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How many words does a life story need to be?

The question of how many words a life story should be is often one of the first queries asked of a professional life story writer.

Here’s a list of elements that contribute to how we determine your ideal life story word count.

  • How much material there is to work with?

Sometimes we need to make a start to see just what the story shape needs to be

  • What budget you have for writing and production?

The amount of money you have to spend on the project can influence how many words you might reasonably expect for your investment.

  • The time period of focus

It’s not always necessary to take a cradle-to-grave approach. If you are wanting to focus on a specific period of life we may be able to achieve a wonderful story in less words than a ‘whole of life’ project.

  • The stamina of subject

Consideration as to what time the subject can commit to the project is important.

  • What research exists or can be incorporated?

For example, old letters, diaries and even internet research can contribute significant story matter to the text.

  • Any deadlines that need to be met

If there is a special occasion or a deadline that needs to be met there may be some simple and understandable limits to how much time can be spent gathering information and writing the story.

  • Who the story is for?

A professional writer will always work to the highest possible standards in their writing but there can be a difference if a story is being written for a ‘family and friend’ audience, compared to being written with a view to future publication.

  • What medium are you choosing for your story?

There are so any options. Would you like a traditional printed text based book, or do you have a series of photos that can be used as a story basis with long captions? There are many ways to tell a story especially when we add in the growing range of digital options such as a story website, audio, video and on.

I have found a good place to start with my clients is to quote on 20,000 words, 40,000 words and 60,000 words.  The upper amount is the length of a regular sized novel, however, even the shorter number of words involved in a 20,000 word project offers plenty of scope to tell the highlights of a person’s life with the right storytelling techniques.

Some people are natural storytellers, and the flow is easy to achieve. Others need more time settling in and opening up.  Sometimes we find stories grow with the telling and the task can be bigger than anticipated. Flexibility is key. This is the human part of life story writing.

Whatever is needed or wanted – it’s your call.

 

About Lindy Schneider

Lindy is an accredited Life Story Writer with peak body Life Stories Australia, where she also holds a board position. She is an experienced biographer and memoirist who relishes bringing people’s stories to the page.

She is the author of From This Place – Stories of Inspiring Women Artists of the Upper Yarra Valley (with Angela Rivas), biography Visionary Man, Visionary Medicine, the story of Professor Avni Sali and Integrative Medicine, and co-author of The Chemical Maze – Bookshelf Companion. Her short story ‘Juice’ was shortlisted in the Cancer Council Arts Awards, and she won the Best Script award for ‘Pablo’s Muse’ in Theatre Shorts 3. She is a regular features writer for the Yarra Magazine.

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Thinking about Life Story Writing

Some important questions (to get started and for quoting)

Every life story writing project is different just as every person’s story is different.

Here are some things to think about that can help us finetune what you need and what type of costs are involved.

Where is the person currently living? Will they prefer face to face interviews, or will Zoom or a phone call work for them?

Does the person have anything already written down?  I can interview and write a full draft for you, but some people may already have notes and need some help in collating and shaping their manuscript. Some projects may be already well formed and just need a careful edit.

How much research needs to be done? What source materials are available such as diaries, articles, recordings etc?

How many other members of the family would need to be interviewed (if necessary)?

What is the outcome you would like?  A private story for family and friends, or something that is publishable (self or mainstream)?

What kind of word count would you envisage? I typically quote on 20,000 words, 40,000 words and 60,000 words (with 60,000 being the length of an average book).

Is there a deadline?

I typically provide a completed manuscript as a Word document, but I can also assist with creating a printed book or photo book (self publishing), or the submission process with publishers.

I make life story writing a beautiful process for the subject. Telling one’s story is more than just an exercise in capturing words, it’s a way of creating a legacy of thoughts, meaning and emotion for a family that endures as a precious reminder of life, love and connections.

Ready for the next step. Email me lindy@lindyschneider.com.au

Download this as PDF here

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Finding a sweet spot to live

A little bit of good news. I’ve just successfully completed a Diploma (Level 5) of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)!

Building on my love for words, helping others and a passion for life long learning, this appealed as a beautiful extension of the part of me that is forever both a traveller and a self confessed word nerd.

In addition to proving to myself that I could do it, I hold this achievement as another step towards a return to my beloved Italy, where one day I will delight in teaching English, and living the life again while improving my own Italian speaking skills.

I don’t know how exactly this will unfold but…letting my dreams define my reality seems like a sweet place to start.

