How to turn your life story into a great autobiography worth publishing

We’ve all sat next to a great raconteur and listened to them spin the thinnest of tales into a gripping story, and we’ve certainly all been cornered by a bore who spends hours describing trips to exotic locales with all the thrill and colour of a wet Wednesday. So how do you turn your own life into something like the former, and avoid all the pitfalls of becoming the latter? 
    
Every adult has been formed by early and teenage years, for better or worse, and we probably all share overlapping experiences: a beloved relative, a favourite toy, a frightening moment, a schoolyard memory. And as teenagers, further common ground: falling in and out with friends, first crushes, exam stress, the founding of future plans, the start of the working world. Great autobiography lies in those overlaps, and how we turn them into the beating heart of a story.

Looking at a great celebrity memoir of recent times, Elton John will have had multiple overlaps with his readers during his childhood and teenage years (parents, encouragement, obsessions, disasters). Most of us, I gamble, didn’t grow up to be Elton John, but those overlaps are what connect us with his story—the glitter, glamour and excess are just the sprinkles on top.

In fact, the great memoirs from the non-glittery and glamorous among us focus on the remarkable interior lives these writers had away from any public gaze: the isolation and resilience of Tara Westover in Educated, the inspirational late-in-life running passion of Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, or the grief and survival of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

These writers, and other great memoirists, take notable moments from their lives — some huge, like becoming an orphan at a young age, some seemingly trivial, like deciding to take up a new hobby — and build a narrative around these moments that we can connect to in the overlaps.

Beyond the connection, we need momentum to keep us reading, and that momentum comes from the pulse of the story: what occurred from the grief, determination, love, fear, or some other defining aspect of the human spirit, captured in a narrative arc that makes us ask, ‘And then what happened?’

Finding that heartbeat of your own story, as an aspiring autobiographer, is vital to making your story not only good, but publishable. Every editor wants to be able to pitch your life story in one sentence (“A high-earning businessman gives up his CEO career to become a birdwatcher”, “A mum of two from a humble background makes groundbreaking discoveries that change the face of medicine”) by combining the human aspect (your face that everyone sees) with the remarkable (your behind-the-scenes work on charity, sport, science, politics, hobbies, or self-development).

The autobiography itself then needs to have that vital pulse, the flow of one event after another built up with rhythm and tension, keeping the reader turning your pages.

Unless you’re already gifted with a great skill with words, the crucial step is finding the right ghostwriter. Ghostwriting has been around for as long as there’s been the written word, because as long as there have been memoirs, essays, stories and histories, there have been talented writers who can take the skeleton of a good yarn and turn it into unmissable prose.

The ghostwriter’s job is to get both the human connections and the rhythms of your story onto the page. Of course, because one lives one’s own life every day, morning, noon and night, we often lose sight of what might be exciting, funny, or unusual to others. A ghostwriter will draw out the most interesting aspects of your day-to-day life, from the grindingly mundane (‘you have to make how many sandwiches per week?’) to the jaw-dropping (‘you grew up with how many monkeys in your household?).

When it comes to the remarkable, would-be authors are also surprisingly reticent to spell out the hard work, sacrifice and dedication it takes to truly turn a life around. And when they do want to talk about it, it’s tricky for them to know what level of detail a reader needs to understand that work, and the journey they’ve been on to get to where they are now.

A good ghostwriter will sit with an author for hours, days, weeks and even months, to build up a full picture of a life to capture it on a page. From first steps and early years, the building blocks for all of us, through passing fads and youthful errors, the ghostwriter will allow the author to talk the ideas through, and sometimes join dots they’d never been able to connect before. It’s more common than you’d perhaps expect that a client describes the process of working with a ghostwriter as something akin to therapy, as they talk through major events in their life with someone totally unwilling to judge, who can help the author organise them into that vital narrative pulse.

Finding a good ghostwriter is key. Having someone with experience in the same field as the author might seem like a crucial element, but it is very rarely essential: having someone outside the industry or interest means instead that the ghostwriter can come to it cold, and ask the same questions as the reader would want to know: how does this whole thing work? How do you climb the ladder? What does failure look like in this world?

Instead, good chemistry is vital. Working with a ghostwriter who understands the heart of your story, who can laugh with you at comedic events and express the pain of your darkest moments, who can capture what the struggle cost you and how it felt to achieve something you never thought you could, no matter how great or small — that’s the key to creating a great life story that everyone wants to read.

Sam Binnie is a professional writer of fiction and non-fiction. She has ghostwritten a Sunday Times bestselling celebrity memoir, created a guidebook to the multiple-award-winning Wolf Hall books and written four of her own novels. She has interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, copy-edited art books, cookery books and major industry handbooks, and runs corporate copywriting workshops and creative writing sessions in schools. Her writing has appeared in VICE magazine, The Guardian and Harper’s Bazaar, and she won the Orange Short Story Prize in 2005. She works as an editor and ghostwriter at The London Ghostwriting Company on fiction and non-fiction titles.