Hopefully you have gathered a rough draft or some ideas to edit into an account of your life or whomever you are writing about. With a tentative outline in mind, write down the various topics or areas of your life you want to share. If you’re compiling chronologically, you can still begin with a later part of your life and then do a flashback to your birth or childhood. The most boring bios I’ve read start with “I was born in…” You don’t want to put your reader to sleep, but instead share some exciting experiences in your life perhaps with a touch of humor to intrigue your reader to read more.
Is there a theme to your life? In writing my husband’s life story, I realized he had spent his whole career searching/exploring for the perfect homestead spot. Working for the US Forest Service, he moved a total of 22 times during his career trying out different climate and locales. To explore this theme, I named the first chapter in his bio “Southern Roots” and discussed how his ancestors had set the example moving west from their early beginnings in Virginia to Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma and finally to Texas looking for better opportunities. The second chapter is entitled “Rooted in Texas” which is where he was born and raised. Then the third chapter is “Exploring the Wild West” with details of his life after marriage and college to find a place to settle and raise his family. The last chapter is entitled “Retirement and New Dreams.” The overall title for his history is “The Biography of Bert Allen Floyd Jr: From Texas to Exploring the Wild West.”
Looking at your manuscript and trying to break it up into sections can help you organize it better. There are more lengthy histories and photos of my husband’s ancestors that I wanted to add to his book, so I put them in an appendix at the end.
I begin his story with “Bert Allen’s ancestors were true Southerners from West Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Some fought in the Civil War for the confederacy. They eventually migrated west across the southern states through Oklahoma then called the Indian Territory, and ended up in Texas.” My purpose in writing his history was to give his descendents some background information on their ancestors as well as details of the life and accomplishments of their father and grandfather.