Writers and Editors

Here's a gateway to life story telling resources, whether you're doing it yourself, hiring a pro, or helping others tell their stories.

Telling your story

• Articles, stories, websites, and other resources about how people have told their own, their family, or their company stories)
• The art and craft of interviewing
• Great interview questions and guides
• Audio recording and editing equipment, software, and tutorials
• Capturing family voices

Multimedia -- scanning and adding images, sound, music

• Video and multimedia tributes and documentaries (good examples online)
• Video production and editing
• Sources for music, images, video clips and related material
• Finding background music for video biographies, podcasts, presentations, blogs, etc.
• Finding vintage music from a particular year or place
• Finding photos and other images
• Scanning photos, documents, and other images
• Scanning, repairing, and organizing photos
• Audio recording and editing equipment, software, and tutorials
• Audio editing software and instructions
• Audio tools, technology, and tutorials
• Mastering multimedia

Archiving, conservation, and preservation

"Never dump originals - they may be all that is left after the computer age."
~Peter Amsden, via Taylor Whitney • Preserving your family and national treasures
• Archiving resources
• Books about preservation
• Adding metadata to photos
• Suppliers of archival materials

Oral histories and video interviews

• Doing oral histories or video interviews
• Oral history collections online
• Online guides to doing oral history
• Transcribing oral history interviews
• Books about doing oral history
• Oral history as social history
• Stories about oral history
• Further reading about oral history

Booklists

• Books to help you get started writing your own (or someone else's) life story
• Writing personal and family histories (a booklist)
• Memoir writing as discovery
• Memoirs, healing, and self-understanding
• Writing from memory prompts
• Anthologies of life story writing and reminiscence
• The art and craft of memoir and biography
• Books for life story writing and reminiscence groups'

Memoir, biography, and corporate history

• Memoir, biography, and corporate history
(Writers and Editors site)
• What is the difference between a memoir and an autobiography (or memoirs)?
• Organizations and gathering places for
biographers, memoirists, personal historians, and other life story people
• The craft of life story writing
• The nature and malleability of memory
• The art, craft, and politics of biography
• Memoirs, memoir writing, and autobiography
• Writer's Digest series on memoir writing
• The life story business and market
• Become a personal historian--help others tell their life stories
• More about personal histories and legacy memoirs (primarily for the family)
• Writing corporate and organizational histories (commissioned histories)
• The self we tell ourselves we are influences our decisions

Memoirs (recommended reading)

• Coming of age memoirs
• Memoirs and personal accounts of
vocation, avocation, occupation, profession, calling
• Memoirs of regular people
(and lives lived outside the limelight)
• Memoirs of friendship, family, and other relationships
• Graphic memoirs
• Food memoirs and biographies
• Memoirs of illness, crisis, disability, differentness, and survival
• Memoirs of (and other books about) caregiving
• Memoir- and life-story-related sites

Ethical wills (or legacy letters)

a/​k/​a life letters, heart wills, ending notes, love wills, testaments)
• What is an ethical will?
• Examples of ethical wills
• Why people create ethical wills
• How-to books
• Dignity therapy
• Ethical Wills (Pat McNees, blog entry on APH website)
• Kristie Miller's Letter of Intent

Pat McNees's three websites

• Dying, Surviving, and Aging with Grace (not necessarily in that order)
• Writers and Editors
• Pat McNees (personal site)

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