How to begin generating content? 

Here are some tips and writing exercises to help you explain your life story. First, list 10 or more topics you might cover. Then, add more bit by bit, slow and steady, day by day, week by week. Here are some general tips:

• List as many life events as you can

• Cover the page with more ideas than you could ever use

• Revisit the ones that catch and hold your attention

• As long as you are enjoying telling the story, your reader will be able to find some spark of life in it

• Review you work, but do not look back to fix anything. Just plow forward, day after day

• When you are felling reflective (and not merely procrastinating), go back and see what you wrote

• Select the stories that still make you smile or think

• Add details

• Tell the stories that will survive after you are gone

• Write something you could show to your grandchildren some day

Brainstorming prompts and questions to get you started

1. Why did you start a certain favorite hobby or activity that you still enjoy today?

2. Why did you chose your university?

3. Why did you chose your major at university?

4. Why did you chose your industry and function? 

5. Why did you chose your company?

6. What did you learn from your first assignment / career phase?

7. What are you doing and learning now?

8. What do you want to do next?  

Think about these topics when you get stuck

1. First memories

2. Childhood memories

3. Birthdays

4. New Years

5. Holidays

6. Hard times and difficulties

7. Festivals and celebrations

8. Friends and neighbors

9. Family members

10. Chores

11. Illnesses

12. Entertainment

13. Things you built with your hands

14. Things you created with friends

15. Homes

16. Schools

17. Sports

18. Travel / international experience

19. Love and marriage

Are you the hero of your story?

• Can you show your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions to express an event or story?

• For example, we may say, "He is sloppy." This is telling.

• In order to truly convince your readers, make sure to show with details exactly what you mean.

• Save your assertions for the topic and controlling sentences.

• You can't tell us someone is a wonderful person, a talented musician or a spoiled child. We won't believe you. You must show us.

• Look for any opportunity to show us in real time, to act out, to let us feel. The difference will amaze you.

• For example, we may say, "His shoelaces are untied, his socks are mismatched, his shirt untucked, and his face unwashed." This is showing.

• Show us your feelings and words

• Show us the motivations that drove your actions

• Show us how others responded in words and actions

• Thought

• Felt

• Said

• Did

WRITING ABOUT YOURSELF

The memoir

• Of all the subjects available to you as a writer, the one you know best is yourself: your past and your present, your thoughts and your emotions.

• Yet it’s probably the subject you try hardest to avoid.

• Give yourself permission to write about yourself, and have a good time doing it.

• Don't be eager to please. If you consciously write for (admissions officers), you'll end up not writing for anybody. If you write for yourself, you'll reach the people you want to write for.

The crucial ingredient in memoir is, of course, people. Sounds and smells and songs and sleeping porches will take you just so far. Finally you must summon back the men and women and children who notably crossed your life. What was it that made them memorable—what turn of mind, what crazy habits?

Write about yourself, by all means, with confidence and with pleasure. But see that all the details—people, places, events, anecdotes, ideas, emotions—are moving your story steadily along. Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful work.

Which brings me to memoir as a form. I'll read almost anybody's memoir. For me, no other nonfiction form goes so deeply to the roots of personal experience—to all the drama and pain and humor and unexpectedness of life. The books I remember most vividly from my first reading of them tend to be memoirs: books such as

• Russell Baker's Growing Up

• Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments

• Mary Karr's The Liars' Club

• Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes

• Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory

• Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings

What gives them their power is the narrowness of their focus. Unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The memoir writer takes us back to some corner of his or her past that was unusually intense—childhood, for instance—or that was framed by war or some other social upheaval.

• Nabokov's Speak, Memory, the most elegant memoir I know, invokes a golden boyhood in czarist St. Petersburg, a world of private tutors and summer houses that the Russian Revolution would end forever. It's an act of writing frozen in a unique time and place.

Think narrow, then, when you try the form. Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction. Thoreau wrote seven different drafts of Walden in eight years; no American memoir was more painstakingly pieced together. To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth. One secret of the art is detail. Any kind of detail will work—a sound or a smell or a song title—as long as it played a shaping role in the portion of your life you have chosen to distil.

Consider sound. Here's how Eudora Welty begins One Writer's Beginnings, a deceptively slender book packed with rich remembrance

"In our house on North Congress Street, in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks. There was a mission-style oak grandfather clock standing in the hall, which sent its gong-like strokes through the living room, dining room, kitchen, and pantry, and up the sounding board of the stairwell. Through the night, it could find its way into our ears; sometimes, even on the sleeping porch, midnight could wake us up. My parents' bedroom had a smaller striking clock that answered it. Though the kitchen clock did nothing but show the time, the dining room clock was a cuckoo clock with weights on long chains, on one of which my baby brother, after climbing on a chair to the top of the china closet, once succeeded in suspending the cat for a moment. I don't know whether or not my father's Ohio family, in having been Swiss back in the 1700s before the first three Welty brothers came to America, had anything to do with this; but we all of us have been time-minded all our lives. This was good at least for a future fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly, and almost first of all, about chronology. It was one of a good many things I learned almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.

