A prompt book is not a biographer

A prompt book is a reasonable gift. It is also a different product from a biographer, and treating them as cousins is how families end up with a half-filled volume and a parent who felt assigned.

The prompt book’s strength is also its limit: everyone gets the same questions, in the same order, and the storyteller has to write. Isolated questions produce isolated answers. There is no one to notice that a name from page four belongs to the story on page nineteen.

What a private biographer has to do

The work is not asking. It is carrying a thread.

That means remembering the people already mentioned, returning to a story that was left unfinished, staying with a detail that turned out to matter, and leaving a subject alone when it is refused. It means turning speech into something readable without turning it into someone else’s prose. And it means the storyteller still has the last word.

Joan is built around those jobs. The comparison, written fairly, is on Your private biographer.

Why the storyteller should not have to write

Writing is a second translation. Talking is the first, and for most people it is the only one they will do. A phone call at a familiar time asks for speech. A prompt book asks for a sitting, a pen, and a kind of composure that a good conversation does not need.

If you have already bought a prompt book, it is not wasted. Use one question as a starting point for a call, then put the book down. The useful part was the question. The rest is homework.

Joan calls so nobody has to assign it. Join Founding Families.