Healthy Living

Personal Healing through Story Telling Part 3 The Journey Begins

by Jerry Walch
07/30/15
Free to Share
Author requests article critique

  Message Writer
  Hire Writer

Tweet

Perhaps you are like a dear friend of mine, a beloved sister in Christ, who came to me a few weeks ago for advice on writing her Christian autobiography, who had never written anything beyond personal letters, business letters, and interoffice memos. If you’re like Diane, the good news is that there’s no one right way to tell your story, no one right way to share how God came into your life and no one right way to share how He’s working in your life today, all you have to do is begin by typing or penning the first word. I think Robert Collier (1885—1950), the author of numerous motivational books, his most well-known perhaps, “The Secrets of the Ages”, sold well over 300,000 copies during his lifetime, said it best. Collier wrote, “Take the first step, and your mind will mobilize its forces to your aid. But the first essential is that you begin. Once the battle is started, all that is within and without you will come to your assistance.”

For the remainder of this part of “Personal Healing through Story Telling”, I want to share a few tips on how to begin writing out your personal story.

• First, don’t worry about the quality of your writing, grammar, punctuation, and spelling aren’t important since what you write in your diary or journal will be for your eyes only. In the future, when you are ready to share your story with the world, you can edit what you have already written to correct any mistakes in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and formatting.


• Next, you need to establish a place and time to write, a place where you feel comfortable—the library, a café or coffee shop, a corner of your living room, or your bedroom. Choose your time and place carefully, and then go there at the appointed time to write on the days that you’ve scheduled to write on, at the appointed time. In the beginning, keep the duration of the time you will spend writing short, in the beginning don’t expect to write for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time, as you become more comfortable writing you should extend the time you write by 5 to 10 minutes at a time.


• Pick a place to begin, eventually you will want your story to begin at the beginning and progress in an orderly manner, but you don’t have to begin writing out your story at the beginning, begin with a recent experience that is still fresh in your memory, you can always put things in chronological order later. Word processors makes shifting sections around easy with their “cut” and “paste” features, but if you’re more comfortable using pen and paper, use college ruled notebook paper in a 3-ring binder which will allow you shift sections around without having to rewrite the whole document over.

Well there you have it, all the basics you need to get you started on telling your story—if I can help you in any way, feel free to contact me through FaithWriters.