You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. Anne Lamont

Introduction

You’ve wanted to write your life story for some time now. Maybe you want to write for your grandkids, for yourself, or in hopes of reaching a larger audience. All of these goals are a good fit for this course.

Find Your Story is designed for absolute beginning writers. I will get you writing your life story in just 28 days. All I need from you is between five and fifteen minutes, 4-5 days a week. Depending on your pace, you can complete the 28 day course in 5-6 weeks. By the time you finish, you will have an organized writing outline and schedule that will keep you writing your first draft for several more months.

This course is very different from other memoir writing courses. My academic and professional expertise is in both literature and mental health, specializing in the psychological and spiritual development of older women. I developed the Find Your Story course to prove that when we feel our way through our own life stories we become better storytellers and create stories that cultivate a healing response in others.

In the first half of the course, you will work through several therapeutic writing exercises. Many of these are writing prompts, but others I’ve developed out of some traditional mental health exercises that you may have seen before. This writing process sometimes might feel a bit like therapy in the first half.

In the second half of the course, you will move into more traditional writing exercises. The challenge you face is getting your narration of life events shaped into a story for someone else to read. I will help you move your confusing mix of feelings and memories into a very basic and traditional story structure. We will finish up the last week with some organizational exercises that will keep you on track to getting your first draft written.

We don’t know what will unfold for you as you start your Find Your Story journey. No matter how old you are, you are in a constant process of unfolding, as you continue to grow forward and reflect backward. Many women work through these exercises again and again. Your responses to these exercises will be different from year to year. With that in mind, I’d like for you to remember that your first pass through this book is just a first look in both directions. I will ask you to please not try to do too much in this first time though.

And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. —Louise Erdrich