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A Sicilian Winter with the Locals

Read all about my six week sojourn in Sicily and the inspiration of language, season and of course food.

Read Article here

As featured in the Autumn 2025 issue of the Yarra Magazine

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Google reviews

I am reaching out to you as someone I truly enjoyed working with in the past. I hope you are well and thriving. I want to ask you for a few moments of your time.

If you feel you can, I would be delighted if you could upload a short review of my professional services to the Google review section of my Google business listing. I have not focused on this much in the past, preferring to invest real time in my writing and my clients, but it would be so valuable to now have some of this feedback in the public domain.
I would of course be delighted to write a review for you in return – please send me your link.

This is the quickest and easiest way to find the form for a review. Simply click on the link and know that I am grateful for your time and support. LINK> https://g.page/r/CRJuVbAJVGylEBM/review

Thank you for your words. They mean a lot to me.
Lindy

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In search of sfumatura

The average English speaker knows between 20,000 and 35,000 words and even at four years of age we have mastered about 5,000 words. Clearly it’s a lifetime of discovery. Avid readers, writers and students of grammar will naturally fall to the upper end of this range of words, and I’d like to think I’m somewhere in among them. So it’s been an awakening of sorts to start studying a new language and be back with the four year olds! 

This is my fourth full year of weekly Italian lessons. After a big start back in 1999 when I took a trip to foreign language school in Florence, Italy, for 3 months, I languished in learning from the minute I moved to the Yarra Valley – life, distance, distraction took over. It was due to the movement of so many classes to the online environment during COVID, and the overwhelming need I had to make the most of lockdowns, that I was able to return to study. And its been such a joy. 

I’m not sure how to quantify how many words I know but for the B1 level I am currently mastering, a little research indicates 5,000 seems about right. (Plus blessedly Italian is a familiar sounding language – the Latin base that is the foundation of Italian and English gives us much in common that I am forever grateful for.)

But there is one thing that truly frustrates me when I try to write and speak in this new language. The difference between knowing 5,000 words and 35,000 words can be summed up in one word! Sfumatura, which is the Italian word for nuance. 

Sfumatura is how we bring meaning to our words, how we find the depth of description, the carriage of emotion, the speakable and the unspeakable. Nuance is the difference between pedestrian and powerful. Nuance is the marker of a great writer and communicator. Nuance is what makes a life story resonate, inspire and move.

So I will persist in the search for sfumatura and this next chapter will be about me living in Comiso, in Sicily, for six weeks over the Italian winter; writing, studying and more importantly immersing myself in the subtleties of daily life and language.

And meanwhile, there have been so many ways that learning a language has been meaningful for me.

Learning a language has helped me to:

  1. Develop better listening skills.
  2. Understand the deep roots and nuances of my birth language.
  3. Gain a deeper appreciation for the lives of those who can’t communicate easily.
  4. Give myself to slow and incremental growth instead of fast and furious – slow learning is key.
  5. Authentically lean into a culture that represents all the values I appreciate for a good life.
  6. Meet so many gorgeous and generous people I would not usually encounter in life.
  7. Keep my mind curious, active and supple.
  8. Laugh at my own mistakes – there have been plenty.
  9. Hold true to my desire that in this lifetime I will be fluent.
  10. Drive my family crazy when I speak to myself in Italian at home, or anywhere.

In this lifetime I will master a second language. It makes me a better writer in English. And perhaps one day, an accomplished writer in Italian as well. 

So onwards I go, because there are moments when I think first in Italian, or something just magically drops in that makes it all so exquisitely pleasurable. I will find the nuance. Or perhaps it will find me. 

(I’ll be in Comiso 3.12.24-14.1.25)

Chi cerca, trova. Whoever seeks, finds.

 

#lifestoriesaustralia #inspiringlifestory #lifestoryinterviews #hearmystory #sharemystory #livetotell

#biography #therightwordchangeseverything #lindyschneiderwriter #memoir

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Breadcrumbs

Often clients will ask what the plan is for a life story I am writing. Every writer will have their own process for the gathering, sorting, arranging and writing of life material but I believe it is the material that suggests to us how we might best handle it.

So I am not the type of writer that sets up a chapter by chapter plan.

When I take on a story, I understand there is first the need for open listening and documenting without trying to prescribe any sort of format or outcome. 

I approach each story as an act of creative endeavour, an exploration that can only reveal itself as the project progresses. There is no way of knowing every intricacy or turn in a story when we first start. The process is a creative act shared between subject and writer that often follows an uncertain path, but nevertheless one with its own inherent wisdom and foundation.

