—LIFE STORY WRITING
How to write a book about your life
Two ways to get it done, and they cost less differently than you would think. Writing it yourself is free and takes roughly four hundred hours, plus $3,300 to $6,000 at the end for editing, cover and publishing setup. Having it written runs $5,495 to $24,999 and asks eight to twelve hours of recorded interviews from you instead.
Below: a template you can fill in this afternoon, what to do about the people in the book who are still alive, and how to tell which path is yours.
—WHO IT IS FOR
Who the book is for, and why that decides everything else
Most people who want to write their life story are not sure they are allowed to. The question underneath “should I” and “can I” is whether an ordinary life is enough to fill a book.
It is. The more useful question is who you are writing it for, because that answer sets the length, the budget, the shape and whether the book ever needs to be on Amazon at all.
Four reasons people write their life story, and they are not interchangeable.
To be remembered by people who will outlive you. Usually grandchildren. The book is an object on a shelf, read aloud at some point after you are gone. Commercial reach is irrelevant here and length is a burden rather than an achievement. Twenty thousand words does this job completely.
To make sense of something. Illness, addiction, a marriage that ended, a war. The writing is the processing and the book is what is left over. People writing for this reason often stall near the hardest chapter, and that is not a discipline problem.
To be believed. An account that was disputed, minimised, or told wrong by someone else, written down and made permanent. The stakes here are the highest on this page, and the legal questions further down matter most to this reader.
To be seen as having mattered. A career, a business, a life that was significant to the people inside it and went unremarked outside them. This one gets called vanity and it should not be. It is the most common reason and it produces good books.
Most people are two of these at once, and the primary one decides the book. Someone writing to be remembered does not need a market. Someone writing to be believed needs a lawyer more than a marketing plan. Someone writing to make sense of it may not need to publish at all.
Answer that before anything else on this page.
—THE SHAPE
Your whole life, one part of it, or a book for the family
Four shapes, and picking wrong is the most expensive mistake available here, because you find out in month three.
The whole life, start to now. Chronological, comprehensive, usually 70,000 to 90,000 words. Michelle Obama’s Becoming is this shape. It is what most people picture and the hardest one to finish, because sixty years of material means every decade competes for space and none of them wants to lose. Works best when the record itself is the point.
One period. A few years, or one thing that happened, told properly. Usually 60,000 to 75,000 words and far easier to hold in your head. Tara Westover’s Educated covers a childhood and a leaving. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking covers twelve months. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild covers one walk. Almost every life story that strangers actually read is this shape, and if you want the book to sell rather than sit on a family shelf, start here.
A collection of pieces. Ten or twelve standalone chapters linked by a theme rather than a timeline, the way Mindy Kaling’s essay collections work. Forgiving to write, because you can finish one and start another without the whole structure depending on it. Good for people who have tried the chronological version twice and stalled.
A book for the family. Twenty to thirty thousand words, printed for people who already love you. No category, no market, no cover competing on Amazon. There are no famous examples of this shape, which is the point of it. This is what a great many people searching this actually want, and they talk themselves into the 90,000-word version because it sounds more serious. It is not more serious. It is four times the work for an audience of eleven.
Decide this before you write anything. The shape sets the word count, the word count sets the timeline, and the timeline is what determines whether you finish.
—THE METHOD
Timeline first, then scenes
The most common way a life story dies is this. You begin at your birth, write forward year by year, and give up somewhere around your twenties. The reason is that writing chronologically means writing the dull years at full effort before you reach the parts you actually wanted to write.
Work in two passes instead.
Build the timeline. One line per event, no prose, no order beyond the year. Births, moves, jobs, losses, the day something changed. Aim for a hundred lines and expect to add more for weeks, because one memory drags three others up with it. This is a list, not writing, which is why it is the only part of the process nobody stalls on.
Then mark the ones that still have heat. Not the most important events. The ones you would tell a stranger at a dinner. There will be fifteen or twenty, and those are your chapters. Everything else on the timeline becomes connective tissue or gets cut.
Write those scenes in any order. Start with whichever one you can see most clearly. A scene is a specific day in a specific place with people saying things, not a summary of a period. “My father worked long hours” is a summary. “My father came in at nine and ate his dinner standing up” is a scene, and it does the same job in fewer words while the reader sees it.
Get the order right last. Once the scenes exist you can arrange them, and the arrangement is usually not chronological. The strongest opening is rarely the earliest event.
