"Memoirs are the backstairs of history."
- George Meredith
Planning Your Lifetime Book
Depending upon your age, your lifetime story can be a long one, filled with precious and sometimes lengthy descriptions of events and accomplishments, some remembered with humor and some that may be quite tragic. Your life is a drama that spans decades. So how do you recount all of those great stories in the space of a fifty or a hundred-page book? (See book options.)
The 4 P’s:
PURPOSE—PROBING—PRIORITY—PROGRESS
Your Lifetime Writer uses a carefully crafted process designed to cull the best of your lifetime stories to fit the limitation of the book size you have selected.
Here’s how it’s done:
PURPOSE
Your Lifetime Writer begins by helping you organize everything around your stated PURPOSE. Are you writing the book to capture a few treasured moments? Or maybe your principal purpose is to share a lesson learned. Still others may want to write a book to recognize individuals who have made an impact on their lives. Whatever your purpose, it will help you limit the focus and the scope of your lifetime book.
PROBING
Once you decide your PURPOSE, your Lifetime Writer begins to “probe” by asking you questions that align directly with your purpose and story telling objectives. These questions, conducted in interviews, keep you focused and on track, so that you can choose those life events that are most relevant.
PRIORITY
After the interviews, there will be time to fill in the blanks. Your Lifetime Writer develops an outline of the topics, events and stories you have explored together so far. Your stories are fit into a timeline and a chronology, so that you can easily see the periods of your lifetime that have the most importance to you and identify where the memories have faded. Then you and your Lifetime writer work together to prioritize the ideas and narratives, and to rank them as to their relevance to your purpose. Together, you and your Lifetime Writer choose the stories to include in your final book, and which stories to hold for a later edition or perhaps a future book written for a different purpose.
PROGRESS
The final step in the process is managing the PROGRESS of your Lifetime Book Project. Your Lifetime Writer manages the writing, editing and publishing process, creating a flexible schedule that can be updated regularly. We provide you with a three-ring binder to hold paper copies of every chapter as they are written. When the final draft is approved, your writer/editor works efficiently to publish your book by a certain date. Maybe you would like to complete the book in time to be a gift for an anniversary or a birthday. Or perhaps you have no deadline and would like to proceed with the project at your leisure. Your Lifetime Writer monitors the PROGRESS of your Lifetime Book project and continually updates you and encourages you until the book is completed.
There is no need to be anxious about the writing process or to delay telling your lifetime story any longer. Your Lifetime Book writing process is one you will enjoy because your Lifetime Writer is dedicated to making it easy for you and a pleasant experience overall.