40 Questions to Ask Yourself When Writing Your Life Story

A life story is not a timeline. It is a set of answers to questions you have never been asked directly. If you sit down to “write your life”, you will freeze. If you sit down to answer one question, you will write for an hour.

Use these in any order. Skip the ones that do not apply. Answer one a day, or one a week. Ten good answers make a chapter; forty make a book.

Beginnings

1. What is the first thing you remember?
2. What did your childhood home smell like?
3. Who was the person who made you feel safe?
4. What were you told about yourself before you could disagree?
5. What did your family never talk about?
6. What was the first rule you broke, and what happened?
7. What did you want to be when you grew up, and why that?
8. Which teacher or adult saw something in you that your family did not?

Family and inheritance

1. What did you inherit that was not money — a temper, a fear, a habit, a story?
2. Which parent do you understand better now, and what changed?
3. What is the kindest thing anyone in your family ever did for you?
4. What is the thing you have never forgiven them for?
5. Who in your family would you want to interview, and what would you ask?
6. What family story do you suspect is not true?
7. What did you have to become in order to survive your family?
8. What do you want the next generation to know about where they come from?

Turning points

1. What is the decision that changed the direction of your life?
2. What is the moment you knew something was over?
3. What is the risk you took that you would take again?
4. What is the chance you did not take?
5. Who did you lose, and what did they take with them?
6. What is the thing that happened to you that you have never told anyone?
7. What is the thing you did that you have never admitted?
8. When did you first feel truly alone?

Love and friendship

1. Who was your first real friend, and what happened to them?
2. What is the most honest thing anyone has ever said to you?
3. What did you learn about love from watching your parents?
4. Which relationship taught you the most about yourself?
5. What do you wish you had said to someone before they left?
6. Who are you still trying to impress, and why?

Work, ambition and failure

1. What did you do that you were proud of and never told anyone?
2. What failure taught you more than any success?
3. What did you sacrifice for stability, and was it worth it?
4. What would you do if nobody would judge you for it?
5. What is the work you are still avoiding?

Now and next

1. What do you believe now that you did not believe five years ago?
2. What are you still carrying that you could put down?
3. What would you want written about you in one sentence?
4. Who do you owe an apology, and what would it say?
5. What is the next chapter you want to write, literally?

How to turn answers into a Full Chapter

Do not edit while you answer. Write badly and quickly, then leave it for a week. When you return, group your answers into four or five acts — beginnings, the thing that broke, the rebuilding, and where you are now. That structure is enough for a readable life story; you do not need a literary agent to make sense of your own life.

If you want a place to keep the answers together, a Full Chapter is a set of sections built for exactly this — ten prompts, saved privately, publishable when you are ready. You can also read other people’s stories about hope and starting again for company while you write.