Two practical things. Talk it before you write it, because most people tell a story better than they draft it. Record yourself explaining a scene to someone, then transcribe it and edit, and the voice on the page will be closer to yours than anything you type cold. And write the first draft without checking dates. Chasing a date in month one is how an afternoon of writing becomes an afternoon in a photo album.
—THE TEMPLATE
A life story template you can fill in this afternoon
Everything below is on this page. Copy it, print it straight from here, or take the Word version at the end. No email required.
Six columns, one row per event, and no prose anywhere in it. The heat column stays empty on the first pass. You come back and mark it once the list is long enough to compare against itself.
| Year | Age | What happened | Where | Who was there | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1971 | 0 | Born, second of four | Leeds | ||
| 1978 | 7 | Dad lost the shop, we moved in with Nan | Bradford | Mum, Nan, my brother | ✱ |
| 1983 | 12 | Won the county thing nobody expected | Bradford | Mr Ellis | |
| 1987 | 16 | Left school at sixteen against everyone’s advice | Bradford | Mum, arguing | ✱ |
| 1989 | 18 | Moved to London for the job, first time living alone, hated it for a year | London | ✱ | |
| 1994 | 23 | Married | Leeds | everyone |
Six rows is not a book. A hundred is. Keep adding for a few weeks, because one entry drags three more up with it, and the ones that arrive on day nine are usually better than the ones from day one.
The difference between a useful row and a useless one is specificity. “1989, moved” tells you nothing you can write from. “Moved to London for the job, first time living alone, hated it for a year” already contains a chapter: a place, a reason, a feeling and a length of time. Write the version you would say out loud to someone, not the version you would put on a form.
The heat column is the whole point. Once the list is long, go back and mark the entries you would tell a stranger at a dinner. Not the most important ones. The ones that still have something in them. There will be fifteen or twenty and those are your chapters. Everything else is connective tissue or gets cut.
The same template as a Word file you can type into. No email, no form.
Fifteen prompts, for when the grid stops filling itself
Most people get to forty rows and stall. The obvious events are down, the years look thin, and it feels like nothing else happened. Something else happened.
Every prompt that lands becomes a row. Every row you mark becomes a chapter. That is the whole route from a blank page to a book, and forty rows is not enough to choose from.
Answer these onto the grid as rows, not as prose.
- The first time you left home, whether that was for a night or for good.
- A job you were bad at, and what it taught you about yourself.
- Something you believed for years and later found out was wrong.
- The first person who died who you actually knew.
- A door that closed, and what came through the one that opened instead.
- The room you remember most clearly from childhood, and what happened in it.
- Something your parents did that you swore you would never do.
- A friendship that ended without a fight.
- The most frightened you have been, and whether anyone else knew.
- The moment you realised your parents were people rather than parents.
- Money: the tightest year, and what you went without.
- A stranger who changed something and never knew.
- The thing you are proudest of that nobody would put on a list.
- What you were doing when the news came, for whichever news that is for you.
- Something you have never told anyone, and whether it belongs in the book.
Two notes on using these. Answer them out of order, and skip any that produce nothing, because a prompt that does not land for you is not a gap in your life.
And a warning about the last one. It is the most productive question here and the one most likely to stop the project, because deciding whether something belongs in the book is a different job from remembering it. Write the row now. Decide later, after the section on people who are still alive.
—MEMORY
You will get things wrong, and your family will remember it differently
The first draft of a life story runs into a problem no other book has. You are the only source, and memory does not work the way we assume it does.
It reconstructs rather than replays. A scene you can see clearly may have happened a year later, in a different house, with someone who turns out to have been somewhere else that summer. That happens to everyone, including people with excellent memories, and it is why life-story writers get ambushed by a sibling who remembers the same afternoon completely differently.
Which is a working problem, not a character flaw. Here is how to handle it.
Check what is checkable. Photographs with dates on the back. Letters, school reports, medical records, employment records, property deeds, old diaries, newspaper archives for the public events you remember living through. An hour with a shoebox settles more disputes than an argument does.
Write the uncertainty into the prose. “I remember it as a Tuesday, though my sister says the funeral was on a Friday” is stronger writing than either version stated flatly, and it is honest. Readers trust a narrator who admits the edges are soft. They stop trusting one who is certain about everything from fifty years ago.
Interview the people who were there, if you can. Not to arbitrate, but because they remember details you do not, and because a recorded conversation with someone in their eighties is worth having whether or not the book happens. Ask what they remember before you tell them what you remember, or you will get your own version handed back to you.
