I’ve made a New Year’s resolution to write my family history. But where do I start, and how?

Start with your own life.

On a sheet of paper, draw the floor plan of your childhood home. As you draw, jot notes in the margin of whatever comes to mind. Maybe you draw the living room, and remember that evenings Mom always sat in the corner in a big brown chair and that the cat, Friday, often sat on her lap. Write that down. Write quickly, without revising. Keep drawing. Write the next image or thought. Dad had a workbench in the garage. He’d whistle while he worked.

Don’t think anything is too trivial to mention. History isn’t an essay. It’s a story. A storyteller’s job is to make remembered experience come alive. For that you need images, details, bits of conversation, the same stuff a novelist uses.

Allow about thirty minutes for this. Remember, just draw and make notes.

At the end of the first session, quickly write down a list of five more settings from your early life that are important — a bedroom, another house, the yard, school rooms. Then call it a day.

Next day take one of these settings from your list and do the same thing: draw, write, draw, write. Here’s my bedroom where I dreamed of moving to the big city, I had a little desk here where I had a stack of Superman comic books. Work no more than an hour at each session.

Make a timeline

Now make a timeline of your life, nothing elaborate, simply put down the date and a brief descriptive note. Jan. 24, 1938 — born in Minot, N.D., at four in the afternoon, Dad came to the hospital and looked at me and, Mom said, was very pleased because all the nurses said I looked just like him. This chronology may take several hour-or-less sessions. If you can’t remember exact dates, don’t look things up now, just wing it.

In the next several days make lists with brief notes alongside each item. List all the houses you lived in, all the schools you attended, all the friends you had up to age 18 or so, and so on. You’ll be astonished at how much writing these lists makes you remember. Don’t sit and think, write. Make up your own lists, maybe all the cars you owned or your favorite outfits as a child. I don’t know why, but every man I’ve ever met in my workshops can name and describe in detail every car he’s owned, and every woman can list and describe her favorite outfits.

This is a couple of weeks of work, maybe more. Never work more than an hour each day, date each day’s work, keep it all in a notebook or your computer file folder. If you find you’re enjoying yourself, then you’re right on target and ready for the next major step.

Writing the stories

Next, write some of the stories of your life. Start at any point with a story you’ve told a time or two before.

A story is a series of scenes. It could be just one scene with a few paragraphs, or several and much longer. Scenes are fundamentally actions, usually presented in chronological order. Write it in first person.

“At 8 I got up and dressed. By 8:45 I was on my way downtown to my first job. Right at 9 I walked bravely in the front door of the hotel.”

There could be three scenes here, one for each setting — the house, the street, the hotel. But develop only important scenes. The important scene isn’t getting up and dressing. It isn’t walking downtown. It’s reporting to work at the hotel.

“I went up to a tall man in a double-breasted uniform coat with a badge that said ‘Bell Captain.’ He was surrounded by bellboys. They were wearing red waistcoats and red pants with a blue stripe down the side. They had on pillbox caps. Each wore a badge that said Service.

“The bell captain looked down at me. ‘You the new kid?’ he snarled. ‘You shoulda been here fifteen minutes ago, so you’d be ready to work at 9. You’re not being paid fifteen cents an hour to dawdle around getting into uniform.’

“‘Sorry,’ I managed.

“‘And don’t come in through the front door. That’s for guests. Use the back door.’

“‘Yes, sir.’

“He shrugged. ‘Okay this time,’ he said, speaking softer. He turned to one of the other boys. ‘Philly, take him down to Housekeeping and get him suited up. And tell him everything you know about bell-hopping. That won’t take long.’ The other boys grinned easily, and so did Philly, who led me down the back stairs. ‘Mr. Blake’s a good guy, really,’ Philly said. ‘You treat him good, he’ll treat you good.'”

We’ve got a scene going, don’t we? A scene makes you feel like you’re watching something happen. You aren’t merely told, you’re shown.

So you describe actions and present dialogue.

“Philly, who maybe was a year or two older than me, made sure I got a uniform that fit. ‘You’re about an eighteen waist, I bet,’ he said, taking a pair of red pants off the rack. ‘Try these.’ I put them on and looked in the mirror. I thought I looked pretty spiffy.”

Got it? Now think of a story-your first day at a job, buying your first car, maybe your wedding night. Then divide the story into scenes.

Write the scenes. And congratulate yourself. You are re-creating your life. A hundred years from now one of your great-great-great grands can read this and know just what it was like to be a bellhop at the Hotel Gillette in 1947.

And that, as they say, is history.