You bought one of those fill-in books for Mum or Dad. Four pages are done. It has been in a drawer for two years. Here is how to get the rest.
Stop expecting them to write it. Those books fail for a reason: they ask an older person to sit alone and produce written prose, which is a skill most people never had and a task nobody enjoys. Take the questions out of the book, ask them out loud, and record the answers. The book becomes a question list, which is the only part of it that was ever any good.
Why they stall
It is not laziness and it is not that they do not care.
Writing is a skill, and most people do not have it. Someone who left school at fifteen and spent forty years in a trade has no reason to be comfortable producing a page of prose about themselves. Speaking, they are fluent. Writing, they are self-conscious and slow.
The questions arrive in the wrong order. These books open with the big ones, and question three is often something like “what was your happiest moment?” That is an essay question. It closes people down.
There is no deadline and no audience. Nothing makes it this week’s job.
The box is too small. Four lines for twenty years, in a book designed to look neat, tells the person that a short answer is what is wanted.
Handwriting. For a lot of older people this is the quiet reason. Their hand is not what it was and they do not want to say so.
None of that is a reason to give up on the book. It is a reason to stop treating it as a book.
What to do instead
Use it as a question list. The questions in it are usually reasonable. Read one out, let them answer, and record it.
Answer it together, out loud. Half an hour, a cup of tea, and the book open on the table. You write, or the phone records, or both.
Start from what is already done. The four completed pages tell you what they were comfortable with. Start there and go sideways.
Do not go in order. Skip anything that feels like a test. Nobody is marking it.
Let them dictate. “You talk, I will write it in” removes the whole problem at a stroke, and most people are visibly relieved by the offer.
If the book’s questions are thin, the hundred questions are grouped by theme so you can take a section at a time. If you are going to record, the recording guide covers the practical side in one page.
If they will not, or cannot
Some people genuinely do not want to do it, and that is theirs to decide. Some cannot: a shake, poor eyesight, or simply too much effort.
In that case the book is finished as far as they are concerned, and the useful thing is to stop asking them to fill it in and start asking them questions. The material still exists. It just has to come out of their mouth rather than their pen.
What to do with the four pages that are done
Keep them exactly as they are. Their handwriting is part of the record, and in twenty years it will matter more to somebody than the content does.
Photograph or scan those pages now, before the book goes back in the drawer. Books get damaged, lost in house moves, or thrown out by someone who did not realise.
Turning it into something finished
If you want the answers to become something people will actually read, the half-finished book is a useful starting point rather than an awkward one. It tells me what they are willing to talk about and what they skipped, which is information I would otherwise spend a session working out.
Families come to me with these books fairly often. Send me a message saying roughly how much is filled in and what state they are in, and I will tell you what it would take to finish it properly.