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30 Prompts to Start Writing Your Memoir

May 05, 2023 | 2 min read
Woman writing memoir

Everyone has a story to tell. Here at Freewrite, our passion is helping people overcome the obstacles to writing and get words on the page.

Many #FreewriteFam community members use their Freewrite for journaling or to write memoir. But sometimes your own story is the hardest to tell. Where do you start? What’s interesting enough to include?

Our advice: Stop thinking; start writing.

And if you need a little help with the “start” part, here are 30 prompts to get you going. Pick a prompt, set a timer for 15 minutes, and WRITE ON!

  1. Describe yourself as a child.
  2. How did you get your name?
  3. Describe your childhood home. How did it smell? What was the temperature?
  4. Pick a number from 1-20. Write about your life at that age.
  5. What was your favorite book or movie as a child? Why? Do you still like it?
  6. When you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up? How close did you come to pursuing that?
  7. Describe someone you admired when you were young. Did your impression of that person change when you grew up?
  8. Tell the story of the best meal you’ve ever had.
  9. What do you remember (if anything) about your parents’ relationship? Either with each other, or with others?
  10. Do you have any siblings? If so, did you get along?
  11. Describe a hobby you used to have that you no longer do. Why did you stop?
  12. Describe the best day of your life.
  13. What was your worst fear at age 5? Age 15? Age 25? Now?
  14. Describe the very first trip you took away from your hometown.
  15. Write about a historical event that you lived through.
  16. Do you believe in the afterlife? Why or why not?
  17. What was your first job? Did you like it? How long did it last?
  18. How do you define loss? Tell about a time you experienced loss, in any form.
  19. Do you remember your first love? Describe them.
  20. Have you experienced a life-or-death situation? How did you feel?
  21. Tell the story of a moment when you were scared to do something but did it anyway.
  22. What’s more important to you: honesty or loyalty?
  23. At what moment in your life did you feel most loved?
  24. What has been the biggest challenge of your life thus far?
  25. Do you prefer winter, spring, summer, or fall? Why?
  26. Name one insecurity you have about yourself. Now tell a story about where that insecurity was born, or how it has affected your life.
  27. Do you believe people are inherently “good”?
  28. Name one thing you believed as a young person that you changed your mind about.
  29. What are you good at? Be honest and don't sell yourself short.
  30. What is your most prized possession? 
January 09, 2026 2 min read

A new year means a whole new crop of work is entering the public domain. And that means endless opportunities for retellings, spoofs, adaptations, and fan fiction.

December 30, 2025 3 min read

It’s Freewrite’s favorite time of year. When dictionaries around the world examine language use of the previous year and select a “Word of the Year.”

Of course, there are many different dictionaries in use in the English language, and they all have different ideas about what word was the most influential or saw the most growth in the previous year. They individually review new slang and culturally relevant vocabulary, examine spikes or dips in usage, and pour over internet trend data.

Let’s see what some of the biggest dictionaries decided for 2025. And read to the end for a chance to submit your own Word of the Year — and win a Freewrite gift card.

[SUBMIT YOUR WORD OF THE YEAR]


Merriam-Webster: "slop"

Merriam-Webster chose "slop" as its Word of the Year for 2025 to describe "all that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters."

The dictionary lists "absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, 'workslop' reports that waste coworkers’ time … and lots of talking cats" as examples of slop.

The original sense of the word "slop" from the 1700s was “soft mud” and eventually evolved to mean "food waste" and "rubbish." 2025 linked the term to AI, and the rest is history.

Honorable mentions: conclave, gerrymander, touch grass, performative, tariff, 67.

Dictionary.com: "67"

The team at Dictionary.com likes to pick a word that serves as “a linguistic time capsule, reflecting social trends and global events that defined the year.”

For 2025, they decided that “word” was actually a number. Or two numbers, to be exact.

If you’re an old, like me, and don’t know many school-age children, you may not have heard “67” in use. (Note that this is not “sixty-seven,” but “six, seven.”)

Dictionary.com claims the origin of “67” is a song called “Doot Doot (6 7)” by Skrilla, quickly made infamous by viral TikTok videos, most notably featuring a child who will for the rest of his life be known as the “6-7 Kid.” But according to my nine-year-old cousin, the origins of something so mystical can’t ever truly be known.

(My third grade expert also demonstrated the accompanying signature hand gesture, where you place both hands palms up and alternately move up and down.)

And if you happen to find yourself in a fourth-grade classroom, watch your mouth, because there’s a good chance this term has been banned for the teacher’s sanity.

Annoyed yet? Don’t be. As Dictionary.com points out, 6-7 is a rather delightful example at how fast language can develop as a new generation joins the conversation.

Dictionary.com honorable mentions: agentic, aura farming, broligarchy, clanker, Gen Z stare, kiss cam, overtourism, tariff, tradwife.

Oxford Dictionary: "rage bait"

With input from more than 30,000 users and expert analysis, Oxford Dictionary chose "rage bait" for their word of the year.

Specifically, the dictionary pointed to 2025’s news cycle, online manipulation tactics, and growing awareness of where we spend our time and attention online.

While closely paralleling its etymological cousin "clickbait," rage bait more specifically denotes content that evokes anger, discord, or polarization.

Oxford's experts report that use of the term has tripled in the last 12 months.

Oxford Dictionary's honorable mentions:aura farming, biohack.

Cambridge Dictionary: "parasocial"

The Cambridge Dictionary examined a sustained trend of increased searches to choose "parasocial" as its Word of the Year.

Believe it or not, this term was coined by sociologists in 1956, combining “social” with the Greek-derived prefix para-, which in this case means “similar to or parallel to, but separate from.”

But interest in and use of the term exploded this year, finally moving from a mainly academic context to the mainstream.

Cambridge Dictionary's honorable mentions: slop, delulu, skibidi, tradwife

Freewrite: TBD

This year, the Freewrite Fam is picking our own Word of the Year.

Click below to submit what you think the Word of 2025 should be, and we'll pick one submission to receive a Freewrite gift card.

[SUBMIT HERE] 

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Sources

December 18, 2025 7 min read

What can Jane Austen's personal letters teach writers of today?