Juiced On Writing

As a scrapbooker hobbyist, there were two beliefs I held strongly and which remain with me to this day -

1. Preserve our memories for future generations
2. Tell our story – with scrapbooking it was via photographs and decorations, but there was a major element of writing.

I can not impound it enough, as I know of so many families who simply don’t think about this, then have a family death, and suddenly they inherit a box full of old photograph albums or unfiled snapshots, and that family member’s real memories (and their children’s for that matter) have been lost with the death.

Rather than leave it to some historian, or your great grandchild to try to piece together and most definitely make some mistakes, the world of the writer is much more open to retaining our memoirs as a legacy for future generations.

A recently discovered website called Story of My Life has given us another method of doing this.

Story of My Life allows a user to upload media including photographs, and write their life memories. It is stored on databases, and supposedly forever (we’ll not get into the storage implications of electronic data in this post). Once written, your stories can be made public, or with private access.

The website itself has one heck of a goal –

To collect the life Story of every person who has walked the face of this earth – in the past, the present and our futures; and to keep these Stories preserved and accessible forever.

Despite the lofty goal here, Story of My Life.com holds a lot of stories, and has a lot of people using it to write down their own stories. Registered users can organise their stories by chapters (chronological), categories (topics) or maintain an online journal via their SOML blog.

There is a browse story tab for finding the most popular stories, pictures and videos, and users have various functions available to them, including setting up family networks linking their stories together with others; and a top ten list feature.

Even if, as a writer, you might be reluctant to invest in Story of My Life for documenting your own memoirs or publicising these, consider the database of other’s stories which exist for the public on the Story of My Life website. Browsing through various SOML user’s stories, many can provide inspiration for your own memories, or writing. There are many sources of ideas published on the site, from stories, to vintage or current pictures, videos and many of the users of SOML appear to see the site as a very powerful outlet for their own writing.

These posts may also be of interest:

1. 1000 Words A Day On the subject of writing goals, and my consideration towards...
2. Writing Links (weekly) Family Tree Software – Draw your family tree diagram...