Personal History Course, Lesson #1…
If you have wanted to preserve your story for future generations, but haven’t quite known how to start, I’m hoping this series of blog posts can help.
The very best way to get started is to start.
Starting is the piece that trips up the 97% of professional writers who know they have a book in them but never get it published. That’s a real statistic, by the way. If you don’t consider yourself a writer, my first task is to convince you that you don’t have to be. You don’t have to be a writer to write your personal history.
As long as you can speak, you can record your memoirs and your personal stories for your descendants in a way that will be meaningful for them.
But you do need to start…
Here’s one way to do it. You only need a smartphone:
- Find a quiet, well-lit room
- Put your phone on a tripod or other secure surface about 4 feet away, just below eye level. If someone else is helping, have them help frame you in the center of the lens. In a worst-case scenario, you can hold your phone in front of you while you record yourself speaking
- Turn on your video app
- Press record
- Sit in front of your phone and tell a “Genesis story”
- When you finish, press stop to save your video
- Celebrate, because you have STARTED, and your personal history is in process!
All of my clients start their histories with a single video story. All of them are nervous in front of the camera at first. All of them get used to it. All of them have succeeded in “writing” a book more than 100 pages long, although most never physically typed a single word. I’ll tell you how that’s done in this blog series, but let’s start with a single recorded story.
Here’s Donrey’s first video story attempt:
Does he seem nervous? Does he flounder around for the right grammar? Is he worried about where the commas go?
Nope. He’s just being Donrey, including putting on his favorite ball cap before we started just because he knew it would annoy some of his admirers. But this single 2-minute story includes some pretty amazing stuff:
- It immortalizes the sound of his voice for his descendants
- It showcases some of his personality
- It tells a favorite “genesis story” (the story of how he proposed to his wife)
- It enshrines his favorite family heirloom (his ’68 Mustang convertible)
- It celebrates one of his hobbies (gardening)
All in two minutes. We didn’t have fancy equipment. All I did was line him up in the viewfinder of my iPhone and push “record.” You can do something just this simple as you begin to record your personal history. All you have to do is start.
Before the day is over, choose a Genesis story and tell the camera, in 5 minutes or less, the most interesting parts of the story.
Photo by Andrew Neel
*What is a Genesis Story?
A Genesis story is a story of a beginning, but not necessarily the beginning. It’s a good place to start a history because there are so many beginnings in your life:
- Your first day of elementary school
- The day you met your best high school friend
- The first time you glimpsed your significant other
- Your first date with your significant other
- Your first job
- The first time you ended up in the hospital
- The birth of your first child
- Your first attempt at your favorite hobby
- Your first trip to the dentist
- The day you had an idea for a business you could start
- What happened the day you left home for the first time
- The day you learned to read
*I am indebted to Rhonda Lauritzen at Evalogue.life who taught me the magic of a Genesis Story. Rhonda teaches professional oral history interviewing skills.
You may have already told this story many times, or never have breathed a word of it to anyone! You won’t mess this up. Just turn on your phone and try it. Once you have done this much, it will be easier to keep going. And once you finish, you can move on to Lesson 2: Remembering With Photos
You can sit in on my very first Zoom class held in March 2024 with a few friends who are working together to write and publish Personal Histories for ourselves and our family members.
