Exercise 3: A Timeline of your Life
Timelines are another useful tool. Making one for your life (or trying to make one) will trigger lots of memories you can write about. Timelines will also help you stay organized. You may find yourself checking back to your timeline as you write a part of your story. Making a timeline is not as easy as it might first sound. A bit of research may be necessary. You may find yourself, for example, pulling out those boxes of memorabilia--cards, letters, photos, tickets and programs saved--or ask old friends and relatives for help, just in order to re-associate a date with an event. It can be a consuming practice. Prepare to make mistakes, to discover the vagaries of memory. As with much memoir writing, it's OK to work in fragments, going back and filling in gaps. You probably will not complete your life's timeline in one go. But do follow the clues. Even without writing many stories, the process of making a detailed, factual timeline for your life will reveal meaning and story lines you didn't realize existed.
This exercise can (I suppose) be done on the computer using a spreadsheet program which allows you to insert dates and events and keep notes about them, but I strongly recommend paper and pencil. The paper and pencil product described below yields a more visual result--something to look at and ponder--while the effort to get the whole thing onto one single LARGE piece of paper will necessarily limit the amount of description you can put in.
What you need to start
Constructing the timeline
Lay your paper on a flat surface so that the long side is towards you. Use the straight edge to draw two parallel lines about 3/4 inch apart from the lower left hand corner of the paper up to the upper right hand corner. This is the timeline of your life.
Write the year of your birth on the bottom horizontal line in between the two parallel lines of your timeline. To the right of the timeline, outside the parallel diagonals, write what happened that year. For example, "I am born in Akron Ohio on Feb 27 in Akron General Hospital." Note: when you put an event onto your timeline, be as factually specific as you can.
Move up one horizontal line, and write the next year between the two parallels. Keep going, numbering the years of the timeline until you reach the top of the page. I find it helpful to mark off my timeline into five year increments. If you are using the recommended 17 x 22 4 squares to the inch graph paper, you will have one long horizontal for each of 68 years. Even if you are older than 68, just do these first 68. If you want, flip the paper over, and write in the rest of your years on the back, that's fine.
At about this point, my students always ask why do I recommend the diagonal line business? Why not just write the years down the left margin of the sheet and then write events that happened on the appropriate lines? You're probably thinking this too, and the quick answer is that works just fine too. For what it's worth, though, here's why I like the diagonal business:
Two reasons:
Fill in events on your timeline
It's easiest to start with the biggest milestones in your life: your birth, the year you graduated from high school or college; when you got that first big job or were promoted; when you met the love of your life; when your kids or grandkids were born; when you joined the peace corps, got polio, or were appointed captain of the team, won a gold medal in the Olympics, immigrated to Australia, or you nearly died. You know, The Big Stuff in your life. Start with that.
Always write small but legibly, in pencil. You don't need to complete it immediately--in fact, you probably can't. Do keep your timeline in a pocket of your binder. Get it out and add things as you remember them or look things up. Don't be afraid to dig down into the memorabilia in the back of the closet or a box under your bed or to call your sister or write an old friend from grade school. It's part of this adventure.
As you fill in your timeline do write down details of place, persons, and specific dates. Don't succumb to the vague.
Types of event to write on your timeline:
From time to time, sit back and consider your timeline. Do you see patterns that might help you structure your memoir? Did this exercise trigger ideas and memories to add to your memory bank?
This exercise can (I suppose) be done on the computer using a spreadsheet program which allows you to insert dates and events and keep notes about them, but I strongly recommend paper and pencil. The paper and pencil product described below yields a more visual result--something to look at and ponder--while the effort to get the whole thing onto one single LARGE piece of paper will necessarily limit the amount of description you can put in.
What you need to start
- Paper: Use a large piece of paper: 17" x 22" works well. I prefer using a sheet of artists layout graph paper with four squares to the inch. Graph paper helps you keep your notes straight and even as you build up your timeline.
- A pencil with a good eraser. Mistakes are inevitable.
- A fairly long straight edge
Constructing the timeline
Lay your paper on a flat surface so that the long side is towards you. Use the straight edge to draw two parallel lines about 3/4 inch apart from the lower left hand corner of the paper up to the upper right hand corner. This is the timeline of your life.
Write the year of your birth on the bottom horizontal line in between the two parallel lines of your timeline. To the right of the timeline, outside the parallel diagonals, write what happened that year. For example, "I am born in Akron Ohio on Feb 27 in Akron General Hospital." Note: when you put an event onto your timeline, be as factually specific as you can.
Move up one horizontal line, and write the next year between the two parallels. Keep going, numbering the years of the timeline until you reach the top of the page. I find it helpful to mark off my timeline into five year increments. If you are using the recommended 17 x 22 4 squares to the inch graph paper, you will have one long horizontal for each of 68 years. Even if you are older than 68, just do these first 68. If you want, flip the paper over, and write in the rest of your years on the back, that's fine.
At about this point, my students always ask why do I recommend the diagonal line business? Why not just write the years down the left margin of the sheet and then write events that happened on the appropriate lines? You're probably thinking this too, and the quick answer is that works just fine too. For what it's worth, though, here's why I like the diagonal business:
Two reasons:
- The diagonal timeline that rises up across the paper from birth towards today has a kind of emotional lift about it. It seems to encourage the mind to think in terms of stories. It whispers you life has been going somewhere, and that's a rather nice thought.
- By cutting up through the middle of the page this way, the timeline can be used to track two different kinds of events at the same time. For example, when I created my own timeline, I wrote milestone and turning point events on the right side of the diagonal and trips/historical events/and my publications on the left side. This helped me think about how events of my internal life fit with more public kinds of life events. Since I moved around a lot during my twenties and thirties, I also began writing my addresses along the outside diagonals of the timeline, so I knew where I was when things happened. Needless to day, it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with this timeline thing, what I wanted to track through time. That's where pencil and eraser come in.
Fill in events on your timeline
It's easiest to start with the biggest milestones in your life: your birth, the year you graduated from high school or college; when you got that first big job or were promoted; when you met the love of your life; when your kids or grandkids were born; when you joined the peace corps, got polio, or were appointed captain of the team, won a gold medal in the Olympics, immigrated to Australia, or you nearly died. You know, The Big Stuff in your life. Start with that.
Always write small but legibly, in pencil. You don't need to complete it immediately--in fact, you probably can't. Do keep your timeline in a pocket of your binder. Get it out and add things as you remember them or look things up. Don't be afraid to dig down into the memorabilia in the back of the closet or a box under your bed or to call your sister or write an old friend from grade school. It's part of this adventure.
As you fill in your timeline do write down details of place, persons, and specific dates. Don't succumb to the vague.
Types of event to write on your timeline:
- births, marriages, divorces, romances, deaths (of persons/animals important to your life)
- household moves (try writing addresses of your changing residences along the diagonal timeline)
- trips, travels, adventures of note
- educational and career landmarks
- jobs (paid and unpaid)
- "Firsts" - your awards, recognitions, publications, wins, elected or appointed offices
- illnesses, traumas of one sort or another
- historic events in which you participated or that affected you personally
- crucial events and turning points (more on this later)
From time to time, sit back and consider your timeline. Do you see patterns that might help you structure your memoir? Did this exercise trigger ideas and memories to add to your memory bank?