50 life story prompts to help you start writing your memoir

Most people who want to write their life story share the same obstacle: not knowing where to start. A life contains too much. The question "where do I begin?" is genuinely difficult, and the answer – "at the beginning" – is almost never useful.

The fifty prompts below bypass that difficulty entirely. Each one is a question small enough to answer, specific enough to open a real memory, and honest enough to lead somewhere worth going. Use them in any order. Write your answers or record them. Work through one a week or several in a sitting. The only rule is that every prompt is a beginning, not a plan.

How to use these prompts

The best approach is also the simplest. Pick one prompt. Give it twenty minutes. Write – or speak aloud, with a phone recording – whatever comes, without editing or second-guessing. A specific memory is worth ten times a general reflection. If the prompt asks about your first day at school, don't write about what school was like in general. Write about that day: what the classroom smelled like, who was sitting near you, what you were wearing.

When you have finished, stop. Come back the following day, or the following week. The accumulation of answered prompts becomes, gradually, a memoir.

For more on the underlying approach – choosing a structure, deciding on your audience, keeping momentum across months rather than weeks – How to write your own life story is a useful companion to this list.

Part 1 – Childhood and where you came from

Your earliest memories hold more than you think. These prompts work backwards from the specific – a house, a person, an afternoon – to the broader patterns of a childhood.

1. What is the earliest memory you have? Describe it as precisely as you can.
2. What did the house or home you grew up in look and feel like? Walk through it room by room.
3. Who was the most interesting adult in your childhood, outside of your immediate family? What made them interesting?
4. What were summers like when you were a child – a typical one, not a memorable one?
5. What did your parents argue about? And what did they agree on without ever having to say so?
6. Was there a teacher, or any adult at school, who genuinely changed something in you?
7. What were you afraid of as a child? And what, specifically, made you feel safe?
8. What did you want to be when you grew up? How seriously did you hold that?
9. Describe a Christmas or family celebration from childhood. What made it particular?
10. What is one thing about your childhood that people today would find difficult to believe?

Part 2 – Education, work, and ambition

This section covers the decades in which you were becoming yourself – working out what you were good at, what you wanted, and what the world was asking of you.

11. What was the first job you ever had? What do you remember most vividly about it?
12. What did you find easy that others found difficult? And what did others seem to manage that you found hard?
13. Was there a single decision – a job offer, a move, a refusal – that changed the direction of your life?
14. Who was the best person you ever worked with, and what made working alongside them good?
15. Describe a professional failure. What happened, and what did you carry forward from it?
16. What was the hardest period of your working life? What got you through it?
17. Was there something you wanted to do – a path, a vocation, a version of your life – that you never pursued?
18. What did money mean to you, and did that meaning change over the years?
19. What are you most proud of in your professional life – not the most impressive thing, but the most meaningful?
20. If you could tell your younger working self one thing, what would it be?

Part 3 – Love, relationships, and family life

These prompts move into territory that is often harder to write about, which is usually a sign there is something worth finding there.

21. How did you meet the most important person in your life? What do you remember about that first meeting?
22. What was the early period of your marriage or partnership really like – not the version you'd describe to a stranger?
23. What have you learned about love that you didn't know at the beginning?
24. Describe a moment when you and someone close to you understood each other completely – and a moment when you didn't.
25. What kind of parent were you? What do you wish you had done differently, and what are you glad you held firm on?
26. What does a child or grandchild do that reminds you, unmistakably, of yourself?
27. Who in your family is gone now that you miss most? What do you wish you had said?
28. What did your parents teach you – explicitly, or simply by the way they lived – about how a life should be conducted?
29. What is a tradition or habit in your family that started with you, or that you kept alive from the generation before?
30. If you could have one more conversation with someone who is no longer here, what would you want to ask them?

Part 4 – The world you lived through

You have lived through decades of history that younger people only read about. This section tries to recover what that actually felt like from the inside.

31. What was the biggest world event of your lifetime? Where were you, and what do you remember feeling?
32. What has changed most dramatically across your lifetime – and do you think the change was for the better?
33. What did you understand about the world at 30 that you didn't at 20? And what do you understand now that you couldn't have at 40?
34. Was there a moment when you felt the weight of history – when something happening in the wider world made itself felt directly in your own life?
35. What was the relationship between your generation and the one before it? What did you disagree about, and what did you quietly agree on?
36. Which piece of technology has made the most real difference to your daily life – not the most dramatic, the most real?
37. Describe a place that no longer exists in the form you knew it – a street, a shop, a way of spending an afternoon.
38. What have you seen disappear that you think should have been kept?
39. What do people get wrong about the era you grew up in?
40. What do you hope will be different for the generation after yours?

Part 5 – What you want to leave behind

These are the prompts people most often leave until last – and then find they have the most to say.

41. What do you believe now that you couldn't have articulated at 30?
42. What has given your life meaning? Not what you think should have given it meaning – what actually did?
43. What advice would you give to someone who is now the age you were when you made your biggest mistake?
44. What are you most proud of – in your whole life, not just the parts that are easy to talk about?
45. What do you regret? And have you made peace with it?
46. Who shaped you most as a person – and do they know?
47. What do you want the people who love you to understand about your life that they might not already?
48. What is a story you have told so many times it has become a performance – and what is the version behind it that you have never told?
49. What do you hope your grandchildren will carry forward from you?
50. If you could say one thing to someone who will read this fifty years from now, what would it be?

These prompts are a starting point, not a framework. Some will feel too large and some will feel too small. Follow the ones that pull at something – and if one opens a memory you weren't expecting, stay there. That is usually where the most useful material is.

For a sense of what a complete memoir looks like once the material is gathered – the formats it can take, what the process of shaping it involves – What Is a Life Story Book is worth reading before you decide how you want to proceed.

If you would rather talk through these questions than write your way through them, Chronicle is built for exactly this: guided conversation in your own voice, shaped into a printed book. The prompts are a beginning. The book is what you're working towards.