Your project for this class will be mind mapping the five W's of your memoir. This will give you a great Quick Start and keep you on track as you're sharing your story, and will give you a fun sense of progress. As you're looking at the material you're putting up on your poster board, an accumulation of your thoughts, your ideas and your photos, it will just start to take shape, and be a whole lot of fun. The five keys for Mind Mapping Your memoir correspond to who, what, when, where and why. These will be your signposts that will keep you on track and give you a structure to go ahead and start pulling your material together and just brainstorming ideas. You will be amazed at how quickly this will start to come together.

Once you start following this mind map structure. now is the perfect time to share your story. There is nothing Like finally tackling that project that you've always wanted to do, folks have been begging you to share your story to put it down on paper, or maybe the story of someone else that you love. So do something about it, get your materials together and get started, you will be impressed with how much you can accomplish in a short amount of time and it will be one of the most satisfying projects that you've experienced. Here's a tip for you as you get started with your project. Keep pencil and paper or a little notebook with you at all times or the voice recorder app on your phone, or even your digital recorder with you.

Ideas are going to strike you when you're sitting at a red light when you are walking the dog or just doing any number of things and then you can go back and put those into your project under the right category the who what when where or why but you don't want to lose those stray thoughts that pop up. They're very helpful. As you're going through the brainstorming process, it's important not to edit yourself as you get ideas. Just get them out of your brain and onto the sections of your project board. You can arrange things later. But your idea of using different colored pens or post it notes for each category is going to keep you on track and visually organize and make your job just a whole lot easier down the road and more fun.

So brainstorm, get the thoughts going, and have a good time with us. Although we learned the five W's in a certain order as journalists, I recommend that you start with the when category, use that key to sort of get your thoughts around what the time period is that you want to work with. Your win might start a long time ago. In particular, if you're telling the story of someone that is quite a bit older, you're when could also go back a really long time ago. Some of my clients have worked in genealogy into their life stories, and they've gone quite a ways back I'm not quite sure about like the caveman days, but you might go back that far. Some of you might pick up your story as recently as yesterday, you might want to tell about more recent events and those can be a memoir.

Some of you might determine that your win for your memoir is quite recent, and that is every bit as valid as doing a full life history. There have been great memoirs told that deals just take place over the course of a day or have a short period in someone's life and they can be very powerful. Here's an excellent tip as you get started with mind mapping, your who, what, when, where and why, for the Quick Start memoir project. If you have trouble getting going or think that you don't have much to say, it helps to start by taking it out old family photographs, and talking through them. These photos can just really elicit memories, including stories that you've heard all your life, you might think of some details. Or if you're working with someone else, it might draw out details that they hadn't considered before, or have forgotten until they start telling the story.

So as you're working through those photos, get them out, sort them roughly into a chronological order. identify who the people are in them, see if you can make some stacks under your your sections who what when excetera and then start to pair those photos down into Maybe two or three per section. You can always go back later when you when you're going to further develop your memoir. And I'll talk about that in some subsequent classes. And you can add in additional photos there. The key is to not get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity.

So give yourself a timeframe that is limited and learn to just make some snap judgments about which of these photos really resonate with you, and are ones that you repeatedly like to look at and they really just capture one of those categories. I bet you're full of ideas and can hardly wait to start