In his book You Don’t Have to be Famous: How to Write Your Life Story, Steve Zousmer makes a compelling case for writing your

Nelson Co Public Library offers free workshop on life-story writing

The Nelson Co. Public Library invites all who are interested to a memoir or autobiographical writing workshop to be held in the community room on the 1^st and 3^rd Wednesdays of the month at 10:30 to 11:30 beginning on February 6^th. Leading the group will be Paul R. Jordan who has been a writer and communicator for thirty-plus years. Mr. Jordan has been a newspaper reporter, newsman and bureau head for the Associated Press in Kentucky, magazine editor for the state government and Federal public information officer in Washington, D.C. He is the author of three books, Coal Camp Kids, So Little Time for Dying, and Journey from Beaver Creek. As he writes in the author’s note of Journey from Beaver Creek, “I write this because I lived it…Almost all of the story is an eyewitness account, at the same time drawing my own impressions from a volatile era.”

Please call the library at 348-3714 to sign up for this free workshop. The first meeting will take place on Wednesday, February 6^th at 10:30.

In his book You Don’t Have to be Famous: How to Write Your Life Story, Steve Zousmer makes a compelling case for writing your own life story. In addition to tips on organization, research, vision and strategy, Zousmer provides motivation in listing the reasons for writing your life story:

Discovery: Writing is a thinking process. It drives you to create and develop ideas and build new thoughts in the process of articulating them. Words on paper help us advance and find direction that might never have been anticipated at the start of the page or paragraph. Writing your life story can help you transform experience into knowledge and wisdom. Memories are discoveries in themselves but when you subject them to examination under the writing process, they have the potential to shape insights about your life.
Posterity: Writing your life story can extend our voice a decade or several decades beyond our lives, enough to be read by our grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Maybe your story will turn up in an attic a century from now and provide future generations with a valuable account of how their family lived many years earlier.
History: You may want to include your family’s history to ensure that it is passed down or you may want to start a family history if none has been preserved. Your children may not be interested in family history now but when they get interested, you or your memory may be gone and the story will be lost.
Fulfilling your creative impulse: You can write your life story to purely enjoy the feeling and satisfaction from the mental exercise of creativity. “An active mind needs worthwhile activity, and autobiography fills the bill in many ways: it will stir your imagination, awaken your memory, concentrate your thinking, rouse your creative spirit and confront you with invigorating challenges as small as a good sentence and as large as something you thought you could never do: write a book.”

As Steve Zousmer says, “You don’t have to have an exotic or adventurous life to have a life worth recording. Your story is meaningful because it is uniquely yours. Writing isn’t always about getting published or becoming rich and famous; sometimes it’s about something even more important. Don’t wait another day to start writing the story of your life!”