A book about your children’s childhood: start with your voice, not the keyboard
Part one of five in the series A book with the book agent. Next: Everything you can hand the book agent.
A book about your own children’s childhood is one of the most common books nobody writes. Every parent has the material: thousands of photos on a phone, years of messages with the grandparents, a few videos nobody ever finished watching, and above all a memory that still holds the details the children will one day want to know. One thing is missing – evenings at a keyboard. And those are not coming.
This series shows how such a book gets written with the book agent: not by writing, but by talking. The whole method rests on two things – a voice note and the material you hand the agent. Everything else follows from them.
A model example
To show what this looks like in practice, one model client runs through the whole series. Let’s call her Jana. She is not a real customer and nothing we write about her happened – she is an example assembled from the questions parents ask most often. The real figures in this series come from one real book project on which we developed the method, and we say so every time we use them.
Jana has two children, Ema (10) and Tomáš (7). For their eighteenth birthdays she wants to give them a book about their childhood – not a photo album, but an account of who they were, what they said, what went on at home when they were too young to remember. She has been telling these stories for years, at dinners and to the grandparents. She has never written page one.
Why the book has not happened yet
Not because Jana cannot write. Because page one costs an evening she does not have. It is 22:40, the children are asleep, the dishes are done, and what is left for sitting down and starting from the beginning is exactly the energy that is not enough for a single paragraph.
And when she does sit down, she hits the second problem: she does not know where anything is. The photo from the first day at nursery is somewhere in 2019. The message in which grandma wrote that Tomáš had said his first whole word is in a group chat she would have to scroll back three years. She searches for forty minutes and writes nothing.
This is not a writing problem. It is a retrieval problem. The story is complete – in her head, on her phone, in a shoebox. What is missing is something that holds all of it at once.
What the book agent is – and what it is not
If you have used ChatGPT, you have a mental model that does not fit here. A chatbot answers and forgets. Close the window and it is gone. It cannot open your files, does not remember last Tuesday, and can do nothing while you sleep.
The book agent is a worker with hands, a memory and a schedule.
| Chatbot | Book agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | Forgets between conversations | Permanent – every fact with a date and a source |
| Your files | You paste text in by hand | Reads your folder directly: photos, PDFs, message exports |
| Works alone | Never | Yes – on a schedule or when given a task |
| Where you find it | Only when you open the window | It writes to your phone, in Telegram |
| When you are wrong | It agrees | It checks your archive and tells you |
That last row is the whole product. A chatbot will write you a nice paragraph about Ema’s first steps. The agent searches your own messages and videos and answers when it really happened. We come back to that in part four.
Day one: an installation we do together
The agent runs on your computer, not on someone else’s server. That is why it does not install itself – we do the installation together, in one session of about four hours, and you are talking to it from your phone, through Telegram, the same day. You set nothing up.
On that day Jana does three things: she shows where her photos and videos are, exports the family group chat (part two describes exactly what can be handed over) and sends her first voice note. Everything else – reading, filing, remembering – is the agent’s work.
Before the first word: the style interview
Before the agent writes a single sentence, it interviews you. Not about the story – about the voice. Seven questions:
- Which books do you love – not by genre, by feel. Which one made you forget you were reading?
- Which authors should this resemble? One is enough, three are better.
- First person or third? Past tense or present?
- How much should the narrator know – everything from page one, or only what you knew at the time?
- Long chapters or short?
- What must never appear in the book?
- Who is it for?
Jana answers: first person, present tense, short chapters, so they can be read one at a time before bed. The narrator knows only what she knew then. Never: other people’s children by name. Who it is for: Ema and Tomáš, when they turn eighteen – and nobody else until they allow it.
From her answers and the books she named comes a set of rules: how a chapter opens, where a scene ends, when to explain and when to stay silent. That set is then applied to sentences her favourite authors never wrote. This is why no two books written this way sound the same.
The first voice note from the car
The evening after the installation, Jana drives home from her parents. Twenty minutes on the road. She presses the microphone and talks about one day: the day Ema first fell asleep at nursery without crying, and the teacher wrote it on a slip of paper Jana still keeps in her wallet.
One note, one event. That is the one habit worth keeping.
By the time she parks, the note has been transcribed word for word, broken into individual facts, each with a date where one can be established, and filed where she will find it in a year. And questions come back: How old was Ema? Was it in September, when she started, or later? Do you have a photo of that slip? Who picked her up that day?
Jana does not answer at once. She answers on Wednesday, from the car park outside the shop. That is enough.
What comes next
Part two goes through everything that can be handed to the agent – from the family chat export and photos it really reads to the one honest limit worth knowing in advance: Everything you can hand the book agent.
Want to see it live
See how the book agent works – it is all on one page. If you want to see what a voice note looks like as it becomes a record, book a free 30-minute call with a demo. And if you would rather watch from a distance first, a live demo runs in our Discord community.