What is Your Life or Family Writing Mission?

If you write about yourself or your family, what is your mission? What inspires and propels you? Do you feel strongly about what you want to say? Do you want others to understand your experiences or your family’s?

My mission is to coax out the (accidentally or deliberately) concealed parts of my own and my family’s life. Each of us has a unique position from which we can tell a story. My younger brother’s or my older sister’s story of our growing up wouldn’t match mine in every respect. You might have heard it said that each child in a family has different parents. The oldest one has had time alone with the parents when they were a young couple with no other kids to distract them. They were learning how to be parents; the experience was new to them, and they were probably nervous but eager. By the time the second child arrives, they might be less frightened of the experience of being parents. And by the time the third comes, they’re downright veterans who behave with confidence.

It is my mission, and has been for some time, to encourage people to share their stories. Don’t you wish you could ask some of your ancestors about their lives and the events and activities they were involved in? The obstacles they overcame? Their home remedies? Even the meals they prepared?

Whether or not we memoirists and family history writers intend to, we are educating others through our writing. We pass on information to current and future generations. We preserve our own or our family’s history from oblivion.

Writing about our lives or our families also allows us to document our point of view, our slant on incidents and experiences that took place in the large and small arenas we’ve played in.

You can make it your mission to tell the story of your or your family’s life (or a portion of it). You’ll be surprised at what you discover in the process.

Oh! And you don’t have to produce a book. You can write essays and anecdotes—short pieces of manageable length.

I urge you to get started or continue documenting your life or your family’s. You can make that your writing mission.

__________________

If you need help getting started, continuing, or finishing your life or family writing project, get in touch with me. I’m experienced and easy to work with. Just see what others say about working with me. (There are a lot of testimonials. Scroll down to see all of them.)