Memoir writing, family history and storytelling guides

Three reasons people come here, and where each one starts

Most readers arrive with one of three things in mind: a life they want to put on paper, a relative whose memories they are afraid of losing, or a piece of writing that needs to work better as a story. The three are closer than they look. A memoir leans on the same craft as a short story, a family history is built out of interviews, and an interview is only as good as the questions and the listening behind it.

Told & Kept is a set of practical guides to all of it, written for ordinary readers and first-time writers, not for specialists. This page shows how the site is organized and which guide to open first, whatever brought you.

Writing your own life: memoir and autobiography

Begin by deciding what you are making. An autobiography tries to cover a whole life in order. A memoir takes one thread of it, a period, a place or a relationship, and follows that thread closely. Memoir vs. autobiography draws the line between them, which matters because the choice decides how much you have to remember and how much you are allowed to leave out.

After that, the step-by-step guides take over: how to write a memoir for a focused story, and how to write an autobiography for the full span. Both start with gathering material and choosing what does not belong, which is the harder half of the job. Reading helps as much as advice, so we keep a list of memoir examples, with notes on what each can teach a writer, and another of famous autobiographies. If a book feels too large, try a smaller form first, such as the personal essay.

The craft that makes a true story readable

Having lived through something does not make it a story. A reader needs a shape to follow, a voice to trust and a reason to keep turning pages, and all three are skills that can be learned. What narrative writing is lays out the elements, and story structure compares six classic shapes, so you can pick one that fits your material instead of forcing the material into a formula.

Students, and anyone facing an assignment, will want how to write a narrative essay and its close cousin, the personal narrative essay. Writers who are further along can study the choices that change how a story feels: who tells it, how far back in time it reaches, and what happens when the teller cannot be fully believed. That last one, the unreliable narrator, is a question every memoirist meets sooner or later, because memory is not a perfect witness.

Family history: names, dates and the stories between them

A family's past survives in two forms. Records give names, dates and places; stories give everything else. You need both. The practical start is a chart, and how to make a family tree walks through one from the first box to a finished example. When relationships get tangled, what "once removed" means sorts out the cousins for good, and what genealogy is explains the research method behind the hobby.

Charts are also a way of reading. Our Queen Victoria family tree shows how a real dynasty is laid out across generations, and the same technique untangles fiction, as in the Wuthering Heights family tree. Then turn back to your own shelves and drawers. Objects carry stories too, and a short note written today about a ring, a tool or a photograph may be the only record of why it mattered.

Oral history: recording a voice while you can

The surest way to lose a family's history is to assume there will be time to ask later. Oral history is the disciplined version of asking now: a recorded conversation in which someone describes their life in their own words, kept so that other people can hear it. What oral history is covers the method and how to plan a small project. What oral tradition is explains the older practice of handing knowledge down by word of mouth, which is related but not the same thing.

The interview itself rewards preparation. Our list of oral history interview questions comes with advice on how to ask them: open questions, patience with silence, and permission agreed before the recorder is switched on. The six questions further up this page are a small sample to try this week.

Public memory: what a community chooses to keep

Memory is not only private. Towns and nations decide what to remember as well, through holidays, monuments, museums and the arguments about all three. A national holiday is a good place to watch this happen, because it has a date, a history and customs that have shifted over time. Our guides to Memorial Day and Veterans Day explain what each one marks and how the two differ. More on memorials and museums is collected under Public Memory.

Who writes Told & Kept, and what it is not

Advice on recording and preserving interviews follows the published guidance of oral history organizations and of national libraries and archives. When a guide uses a published book to show a technique, quotations are kept short and the author and title are named; prompts and sample questions are written for this site. Sources are linked at the end of each article, every guide shows when it was last updated, and errors are fixed when readers point them out. The editorial standards page has the details.

Told & Kept is independent. It is not a publisher, a writing course or a genealogy service, and it takes no payment to recommend a book, an archive or a tool. It is not connected with the academic study circle that once used this web address. To learn more, read about Told & Kept, or write to us with a correction or an idea for a guide.