My father loved all instruments that would instruct and fascinate. His place to keep things was the drawer in the "library table" where lying on top of his folded maps was a telescope with brass extensions, to find the moon and the Big Dipper after supper in our front yard, and to keep appointments with eclipses. There was a folding Kodak that was brought out for Christmas, birthdays, and trips. In the back of the drawer you could find a magnifying glass, a kaleidoscope, and a gyroscope kept in a black buckram box, which he would set dancing for us on a string pulled tight. He had also supplied himself with an assortment of puzzles composed of metal rings and intersecting links and keys chained together, impossible for the rest of us, however patiently shown, to take apart; he had an almost childlike love of the ingenious.

In time, a barometer was added to our dining room wall; but we really didn't need it. My father had the country boy’s accurate knowledge of the weather and its skies. He went out and stood on our front steps first thing in the morning and took a look at it and a sniff. He was a pretty good weather prophet. "Well, I'm not," my mother would say with enormous self-satisfaction.

So I developed a strong meteorological sensibility. In years ahead when I wrote stories, atmosphere took its influential role from the start. Commotion in the weather and the inner feelings aroused by such a hovering disturbance emerged connected in dramatic form."

Notice how much we learn instantly about Eudora Welty’s beginnings—the kind of home she was born into, the kind of man her father was. She has rung us into her Mississippi girlhood with the chiming of clocks up and down the stairs and even out onto the sleeping porch.

For Alfred Kazin, smell is a thread that he follows back to his boyhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. From my first encounter with Kazan's A Walker in the City, long ago, I remember it as a sensory memoir. The following passage is not only a good example of how to write with your nose; it shows how memoir is nourished by a writers ability to create a sense of place—what it was that made his neighborhood and his heritage distinctive:

"It was the darkness and emptiness of the streets I liked most about Friday evening, as if in preparation for that day of rest and worship which the Jews greet "as a bride"—that day when the very touch of money is prohibited, all work, all travel, all household duties, even to the turning on and off of a light—Jewry had found its way past its tormented heart to some ancient still center of itself. I waited for the streets to go dark on Friday evening as other children waited for the Christmas lights.

When I returned home after three, the warm odor of a coffee cake baking in the oven, and the sight of my mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum on the dining room floor, filled me with such tenderness that I could feel my senses reaching out to embrace every single object in our household.

My great moment came at six, when my father returned from work, his overalls smelling faintly of turpentine and shellac, white drops of silver paint still gleaming on his chin. Hanging his overcoat in the long dark hall that led into our kitchen, he would leave in one pocket a loosely folded copy of the New York World; and then everything that beckoned to me from that other hemisphere of my brain beyond the East River would start up from the smell of fresh newsprint and the sight of the globe on the front page. It was a paper that carried special associations for me with Brooklyn Bridge.

They published the World under the green dome on Park Row overlooking the bridge; the fresh salt air of New York harbor lingered for me in the smell of paint and damp newsprint in the hall. I felt that my father brought the outside straight into our house with each day's copy of the World."

Kazin would eventually cross the Brooklyn Bridge and become the dean of American literary critics. But the literary genre that has been at the center of his life is not the usual stuff of literature: the novel, or the short story, or the poem. It's memoir, or what he calls "personal history"—specifically, such "personal American classics," discovered when he was a boy, as Walt Whitman's Civil War diary Specimen Days and his Leaves of Grass, Thoreau's Walden and especially his Journals, and The Education of Henry Adams.

What excited Kazin was that Whitman, Thoreau and Adams wrote themselves into the landscape of American literature by daring to use the most intimate forms—journals, diaries, letters and memoirs—and that he could also make the same "cherished connection" to America by writing personal history and thereby place himself, the son of Russian Jews, in the same landscape. You can use your own personal history to cross your own Brooklyn Bridge.

For Maxine Hong Kingston, a daughter of Chinese immigrants in Stockton, California, shyness and embarrassment were central to the experience of being a child starting school in a strange land. In this passage, aptly called "Finding a Voice," from her book The Woman Warrior, notice how vividly Kingston recalls both facts and feelings from those traumatic early years in America:

"When I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became silent. A dumbness—a shame—still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say "hello" casually, or ask an easy question in front of the check-out counter, or ask directions of a bus driver. I stand frozen.

During the first silent year I spoke to no one at school, did not ask before going to the lavatory, and flunked kindergarten. My sister also said nothing for three years, silent in the playground and silent at lunch. There were other quiet Chinese girls not of our family, but most of them got over it sooner than we did.

I enjoyed the silence. At first it did not occur to me I was supposed to talk or to pass kindergarten. I talked at home and to one or two of the Chinese kids in class. I made motions and even made some jokes. I drank out of a toy saucer when the water spilled out of the cup, and everybody laughed, pointed at me, so I did it some more. I didn't know that Americans don't drink out of saucers…

It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery, that the silence became a misery. I did not speak and felt bad each time that I did not speak. I read aloud in first grade, though, and heard the barest whisper with little squeaks come out of my throat. "Louder," said the teacher, who scared the voice away again. The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl.”

That childhood whisper is now an adult writer's voice that speaks to us with wisdom and humor, and I'm grateful to have that voice in our midst. Nobody but a Chinese-American woman could have made me feel what it's like to be a Chinese girl plunked down in an American kindergarten and expected to be an American girl.