How to Write a Book About Your Life: An 8-Step Plan for Non-Writers

Write a family book unless you have a clear reason not to. A family book collects 30,000 to 50,000 words of your best stories for people who already know you, and a non-writer can finish one in three to six months. A memoir follows one theme or period, averages 75,000 words in the ghostwriting projects tracked by Reedsy, the publishing marketplace (Reedsy, 2026), and needs the pace of a novel to hold strangers. An autobiography tells your whole life in order and suits people whose careers the public already knows. If a memoir is hiding inside your family book, our guide on how to write a memoir covers that next step.

Start with a list of stories, not a first sentence. Spend one hour writing every story you already tell as a one-line note, such as "the basement flood in 1979" or "meeting your grandmother at the bus stop," and aim for 60 to 100 lines. Keep adding for a week, because each memory drags up others. If the list stalls at 20, work through a set of life story questions one decade at a time.

Next, write one sentence about who the book is for, such as "For Emma, Jake and whoever comes after them." That sentence settles how much to explain and how frank to be about the hard years. Do not start at birth: draft the story you tell best first, because one finished story in week one keeps you going.

Choose one of four structures before you draft: timeline, themes, letters or questions. For a family book, themes in rough time order works best, because readers get the best stories early and can still follow your life from childhood to today. Questions, the format Storyworth and Remento use, are the easiest way past a blank page. You can also mix them, for example a themed book that closes with a letter to my grandchildren and a one-page timeline.

Follow these eight steps in order. Step five, the schedule, is the one that decides whether you finish.

1. Decide who the book is for. Name your readers in one sentence and pick the book type from the table above.

2. Make your story list. Write 60 to 100 one-line memories in an hour, then keep adding for a week.

3. Choose a structure. Sort your list into 10 to 14 chapters by timeline, theme, letter or question.

4. Fill in the chapter template. Note each chapter's stories, people and the one thing readers should take from it.

5. Set a schedule. Put 20 minutes a day, five days a week, in your calendar like a doctor's appointment.

6. Draft one story per session. Talk or type each story start to finish without stopping to fix anything.

7. Edit in two passes. Cut repeats and filler first, then fix the order and dates, and only then ask family to check names and facts.

8. Add photos, design and print. Upload a 6 x 9 paperback or hardcover to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Lulu or Blurb, and order one proof copy before printing for everyone.

Give every chapter one job and a word target, such as "show how hard and how funny the farm years were." This template is built for a 45,000-word family book in 12 themed chapters in rough time order, so rename, merge or drop chapters to fit your life. Our guide on how to interview yourself has the follow-up questions that pull out names, smells and dollar amounts.

Aim for 30,000 to 50,000 words and budget three to six months at 20 minutes a day. That is long enough to feel like a real book and short enough to finish while your enthusiasm lasts, and the 75,000 words of a commercial memoir are the wrong benchmark.

Example: 20 minutes a day for 12 weeks

• Sessions: five a week for 12 weeks is 60 sessions, one story each.

• Drafting: 60 sessions at 20 minutes is 20 hours of talking.

• Words kept: the Stanford test below measured speech input at 153 words a minute, so even at half that pace a session yields about 1,500 raw words. Keep half, about 750 clean words, and 60 sessions give you 45,000 words.

• Editing: one hour each weekend (12 hours) plus a final edit of about 10 hours.

• Total: about 42 hours, or three and a half hours a week.

• Book size: at an assumed 250 words per 6 x 9 page, 45,000 words fills 180 pages, or about 200 with photos.

• Slower pace: at three sessions a week the same book takes 20 weeks, and typing instead of talking roughly triples the 20 drafting hours.

Yes, and for most non-writers talking is the better way to draft. In a 2016 lab study of short messages by researchers at Stanford University, the University of Washington and Baidu, English speech input on a smartphone ran at 153 words per minute against 52 on the keyboard, 2.93 times faster, with fewer errors during entry (Ruan et al., 2016). Spoken drafts also sound like you, which is what your family wants from the book.

Dictation tips that work

• Use the microphone you already own. The microphone key on an iPhone or Android keyboard works in any notes app, and Google Docs has free voice typing under Tools, then Voice typing, in Chrome, Edge and Safari (Google, 2026).

• Say the punctuation. Google Docs takes spoken commands such as "period," "comma," "question mark" and "new paragraph," and "new paragraph" between scenes saves the most cleanup.

• Talk to one person. Picture one grandchild across the table and open with where you were and what year it was.

