How to Write an Obituary When You Are Not a Writer

Writing an Obituary When You Are Not a Writer: Start With Facts, Not Sentences

Someone handed you the obituary, and you have been staring at a blank page ever since. Maybe it was the funeral director asking for a few hundred words by tomorrow, or your mother saying you are the one who writes, when the truth is you have not written anything longer than a text message in years. The cursor blinks. Nothing comes. You start to wonder if you are the wrong person for this job.

You are not. An obituary is not an essay, and it does not need a beautiful opening line. At its core, it is a short factual notice with a few human sentences woven through it: a name, some dates, a list of survivors, and one or two details that sound like the person you are describing. The families who struggle most with this task are almost always the ones trying to write beautifully first, reaching for a tone that feels appropriate before they have written down a single fact.

From working with families through the memorial planning process, the people who finish fastest are the ones who start with facts, not sentences. They answer plain questions first, in whatever order the answers come, and let the shape of the obituary follow. Writing turns out to be a much smaller job than it looked from the blank page.

This post walks through that method: six questions to answer, a way to make your answers sound like you instead of a stranger, and how to lean on a template or a free drafting tool without losing your family's voice. If you want the complete structure an obituary follows, from headline through closing line, our step-by-step guide to writing an obituary covers every section in order.

How to Answer Six Questions and Let the Answers Be the Obituary

You do not need an opening line. You need six answers, and you can give them in any order that comes naturally. Say each one to yourself, or to whoever else is in the room, then write it down in plain language, close to exactly what you said.

Once you have six short answers, stack them in the sequence below and you have a first draft. Nothing else is required. The survivor list tends to cause the most hesitation, since families worry about leaving someone out or getting the order wrong. Our guide on how to list survivors in an obituary walks through the traditional order and exactly who belongs in it.

How to Write It the Way You Would Tell a Friend

The fastest way to find your natural sentences is to say the answer out loud to a real person, or into your phone's voice recorder, then type what you actually said. Most people write stiffly the moment they sit down to compose something formal, and an obituary feels about as formal as writing gets. Speaking first sidesteps that instinct entirely.

Consider the difference between two versions of the same sentence. A written-first version might read: "She was a devoted and generous woman who was loved by all who knew her." A spoken version, the kind you would actually say to a neighbor at the mailbox, sounds more like: "She brought a peach cobbler to every school potluck for thirty years, and she never once used a recipe."

Notice what changed. The spoken sentence is shorter. It uses words your family actually uses, not words that sound proper for the occasion. And it carries a detail instead of a compliment. "Devoted and generous" could describe almost anyone. The cobbler could only describe her. Grief counselors often note that families remember the specific, sensory details of a loved one long after the general praise fades, and readers respond the same way. A detail lets a stranger picture the person. A compliment just tells the stranger what to feel.

Try this with each of your six answers. Say it, listen to what you said, and type it close to word for word. You will edit later. Right now, the goal is simply to get your own voice on the page instead of the voice you think an obituary is supposed to have. And if a blank template has already landed in your inbox from the funeral home, that same instinct applies to every line you are about to fill in.

How to Use a Template Without Sounding Like a Template

Fill the template in completely first, then change exactly three things. A template exists to make sure you do not forget a section, not to write the obituary for you, and most of the awkwardness people associate with templates comes from leaving them exactly as filled in.

Start by finishing every blank. Then make three edits. Replace one general adjective with one specific example, since "kind" and "loving" tell a reader nothing a template did not already promise. Move the sentence that matters most to the second position, right after the opening line, so it is not buried under service details. Delete any phrase you recognize from another obituary you have read, because if it sounds familiar to you, it will sound generic to everyone else.

Here is a filled template paragraph before those edits: "John was a loving husband, father, and grandfather who will be dearly missed by all who knew him. He enjoyed spending time with his family and was a member of his local church." Here is the same paragraph after: "John spent forty years fixing whatever his neighbors brought to his garage, usually refusing payment. He taught his grandchildren to fish on Saturday mornings at the same lake his own father took him to, and he never missed a Sunday at First Baptist."

The facts barely changed. What changed is specificity. If you are working under a deadline and need the fastest possible path from blank template to finished notice, our guide on how to write an obituary in an hour lays out a faster version of this same process, built for when the service is tomorrow.

How to Fix Sentences That Sound Wrong When You Cannot Say Why

Every obituary draft has at least one sentence that reads wrong, even though you cannot explain why. Rather than guessing at it, or rewriting the whole paragraph in frustration, run the sentence through three checks in order, drawn from our list of common obituary writing mistakes to avoid.