I liken this to the gathering of breadcrumbs. Every story crumb drops at our feet to be considered and formed into a coherent thread. 

One breadcrumb leads you to the next…

And the next… 

And so the process unfolds.

Every story will reveal itself and for me the end result is richer and more nuanced. 

 

#lifestoriesaustralia #inspiringlifestory #lifestoryinterviews #hearmystory #sharemystory #livetotell #biography #therightwordchangeseverything #lindyschneiderwriter #memoir

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Life Story Writing

I have always preferred real stories to those of the imagination, but I don’t think I understood how important the imagination was in telling life stories until I dove deep into my first biography project.

I’ve always valued writing as a tool for healing and it is through this lens that I approach my life writing today. Every story, as we tell and retell, requires our imaginative forces to recreate the essence, the detail and feelings of the moment. And in constructing those moments in our lives using words, we are able to peer deeply into the subtleties of our experience.

In life writing we gather together the threads of a life and weave them into a tapestry that can be embraced by others. The opportunity to tell our story in our words is a legacy for others, and one of the greatest acts of faith in ourselves I can imagine.

My pathway into life writing has evolved out of many aspects of my life – writing articles about people as a professional writer and journalist, working with clients as a counsellor and art therapist and from my own practices in journal writing.

When I discovered life writing, I discovered a way to work that brought so many of these elements together. Empathetic listening, authentic questioning, skilful writing and imaginative scene setting all go toward a compelling read, and to write knowing that a story has the power to affect others is one of the most rewarding aspects of the work. But even more than that is the trusted place a life writer occupies in a subject’s world, even if only for a short time. It is work of great privilege and I am forever left with a deep sense of honour that I am invited into a life, a family and a story.

While many life stories are only captured on the page as a project of the twilight years, I encourage people to document their lives at any age or stage. A significant life event, illness or change, decade or transition from one life to another are all worthy of writing about. This means our life stories start right where we are and can companion us throughout our lives.  We all have something fascinating to share and our stories are never finished.

Lindy Schneider

 

 

 

Full Member – Life Stories Australia

www.lindyschneider.com.au

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Ghostwriting – outsource writing your book to a professional

Ghostwriting is all about getting your book written by a professional writer – think of It as your words or ideas, my labour. Your name as author on the cover, my name in invisible ink. I frequently chat to people who say they’ve never heard of ghostwriting but it is much more common that you might think. 

You may notice there are periods of time when I don’t really talk much about what work I am doing. These are times where I have contracts in place and I am head down, bum on seat writing.

And I love it.

I love the intensity of these writing projects.

I love that we start a process together with nothing and end up with a manuscript. There is a pride for both parties. Everyone wins… and the world wins because your thoughts have been captured to be shared with a wider audience. 

I get genuinely excited for the clients I work with.

I enjoy that we build a relationship for the time I am in your life, and I get to know my clients in a real way. I always need to get inside a clients’ voice so I can write in a way that reflects their uniqueness, and that is a challenge that I relish.

And the client always gets final say.

Each project is a little different – for some there are source materials and loads of research and interviews to be done. For other clients with a clear picture of what they want to say, or a personal story to tell, I am more like the conduit from verbal story to getting something on the page.  Usually content is nonfiction, memoir/biography – what I love most – but it can be anything.

Often I sign Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) so I can never talk about who I write for, but I can say this – most books written by ‘famous people’, most columns written in magazines or on blogs by celebrities will have the hand of a ghostwriter in their production.

And sometimes it’s just that people are busy. Writing is hard work. It requires dedicated hours (yes I’ve turned out 65,000 word manuscripts in 6 months) and a skill set that after years of practice I’ve managed to be proficient at. I’ve studied and I’ve honed my skills over decades. And I can tell you it is possible to be ‘writing fit’  – it takes time but it’s a game changer for productivity!

You may have realised there’s value in outsourcing all sorts of ‘life tasks’ to a professional – book writing is no exception.

 

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Natural wisdom for writers a free resource

I am so happy to share this free resource with you. I wrote it from the heart and I trust it will land in yours in just the way you need it to.

Day by day there is an insight into how I write and what makes it a joyful experience for me, plus a writing prompt you can try for yourself.

Reach out if you need to chat. I am offering 1:1 sessions to get you started and keep you writing. With pleasure!

ACCESS THE PROGRAM HERE

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