• Fix nothing mid-story. Leave every mistake for the edit, because going back breaks the memory.

• Spell the hard names at the end. Transcription mangles surnames and small towns, so keep a running names list.

• Keep the audio. A recording keeps your voice and your laugh, which is why our guide to recording your life story in your own voice covers voice and video too.

Yes, as long as you use it as an editor and never as the author. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are good at turning a rambling transcript into clean paragraphs, but none of them knows your life, and all of them will invent plausible details if you let them. Paste in your own words with an instruction such as "Tidy this transcript into paragraphs, keep my wording and order, fix only grammar and add nothing I did not say." Then check every name and date yourself. Our list of ChatGPT prompts for writing your life story has prompts you can copy for each stage.

Printing a 200-page black-and-white paperback costs $3.40 to about $13 a copy as of October 2026, and writing it yourself costs only time. KDP charges $1.00 plus $0.012 per page for a regular-trim, black-ink paperback of 110 to 828 pages, so 200 pages costs $3.40 (Amazon KDP, 2026). Lulu prices a standard 200-page US trade paperback at $5.54 (Lulu, 2025), and Blurb's 6 x 9 black-and-white paperback is $5.99 plus $0.04 for each page past 24, about $13 at 200 pages (Blurb, 2026). A hardcover roughly triples the cost: Lulu's 100-page comparison puts a 6 x 9 hardcover at $12.07 against $4.11 for the paperback at Lulu, and $6.80 against $2.30 at KDP (Lulu, 2026).

Example: 10 paperback copies of a 200-page family book cost $34 at KDP, $55.40 at Lulu and about $130 at Blurb, before shipping and tax. Add three months of Afterlife.ai™ Legacy at $14.99 a month ($44.97) to talk the stories in with your Persona, and the whole project costs about $79 with KDP or $100 with Lulu.

Our verdict: under $100, talk it yourself and print with KDP or Lulu. StoryTerrace's $3,250 Classic book is the realistic entry point for hiring a professional, and a full ghostwriter only makes sense for a book you plan to sell. In a 2024 survey of 269 ghostwriters by Gotham Ghostwriters and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, 25% charged at least $100,000 for their last nonfiction manuscript (Publishers Weekly, 2024). Our breakdowns of memoir ghostwriter costs and Storyworth pricing go deeper.

Talk your stories to your Persona instead of a blank page. Afterlife.ai™ asks you questions about your life, you answer out loud or in text, and each answer is kept as a memory, so the raw material for every chapter piles up as you go. You also get something a printed book cannot give your family: a living AI Persona of you that the people you choose can talk with, in your own cloned voice.

1. Start free. Build your Persona at app.afterlife.ai or in the iPhone or Android app, in any of 42 languages, with 25 memories, up to 5 Trusted Contacts and Executor Lock™ setup. No card, and the free build never expires.

2. Record your voice. Creating your voice is free and so is your first listen, so you hear your Persona speak in your own voice before you spend anything.

3. Answer one question a session. Work through the chapter template for 20 minutes a day, out loud or typed, and each answer is kept as a memory.

4. Keep going past 25 memories. A 60-story book needs more than the free build, so move to Legacy at $14.99 a month or Eternal at $29.99 a month (see pricing).

5. Write each chapter from your memories. Every chapter starts from stories you have already told instead of a blank page.

6. Set up Executor Lock™. Name your executor and Trusted Contacts, so that at verified death your Persona is locked as a perfect snapshot that nobody can edit, retrain or use to impersonate you.

The book and your Persona do different jobs, and you want both. The book is what your family reads cover to cover, and your Persona is who your grandson asks when chapter six mentions the cannery job and he wants to know what it paid. Your first Persona Video, a video message in your face and your own voice from one 30-second recording, is free too. Our ranking of the best life story apps compares Afterlife.ai™ with the alternatives.

• Amazon KDP: Paperback printing cost

• Lulu: Your book price for print and retail

• Lulu: Print-on-demand, breaking down the costs for authors

• Blurb: Pricing and shipping calculator

• Reedsy: How much do ghostwriters make?

• Publishers Weekly: Ghostwriter survey finds manuscripts fetch high fees (2024)

• StoryTerrace: Pricing

• Storyworth: Pricing

• Remento: How it works

• arXiv: Ruan et al., Comparing speech and keyboard text entry on touchscreen phones (2016)

• Google Docs Editors Help: Type and edit with your voice