Writing someone else’s life story is an act of love, but it comes with a particular challenge: how do you capture a person’s voice and experience when you weren’t there for all of it? The answer is to become a careful listener before you become a writer. Here is a step-by-step process that works whether you are writing a few thousand words or a full-length memoir.
Step 1: Gather Everything First
Before you write a single word, collect as much raw material as you can. Schedule two or three recorded interviews and ask open-ended questions that invite stories rather than facts. Photograph or scan any documents the person holds: diaries, letters, immigration papers, school reports, wedding invitations, payslips. These objects often unlock memories that conversation alone won’t reach.
Also gather photographs and ask the person to talk about them — a snapshot of a childhood home can produce twenty minutes of rich detail. If other family members are available and willing, a brief conversation with a sibling or old friend can add texture and catch gaps in memory.
Step 2: Choose Your Structure
There are two main ways to organise a life story, and neither is wrong:
- Chronological: Birth to present, organised by life stages. This is easier to follow and works well when the person’s story has a clear arc — emigration, career change, recovery, achievement.
- Thematic: Chapters grouped by subject: work, family, faith, hardship, joy. This works well when the person resists linearity or when certain themes dominate their experience regardless of when they occurred.
A practical hybrid is to use a loose chronological spine with thematic detours. Start with an early memory that captures something essential about the person, then move roughly forward in time.
Step 3: Find Their Voice
The biggest risk in writing for someone else is drowning their voice in your own. Listen back to your recordings and notice the words and phrases they return to. Do they use humour to deflect? Do they understate everything? Do they describe emotions in physical terms — “my heart dropped,” “my stomach turned”? Capture those patterns in your writing.
Write in the first person as if they are speaking. Read your draft aloud and ask yourself: could this person have said this? If a sentence sounds like a novelist rather than a farmer, a mechanic, or a teacher, revise it.
Step 4: Handle Gaps and Difficult Material
Every life story has gaps — periods the person doesn’t remember clearly, events they’d prefer not to revisit, or family dynamics they want to tread lightly around. Be guided by their wishes. Where memory is uncertain, write around it honestly: “She doesn’t remember the exact year, but it was around the time of…” Invented detail presented as fact will undermine the whole document if it surfaces later.
Step 5: Review Together
Share drafts with the person in sections rather than all at once. Ask them to mark anything that feels wrong, anything they want added, and anything they want removed. This is their story — your role is to shape and preserve it, not to impose a version they don’t recognise. A final read-through together, out loud, is worth the time it takes.