Thinking about using Storyworth to create a family memory book? Learn how our weekly writing prompts work, from choosing and customizing questions to capturing meaningful memories.

Storyworth makes it easy to tell a life's story by breaking the process into bite-sized pieces. Each week, your storyteller receives a thoughtful question designed to spark memories, reflections, or stories. Week by week, the stories will add up to tell their life story. At the end of the year, we’ll capture them all, along with your favorite photos, into a full-color keepsake book. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to select the right questions, customize or write your own, and use our new Personalized Questions tool to tailor the experience. 

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How Storyworth’s Weekly Questions work

Storyworth sends your storyteller a new writing prompt from your queue of questions each week for a year. Storytellers, or anyone else added to their account, can select from our vast, curated question library, rewrite prompts to be more relevant, or create new ones from scratch. For even greater personalization, storytellers can now share details about their life, and our Personalized Questions tool will generate tailored prompts. Learn more about these options below. 

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How to create your queue of questions

Search Storyworth’s prompt library

Our prompt library is filled with hundreds of easily browsable questions to help tell a life's story. You can search by category, including childhood, education, parenthood, family and home, love and friendship, work life, hobbies and passions, travel and adventure, traditions and celebrations, spirituality and faith, military, thought-provoking questions, and challenges. You can also search by any keyword to find the best questions.

Use Storyworth’s Personalized Questions

If you want to ask questions that are unique to your storyteller’s life but aren’t sure how to start writing them, try our Personalized Questions tool. You can find this tool by going to Upcoming Questions and clicking the Personalize button. Add a few meaningful details about their life, like where they grew up, any hobbies they have, their children’s names and ages, or anything else!

We’ll use that information to create custom questions just for your storyteller. You can add them to the queue, edit them, or choose not to use them — it’s up to you.

Rewrite or write your own Storyworth questions

If you find a question you like but it doesn’t feel quite right, or you want it to be more relevant to the storyteller, you can always edit it. You can do this before you add it to your queue, after it’s in the queue, or even while you’re writing the story. For example, you could change, “How did you decide when to change jobs?” to “How did you decide when to leave your job in city government?”

If you want to ask a question that’s specific to your storyteller’s life, you can also write one from scratch and add it to the queue. 

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How to share your stories with Storyworth

‍Once you’ve created your queue, we’ll send one question a week to your storyteller. Storyworth offers multiple familiar ways for them to share stories:

Email Reply: Storytellers can simply reply to their weekly prompts just as they would any email.

Phone Call: They can also request a call from Storyworth to tell their story via landline or cell phone. This creates an audio recording that's automatically transcribed into their memoir in their own words.

Online Account: Storytellers can click the Tell your story button in their weekly email to write their story on their Storyworth account—no login needed! You can also change how often your storyteller receives questions or pause their subscription if needed.

You can change the frequency with which your storyteller receives questions or put their subscription on hold to pause questions if needed.

With over a decade of experience, more than 45,000 5-star reviews, and over a million books printed, Storyworth is on a mission to connect people through meaningful stories. Our goal is to provide you and your family with everything you need to make sharing stories easy and rewarding, including helping you find the right questions to ask. 

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Get started with Storyworth Memoirs now

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