Writing about the memorable experiences in our lives and the lives of our loved ones is tremendously rewarding. The process of turning our memories into written stories increases our understanding of who we are and the events that have shaped us. It also celebrates the legacy we have received from our loved ones and passes that legacy on to the family that follows.
People want to write their life stories and the life stories of their loved ones, but it can be a daunting task--between the interviews, the research in third party sources, and the writing, where do you even begin? There are biographers who can do the work for you but the price matches the magnitude of the project, often costing several thousand Dollars. Whether its the price tag, the time investment, or the lack of know-how, the task of writing about our lives or the lives of our loved ones remains marooned on most people’s long “to-do” list.
Poppy Prose’s solution to this problem is to, first, break up the process of writing life stories into a manageable size--a single story. Traditional biographies and autobiographies are cumbersome and filled with facts most people skip over or quickly forget. We prefer to tell life stories as a series of short stories, with each story showing ourselves or our loved ones in action, illustrating our strengths, passions, weaknesses, hobbies, achievements, humor, failures, and quirks.
The second element of Poppy Prose’s solution is to connect people with writers specialized in writing creative nonfiction who, in close collaboration with the users, write their stories. People can submit stories to us through our website by quickly filling out the story questionnaire that we developed to collect the story and key details about the setting and characters in the story. Our team of writers then turn the stories into clean, professional, magazine-quality short stories. Alternatively, if someone wants to devote the time to craft their own short stories, we make our writers available to coach them and help them improve the writing of their own stories.
The great advantage of this approach is that it removes several barriers that prevent people from writing their family stories--time, cost, lack of confidence, lack of experience, misunderstanding about the magnitude or complexity of the project--and offers in their place a solution that adds substantial value to the users. With a much lower investment in time and cost and without the need for writing expertise, the user receives an engaging short story with touches of writerly craft that can be easily gifted or shared on FamilySearch or other social media sites. In addition, users can compile multiple stories about one person and invite other friends and family members to contribute stories of that person. The collection of stories the users create quickly coalesce into an engaging collection of short stories about a loved one that many friends and relatives will enjoy.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.