You can slice this line into pieces, sometimes called chapters: your childhood, your adolescence, early adulthood, midlife, maturity, old age. Or slice it into decades: the 20s, the Depression 30s, the War-torn 40s, and so on.

    By looking back at the chronology of your life, you begin to see patterns, the paths you chose or the paths chosen for you.

    One method is to craft your autobiography around snapshots. Write your text as lengthy captions: "I spent summers in my childhood at this creaky old house on the lake, where one day..." A caption can be a few words or senetnces of explanation, or it may swell to many pages as you recall the importance in your life of the places and people in the photo.