Your Life Story

Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) felt writing, "The easiest thing in the world. . . I sit up with a pipe in my mouth and a board on my knees and I scribble away."

At 70, he decided to write his autobiography. He had tried before without satisfaction, then decided to dictate his autobiography. Twain felt he could speak with a "whole frank mind."

Moving away from a chronological account of his life, he decided on a structure he described like this: "Start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale."

He called it a "complete and purposed jumble" He claimed this autobiography and diary "ranks with the steam engine, the printing press lamp; the electric telegraph." Twain left 5,000 pages of unedited memoir, and did not want it published until he had been dead for 100 years, when he'd be "unaware, and indifferent."

Mark Twain died in 1910 and the first volume of his autobiography was published just this month. It reached the No. 2 spot on the New York Times best-seller list weeks before it was released. There are two more volumes of autobiography, which will be released in the next five years, edited by a team of six scholars at the Mark Twain Archives, housed at the Bancroft Library on the UC Berkeley campus.

Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography:

It was during my first year's apprenticeship in the Courier office that I did a thing which I have been trying to regret for fifty-five years. It was a summer afternoon and just the kind of weather that a boy prizes for river excursions and other frolics, but I was a prisoner. The others were all gone holidaying. I was alone and sad. I had committed a crime of some sort and this was the punishment. I must lose my holiday, and spend the afternoon in solitude besides. I had the printing-office all to myself, there in the third story. I had one comfort, and it was a generous one while it lasted. It was the half of a long and broad watermelon, fresh and red and ripe. I gouged it out with a knife, and I found accommodation for the whole of it in my person — though it did crowd me until the juice ran out of my ears. There remained then the shell, the hollow shell. It was big enough to do duty as a cradle. I didn't want to waste it, and I couldn't think of anything to do with it which could afford entertainment. I was sitting at the open window which looked out upon the sidewalk of the main street three stories below, when it occurred to me to drop it on somebody's head. I doubted the judiciousness of this, and I had some compunctions about it too, because so much of the resulting entertainment would fall to my share and so little to the other person. But I thought I would chance it.I watched out of the window for the right person to come along — the safe person — but he didn't come. Every time there was a candidate he or she turned out to be an unsafe one, and I had to restrain myself. But at last I saw the right one coming. (From Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by The Mark Twain Project of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, published by UC Press, 2010.)

Creative Write: Begin your life story. Start with a temptation like Mark Twain's above. Share your first lines with us!