That line, from a novelist who spent a career cutting exactly this kind of sentence, is your permission slip. If something sounds like an author wrote it instead of a family, cut it, or say it the way you would to someone who actually knew them.

If you want a running list of phrases that consistently work, plus the ones worth retiring, our collection of the best obituary phrases to borrow and the ones to skip can save you from writing, and then cutting, the same line everyone else has already used.

Should You Let Someone Else Write It for You?

Yes, handing the obituary to someone else is a legitimate choice, and no one should feel it is a failure of love to ask for help. The right choice depends on time, money, and how close you want to stay to the family's own words.

• You, using the six questions. This works well when you knew the person well and can spare an hour. Watch for perfectionism, the instinct to write beautifully instead of factually, which is what stalls most first attempts.
• A family member who already writes. This works well when one sibling or in-law is comfortable writing and everyone trusts them to speak for the family. Watch for one person's voice standing in for everyone else's memories.
• The funeral director. This works well when time is short and the family needs a serviceable notice quickly. Many funeral homes fold a basic obituary into the service package, though what is covered varies by provider and changes over time, so ask what your package includes rather than assuming. Watch for recognizable boilerplate language that could describe almost anyone.
• A professional obituary writer. This works well when budget allows and the family wants a polished, publication-ready piece. Writers typically price by the project, and fees move over time, so ask for a current quote in 2026 rather than working from a number you heard years ago. Watch for a result that reads beautifully but sounds like no one in particular.
• An AI draft you edit. This works well when you have rough notes but no time to shape them into paragraphs. Watch for a draft that is well organized but generic, since a tool can arrange facts but cannot supply the family's own words for you.

The tradeoff is consistent across all five options: the further the writing gets from the family, the more the notice sounds like anyone's family, not yours. That last option, the AI draft you edit, is the one most people reach for when the deadline is close, so it is worth knowing exactly what it does and does not do.

How an Obituary Writing Tool Can Draft It From Your Notes

Here is what actually happens when you use an obituary writing tool: you paste in your six rough answers, misspellings and sentence fragments included, and the tool returns them arranged in standard obituary order with the connecting sentences written in for you. It takes the stacking work from the earlier section and does the sentence building on top of it.

What it cannot know matters just as much as what it can do. It does not know the nickname only the grandchildren use, or which cousin absolutely has to be named even though the family has not spoken in years. It does not know whether your family says "passed" or "died," or whether Dad would have hated the word "beloved." Those details live only in your family, and no draft, however well organized, can supply them.

Treat the output as a first draft engine, not a finished notice. Lovekept's free obituary writer, free to use as of 2026, is built around this same idea: it asks the same plain questions this post covers, then hands you a structured draft to rewrite in your own words rather than a polished piece you are expected to accept as is.

How to Make an AI Draft Sound Like Your Family

A draft from any tool, AI or template, needs three editing passes before it is ready to send. Do them in order.

First, swap every formal name for the one your family actually uses. If the draft says "Robert," and nobody has called him anything but "Bobby" since 1974, change it. Second, find the draft's most general sentence, the one that could describe almost anyone, and replace it with one specific memory only you could supply. Third, read the whole thing aloud to the person who knew them best, and let that person cut one line without arguing about it. They will hear something you cannot.

Here is the part most guides skip: consider keeping one slightly awkward sentence in the final version. Perfectly smooth prose is often the clearest sign that a family did not write the obituary themselves, and mourners notice more than you would expect. A small imperfection, an odd turn of phrase that sounds exactly like your uncle telling the story at Thanksgiving, does more to make a notice feel true than another round of polishing ever will.

Once the words are right, they do not have to live only in a newspaper or a printed program. A memorial page keeps the finished obituary in one place permanently, and it lets relatives add their own memories and photos over time, so the tribute keeps growing the way a real remembrance does. You can create a memorial page for your loved one as soon as the words feel finished.

Common Questions From People Who Do Not Write for a Living

A few questions come up every time someone who does not consider themselves a writer gets handed this task. Here are direct answers to the ones we hear most.

You Were Never the Wrong Person for This

You started with a blank page and the wrong idea about what was being asked of you. An obituary is not a piece of writing to be graded. It is a record: a name, a life, the people left behind, and one or two details that could belong to no one else on earth.

So answer the six questions. Say them the way you would say them at the kitchen table. Cut the sentences that sound borrowed, and keep the one that sounds unmistakably like your family. The words do not have to be beautiful to be true, and true is what the people who loved them will remember.