Two accounts of one event can both be true. A child and a parent in the same room did not experience the same room. You are not obliged to reconcile them. You are writing your account, which is what a life story is, and saying so explicitly in the first chapter solves most of the problem before it starts.
When to tell the family. This is the decision that causes real damage, and there is no rule. Telling them early invites edits you did not ask for and can stop the book. Telling them at publication reads as a betrayal in some families. What works for most people is telling them once the shape exists but before the draft is finished: what the book is about, roughly who appears in it, and that they will see anything that concerns them before it goes anywhere. That is a conversation, not a permission request, and having it in month three is easier than having it in month eleven.
If someone in the book is a danger to you, none of that applies. Do not tell them, and read the section on real people below.
—THE HOURS
What writing it yourself actually costs
Nothing, and about four hundred hours.
The guides telling you to write it never count the hours. The ghostwriting companies never publish a price. So here is both, and you can do the arithmetic against your own year.
Timeline and scene list: 10 to 20 hours. Spread over a few weeks. This part is enjoyable and almost everyone completes it.
First draft: 150 to 250 hours. A 70,000-word manuscript at 300 to 500 usable words an hour, which is a realistic rate for someone writing about their own life and stopping to remember. At five hours a week that is a year. At fifteen it is four months. Very few people sustain fifteen. These are estimates rather than survey figures, and they will vary with how much of the book is already in your head.
Revision: 80 to 150 hours. Longer than people expect and harder than the draft, because you are cutting material you lived through.
Then it stops being free. A manuscript is not a book. Editing, cover, formatting and publishing setup come to $3,300 to $6,000 on a 70,000-word manuscript, and the next section covers what each of those is actually fixing. That figure is with you doing all of the writing.
Having it written runs $5,495 to $24,999, and includes the editing pass, so the honest comparison is roughly $3,300 to $6,000 plus four hundred hours, against $5,495 to $24,999 plus eight to twelve hours of recorded interviews and your time reviewing chapters.
Put a number on your own hour and the two paths often land closer than expected. That is not an argument for hiring someone. It is an argument for choosing deliberately, because the most common outcome is neither. The hours never get found and the draft stops somewhere in the 1990s. That is not a failure of will. It is what happens when a hundred-hour job has no deadline attached to it, which is exactly the problem the shorter book and the hired path each solve in their own way.
The one thing worth saying plainly is that a cheap version of the hired path does not exist. Industry rates for this work start around $15,000 with an experienced freelancer and run past $300,000 at the top. Anything advertised at $2,000 is a content mill, and what comes back needs the same four hundred hours from you to become usable.
—WHAT IT STILL NEEDS
Four things that go wrong after you finish writing
Finishing the draft is the milestone. It is not the end, and the four failures below are the ones that turn a finished manuscript into a book nobody reads.
The draft nobody can follow. Written across two years, so chapter one and chapter eighteen are different books, in different voices, with a middle that repeats itself. This is the most common outcome of the self-written path and the hardest to see from the inside. A developmental edit diagnoses it and marks up the pages, $2,800 on a 70,000-word manuscript. If you only need the diagnosis, an editorial assessment is $1,260.
The typos. Self-published life stories collect one-star reviews for this more than for the writing itself, and reviews land in the first fourteen days and do not come back. Nobody proofreads their own book successfully, because you read what you meant rather than what is there. Copy editing and a proofread on 70,000 words come to $2,590 together.
The cover that announces itself. Life stories are bought on the cover more than most categories, because there is no genre convention doing the work for you. A photograph of the author with the title in a default font is the tell. Cover design from $199, or $399 with a print wrap.
The file that uploads wrong. Trim size, bleed, margins, metadata, categories. Interior formatting from $299 and publishing setup from $249, with the retailer accounts opened in your name rather than ours.
None of this is optional work. It is the difference between a manuscript and a book, and it is the part the free path does not stay free through. Budget for it at the start rather than in month eleven, when the writing is done and the enthusiasm is spent.
—PUBLISHING IT
Thirty copies for the family is a real answer
Most people assume finishing means Amazon. It does not have to, and for a large share of the people reading this it should not.
Thirty printed copies, and nothing else. Print on demand will produce a properly bound book for a few dollars a copy with no ISBN, no retail listing and no marketing. Your family gets the book, the book exists, and the project is genuinely finished. This is the right ending for most legacy books and almost nobody says so, because there is no money in saying it.
Or wide, on the retailers. An ISBN, a listing on Amazon and the rest, a cover built to compete in a category. Worth doing when the book is for strangers, which is the “one period” shape far more often than the chronological one. It adds cost, a marketing question, and a set of decisions the family book never has to make.
