into a draft by using storytelling and emotions and take people by the hand and walk them through the events and happenings.

• Experience life and reach similar conclusions.

This is actually very easy to do when using the above storytelling method. Use your storytelling ability, to shape the way people should think and feel and keep your language and explanations simple and easy to comprehend.

• Have several “Gold Nuggets” of enlightenment.

All along the way, after you use the story to define an event in your life, make sure that you give people conclusions that will shape their thinking so that they will absolutely love what you are telling them. Some of the best storytelling delivers these little gold nuggets. Here’s an example:

“The burned hand teaches best after which advice about fire goes to the heart!”

This is the conclusion that Steve used to explain how purchasing the wrong metal detector cost them a fortune. Now after wasting his money, he was ready to listen to other people who tried to warn him about purchasing the wrong metal detector even if it was cheaper.

• Have psychological and intellectual benefits.

After you provide tidbits of information like “Golden Nuggets”, make people feel that they’ve accessed information that will actually make them better than other people did not read the autobiography. This is a form of psychological reward that tells people you are an expert that you’ve learned from your many years of experience and that if they listen to you, they too will benefit.

In Part 8 we will look at building a timeline of events in your life so that you can ensure you have everything covered and can go into detail on all elements.

In the meantime, Recordalife provides services that take care of writing your memoirs for you, making it easy and enjoyable – we interview you using our proven method, and capture your memories and history, and record them into wonderful keepsakes in the form of full-colour hardback books and ebooks, and audio CDs and MP3 files. We love chatting with people about their lives, so if you have any questions or need advice, please do Contact Us for a friendly chat.

You can also see a sample Life Story chapter by clicking on the link below, to get a good idea of how your memoirs may look in a professionally-designed, edited and printed book.

Click to read  Chapter 1 of Alice’s Life Story Book

Stay Updated

Please fill in the form below to be updated when we post new chapters of our guide: