List the three most memorable experiences of your life:  your parents’ divorce, getting picked on in school, the death of a relative, learning to cope with a handicap, winning (or losing) the championship game…
 List the two most pressing concerns of your life right now.  What am I going to do about my father, mother, sister, lover, child?  How can I stop dieting to the point of starvation?  Should I change colleges, majors, jobs?  Should I try out for the team?  Should I drop this class?
 List your long-term problems with a painful history, your long-term conflicts:  living with a parent’s alcoholism, a schizophrenic sibling, worry about money, grades, career, dilemmas regarding sexual orientation, pressures from parents, partners…
 Look over your list and you will see many possibilities for writing.  Items that appear more than once or seem to connect are especially promising.  Circle them and draw lines between them.  That plane crash may be connected to your fear of taking the new job which requires travel, which connects to your money problems which are causing conflicts with your partner.  What at first appeared to be four problems is really one hot topic.
 Any topic which seems too hot, too complex, too personal, too revealing, is probably worth exploring.
 
 In your notebook, list two topics which would require courage and honesty to write about.  Choose one.  Write a few sentences about why this topic would be hard.  In a few days, go back and see if you can write more. From time to time, add to this list of tough subjects.
Once a week, in your notebook, write one hard truth about yourself or someone you know well.  This will encourage honesty and perhaps lead to a new subject.

From: True Stories: Guidelines for Writing From Your Life by Rebecca Rule and Susan Wheeler Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann 2000