Life stories, autobiography, biography and memoir, are all recreations and discoveries of a life. A well-crafted life story shapes your diverse and colourful assortment of personal vignettes into a graceful, coherent narrative that conveys the larger story and wisdom of your life. This is what a writer does when ghostwriting life stories.
A ghostwriter stands invisibly behind your story.
Life writing is much more than just a listing of facts: dates, figures, events, etc. It is the animating of a life in such a way that others are engaged, interested, inspired even. If life writing is not simply the facts, what is it that people look for in autobiographies, biographies and memoirs?
The genre of life writing is so broad, it can be difficult to identify what falls within this category and where the boundaries of the genre lie. And once you are clear of the boundaries, the genre itself can be fraught with difficulties.
We all know what life writing is…biography and autobiography, right? I mean, there are shelves in bookstores and libraries dedicated to them, we’ve read them, we’ve watched representations of them on TV and in film, perhaps we’ve even attempted to write them. They are the record of a life, one’s own or another’s. But is it really as simple as that?