How to organize memoirs for a biography?

Question

I'm about to start organizing someone's life story to eventually send to a biographer to write a book and would like some suggestions on how to start and organize the process, please.

As they are unable to type and not very techno-savvy, this is my plan:

• Have them audio record the events of their life
• I will create a timeline structure to begin transcribing the details into. This will provide the ability to continue to add more details as they arise

Having some way to auto-generate a table of contents for time periods would be nice. I will also need to add scanned photos, etc. Other than literally transcribing in a large word document, from those in the community who are familiar with the process, are there tools better suited to this process and what suggestions can you kindly provide?

Answer 1

What you describe seems similar to the corkboard feature in Scrivener.

This feature visualizes your content as index cards on a corkboard where each index card could be a bundle of items including text and images. You can also create nested corkboards: the higher level could be by life period, e.g. childhood, teenage years, life as a young adult, etc...; within each life period you can further arrange items based by year, or by events.

I have not written biographies, but I use this feature a lot when I don't write scenes in random order. After I craft a scene, I move it around to where I think it should go in the final timeline.

In addition, if you organize your manuscript by folders, you can dynamically generate a table of contents to check how your project is progressing.