You can do the first and then the second. Print thirty, let people read it, then decide about publishing with real reactions rather than guesses. The order does not lock anything, and the family edition often improves the trade one.
A note for anyone working against a deadline that is not self-imposed. If you are ill, or writing for a parent who is, shorten the book rather than rushing it. Twenty thousand words finished and printed beats eighty thousand words abandoned at chapter nine, and recorded interviews are worth having on their own even if the book never gets written. That is the one situation where hiring someone is not about money, it is about the calendar.
—REAL PEOPLE
Writing about people who are still alive
This is the question that stops more life-story projects than any other, and most guides skip it. Nothing here is legal advice, but these are the things worth knowing before you write, not after.
Truth is a defense, and it is still expensive. A statement has to be false to be defamatory in the United States, and on matters of public concern the person suing generally carries the burden of proving it false rather than you carrying the burden of proving it true. That is better than most authors assume. What it does not do is make a case cheap, because you still have to show up, and you still want the records. Documentation matters: dates, messages, medical or employment records, anything contemporaneous. Memory alone is thin evidence.
Changing the name is not enough. People can be identified by role, place, timeline, appearance, or the fact that everyone in a family knows who the aunt in chapter four is. If a reasonable reader could work out who it is, the name change has not protected you. Change enough identifying detail that the person is genuinely unrecognisable to strangers, or accept that they are identifiable and write accordingly.
There is a difference between what happened and what you say it means. “He hit me on the night of my birthday” is a factual claim you would need to stand behind. “I believe he was drinking, because of how the evening went” is framed as your interpretation. Both can be honest. One is much harder to litigate.
Private facts are a separate risk from defamation. Someone’s medical history, sexuality or finances can be entirely true and still create exposure if disclosed without a public interest reason. True is not automatically safe.
Write the draft anyway. Defamation needs publication, and publication means someone else read it. A file on your own machine is not exposure. Handing early chapters to an agent, an editor or a beta reader is, which is an argument for being careful who reads the first draft rather than an argument against writing it. The legal questions belong to the revision, not the writing, and self-censoring in month one usually produces a book that is neither honest nor safe. Get it down first.
Then get it read. A publishing lawyer reviewing a finished manuscript is the standard step, and it is cheaper before typesetting than after. On our memoir ghostwriting projects a legal-risk pass runs at the outline stage rather than at the end, which is the point where changing the structure still costs nothing.
If you are writing about someone who is currently a danger to you, the order changes. Safety first, publication second, and a lawyer before either.
—HAVING IT WRITTEN
What it costs to hire someone
$5,495 to $24,999, scoped by length and by how many hours of recorded interview the book needs.
The variable is not page count. It is interview time. A 20,000-word book for the family runs on two to three hours of recorded conversation. A full life-arc book runs on ten to twelve, spread across three to four months in ninety-minute sessions, plus a written voice profile the draft gets checked against line by line.
What you do: talk, review chapters, approve. What you do not do: write. An editing pass is included at every tier, so the figure above is the finished manuscript rather than a draft that then needs $3,000 of work.
Three things worth confirming with anyone you hire, us included. Whose name goes on the cover, and whether solo credit costs extra. Who owns the copyright and the royalties when it is finished. And whether an NDA is signed before you start telling someone the parts you have not told anyone.
For context on the market: experienced freelancers start around $15,000 and elite collaborators run past $300,000. Anything advertised at $2,000 is a content mill.
The full scope, the three tiers and how the interview hours differ across them are on our memoir ghostwriting page.
—WHICH ONE
What to do, by the reason you are doing it
The first section asked who the book is for. Here is what each answer means in practice.
Writing to be remembered. Take the short book, twenty to thirty thousand words, and print it for the family. Do not chase a market that does not want a stranger’s life story and does not need to. Write it yourself if the hours exist. If they do not, or if there is a health reason to move quickly, the hired path at the shorter tier is built for exactly this and costs less than most people assume.
Writing to make sense of something. Write it yourself. The processing is the point and paying someone to do it removes the reason you started. Do not commit to publication yet, because you may find you do not want to, and that is a legitimate ending. If you stall at the hardest chapter, that is the book working rather than failing. Put it down for a fortnight and come back to it rather than deciding the project is over.
Writing to be believed. Accuracy first. Build the documentation before the prose, read the section on real people twice, and budget for a legal read. Hiring someone has an advantage in this case that has nothing to do with time: a writer who was not there brings distance to material you are too close to, and will ask the questions a reader will ask.
