How to Make a Fast Autobiography
- 1). Spend up to an hour setting goals for the project. Set aside about a quarter of your time for initial research and planning, a quarter to a half for composing a rough draft and the remainder for editing and refining.
- 2). Skim old journals, notes and memorabilia to find notable themes and significant events that shaped your life. Number the pages of each journal and assign each journal a unique title or letter. Use one color of highlighter or colored pencil to mark each theme as it occurs in your journals. Index important themes, places, people and events in a new document by listing them alphabetically (by the word or name you most intuitively associate with them) alongside the page number.
- 3). Choose a unifying story thread based on your research and reminiscences. The unifying thread may be a driving question you have finally answered, a goal fulfilled or a painful obstacle overcome.
- 4). Draft an outline of your autobiography. The main goal of the outline is to give you a sense of how far the story should move in each segment or chapter of the autobiography, which in turn will help you manage your time as you write a draft.
- 5). Divide your desired word count by the number of days you have allotted to the draft to define your daily word count goal, and stick to it religiously. If you are unable to consistently meet this number, your goal is too ambitious and you will have to give yourself more time to complete the project. As a rough guideline, a 200 page autobiography averaging 350 words per page contains 75,000 words. If you can maintain a typing speed of 50 words per minute, which is very fast for composition, this will take 25 hours of typing. At 30 wpm, it will take just over 40 hours of typing.
- 6). Edit your draft for content by removing irrelevant phrases, clarifying confusing sections and rearranging the order, scope and emphasis of different sections as needed to heighten the clarity and significance of the central thread of your autobiography. Follow the rule that each chapter should be necessary to fully making the book's point and each paragraph should be necessary to fully making the chapter's point. Let a trusted friend or editor read your polished draft and help you find places that are still unclear or lacking in impact. Multiple passes of editing may be necessary.
- 7). Proofread your polished draft and edit for style. In this stage the content should remain fairly unchanged in structure and scope, but individual sentences may need editing for clarity, significance or relevance. Correct any grammar, spelling and punctuation errors. While the limited time frame will most likely affect the quality of the final product, this process should result in a reasonably good autobiography in a short period.
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