Especially if you are working on writing or recording your own life stories, listening to other people tell their life stories is a fantastic way to get inspiration and ideas. Listen, and take notes: what makes this story work (or not work?) Why was it compelling? Did it surprise you? How could you use these techniques in improving your own stories?

Some of our clients come to us with a title already picked out, before they've even begun to write. Others wait for the title to be revealed to them in the writing. Which way is better? It depends.

We get asked this question a lot: how do I choose a title for my book?

Over the weekend, as I was in the organizing mode (specifically, organizing better my genealogy files), I ran across this article on Evernote's blog. It had some great ideas for using the Evernote app to capture and organize genealogy information, but it also gave me an idea:

I could use Evernote as an electronic timeline and capture device for a life story project! Many writers use Evernote to write novels, so why couldn't I use it to write a memoir? 

This week's webinar is the first one in the series, "Defining Your Purpose and Creating a Life Timeline." Enjoy! We'd love to know what you think (be kind, because we were still kind of figuring out the how-to-do-a-webinar stuff.")

"What tense and point of view should I use in my memoir?" This was a question posed to us last Saturday after one of our personal history seminars. "What a great topic for a blog post," I thought. So here it is!

After teaching last Saturday we had several patrons approach us, wanting some of the great quotes we used in our presentations. So here they are--a little inspiration for your Monday morning!

This article (which I was reading at 9:00 this morning when I really should have been writing this blog post) got me thinking. I'm generally not a procrastinator, but am I a precrastinator? This distinction probably applies to more of us than we might think.

Years ago, while sifting through a musty dusty trunk of photos and ephemera that came from my great-grandfather's estate, I came across a torn diary without a cover. I couldn't wait to discover what gems would leap from the yellowed pages to inspire and instruct me, what wealth of genealogical information it would hold. If I only I knew who wrote it....