Writing to be seen as having mattered. This is the one where the full-length book and the market question are both real, so the structure has to hold up to a stranger’s attention. It is also the version that responds best to being talked rather than typed, because you have told these stories before and they are better out loud. Either path works. The deciding factor is whether you want to spend a year writing or twelve hours talking.
Whichever you are, the same first step applies. The timeline is a hundred lines with no prose in it and it takes an afternoon. Do that before you spend anything. Half the people who sit down to it find the book they actually want is the short one, and that book can be finished this year.
—Frequently Asked Questions
What people ask before writing their life story
Is my life interesting enough to write a book about?
For a book your family will read, yes, without qualification. For a book strangers will buy, the test is not whether your life was remarkable but whether one thing that happened to you can be told well enough that a reader recognises something from their own life. Most published life stories are about ordinary events written with unusual precision. A dramatic life told flatly sells worse than an ordinary one told well.
How long does it take to write a book about your life?
Writing it yourself takes roughly four hundred hours, which is a year at five hours a week or about four months at fifteen. That breaks down as 10 to 20 hours building a timeline, 150 to 250 hours on a first draft, and 80 to 150 hours revising. Hiring a ghostwriter takes three to six months of calendar time and asks eight to twelve hours of recorded interviews from you, plus time reviewing chapters as they arrive.
How long should a book about my life be?
Twenty to thirty thousand words for a book printed for family. Sixty to seventy-five thousand for a book covering one period of your life, which is the shape most commercially published life stories take. Seventy to ninety thousand for a full chronological account from birth. Longer is not better, and the ninety-thousand-word version is the one most often abandoned unfinished.
Where do I start if I have never written a book before?
Build a timeline before you write any prose. One line per event, no sentences, aiming for a hundred entries added over several weeks. Then mark the fifteen or twenty entries you would tell a stranger at a dinner, and those become your chapters. Starting at your birth and writing forward is the most common approach and the one that most often stalls, because it means writing your least interesting years at full effort first.
What if I cannot remember enough to fill a book?
Almost everyone thinks this at forty timeline entries and almost everyone is wrong. Memory works associatively, so one entry drags three more up with it, and the events that surface in week two are usually better than the ones from day one. Photographs with dates, school reports, letters, employment records and old diaries all recover more than trying harder does. Interviewing anyone else who was there recovers more still.
Can I write about family members without their permission?
You do not need permission, and you do carry the risk. In the United States a statement must be false to be defamatory, and on matters of public concern the person suing generally has to prove it false rather than you having to prove it true. Changing someone’s name is not sufficient protection if role, timeline or circumstances still identify them. Private facts such as medical history or finances can be true and still create exposure. A publishing lawyer reading the finished manuscript is the standard step, and it costs less before typesetting than after.
What is the best app or software for writing my life story?
Microsoft Word or Google Docs handles it, and the tool is rarely what is stopping anyone. Scrivener is worth the cost only if you are working in non-chronological scenes and need to reorder them constantly. A spreadsheet is the right tool for the timeline stage, because it sorts and filters. Voice recording plus transcription suits people who tell a story better than they type one, which is most people writing about their own life.
Can AI write a book about my life?
It can produce readable text about your life and it cannot produce your life story. The material a life story runs on is specific: what your father said, what the room smelled like, what you decided at nineteen. A language model has none of that and will invent plausible substitutes, which is the one thing a memoir cannot survive. AI is genuinely useful for transcribing recorded interviews and for a grammar pass on prose a person has already written. The US Copyright Office does not register material generated by AI, so a book drafted that way also affects what you can own and license.
Should I write my life story myself or hire someone?
It depends less on budget than on whether you will still be at the desk in month four. Writing it yourself costs nothing plus roughly four hundred hours, and then $3,300 to $6,000 for editing, cover, formatting and publishing setup at the end. Hiring runs $5,495 to $24,999 with the editing included, and asks eight to twelve interview hours from you instead. Put a value on your own hour and the two often land closer than expected.
Next Steps
❦Start with the timeline
The first step costs nothing and takes an afternoon. A hundred lines, no prose. By the end of it you will know which of the four books you are writing and roughly how long it needs to be.
Take the template, or talk to someone about having it written. The call tells you honestly which of three things is true: you should write this yourself, you should have it written, or the book you actually want is shorter than the one you were planning.
Mutual NDA available before the call on request. 100% book rights transfer to you. No contracts until you decide.
AuthorWings· Transparent Pricing · 100% Your Rights
Last updated: September 2026