Writing Your Own Life Story

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• Publisher: Straightforward Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781847166494
• eBook ISBN: 9781847166944
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Writing Your Own Life Story is designed to guide you through all the stages of writing from planning to final lay-out. Written in a friendly, accessible style, full of practical advice and worked examples, this book will help you get your memories from your head onto the page. This new, updated edition is a must-have for anyone wanting to tell the story of their life.

Section 1

Getting Started and Keeping Going

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L.P. Hartley

In this section, we’ll look at planning what you’re going to write, from the gathering of materials that will help prompt memories through to deciding how to map out your book. We’ll also begin thinking about writing a first draft of that all-important story - your life.

Chapter 1

Why Do You Want to Write Your Life Story?

Every one of us has a story to tell, so why not just get on with it?

I know there are some people who can just sit down at a desk and produce thousands of beautiful words that they will never have to change. They’re the exception, not the rule. Most of us aren’t like that. After all, if you felt entirely confident that you could write your life story without any help whatsoever, you wouldn’t be reading this book.

So, to be blunt, why do you want to do it? After all, if you honestly intend writing something substantial, you are going to be taking up a good chunk of your life to do it. As well as taking up time, you’ll probably also need industrial quantities of effort, coffee and chocolate digestive biscuits. Your reasons for writing your life story are probably linked to a second question: who do you expect will read your writing?

Writing for Fun

We human beings love to be creative. Writing your life story is an absorbing way of tapping into that side of your personality. It’s also remarkably inexpensive. You only need pen, paper and a little time. Add into that some will-power and hot beverages and you’re well on your way to keeping yourself amused over several weeks, although it’s more likely to take months or possibly even years. As well as being a comparatively cheap hobby for which you’ve got most of the equipment anyway, it can also be pursued under almost any weather conditions.

If you want to get a more professional finish to your completed work, you may have to invest in a bit of computer kit if you don’t already have it. But even then, writing is a cheaper pastime than cross-country skiing, paragliding or power-boat racing and your chances of injury lower.

Life stories written for the sheer fun of the project are often the best. You can tell when the writer has enjoyed the process of writing – it leaps off the page, involves you, makes you want to read on. Writing for the sheer enjoyment of recording your life is a great motive for doing it.

Writing for You and Your Family

If you’re writing for the pure pleasure of writing, then your reader is likely to be just you or your family.

There’s no reason why it can’t be just you. Why not? What on earth is wrong in writing simply for yourself? There are plenty of people who are happy to dabble in watercolours without ever once wanting to display their efforts, even in the privacy of their own lavatory.

You can learn a great deal writing only for yourself. However, most of the life writers I have worked with want to write for their families. They want their children or grandchildren to have a record of their lives.

From my introduction, you can see that I wish I had more information about my two grandfathers, Roland and Frederick, and their lives. Just think how fascinating it would be for someone hundred years from now – perhaps one of your direct descendants - to come across a well-written document of your life. You might argue that Roland and Fred were involved in a World War and you’ve spent your life in the accounts department. Yes, it’s true that not all lives are as colourful as each other, but that’s not always for the best. Anne Frank led a far more intriguing life than I have, but she died in her teens. I’m happy to live a somewhat greyer life.

A moment’s reflection and we can see that there are things we do now that will soon disappear into history. Emptying a cupboard the other day, I came across a couple of ash-trays. I haven’t smoked for well over 15 years and just about everyone I know who did smoke no longer does. There was a time when non-smokers would even keep in a table-top cigarette-box to offer smokers when they visited rather than ushering them out into the garden to puff damply in the rain. A visit to a British cinema meant watching the film through a cataract of cigarette smoke. There were even little ash-trays screwed to the backs of seats. The current trend is towards ‘vaping’. The electronic cigarette is taking over from the old analogue fag.

Recapturing a Lost Time

There are things that you do now that will eventually be as extinct as the dinosaur, so writing to recapture this is vitally important. And remember this: ordinary people are endlessly fascinating. Our lives may seem dull and trivial to us; but they are not. My grandfathers may well have believed theirs were too, but if they had only put down on paper some of their thoughts, if they had only taken a little time from their lives to write something about their experiences, we would know so much more. Likewise my grandmothers, who were also born before the age of the aeroplane.

The biographies of the great and the good, the noisy, the powerful, and the famous will always be recorded. The rest of us, the ordinary folk going about our ordinary daily lives are just as interesting - probably more so. Visit any stately home and you’ll find that the kitchens are amongst the most popular parts of the house. People will move swiftly past the Vermeers and Landseers, but spend ages chatting to the curators about how the spit worked, where the scullery maid slept and what the butler’s wages would be worth today.

It’s a simple point, but one worth remembering - the way in which we go about our lives is constantly changing. My wife and I once lived in a Victorian terraced house, built for the station clerk of a minor branch railway. Even that family, hardly well-off even by the standards of the day, had a live-in servant, who would have performed the duties now carried out by your washing-machine, dish-washer, hand-held blender and the Tesco delivery van.

Technology advances and with it many of the old ways are lost. I’m still a good few years off my state pension, but as a youngster working in an office, I used a telex machine, a comptometer and a PABX telephone exchange. Slightly later on, as a young teacher, I created hand-written worksheets using a Banda machine, which at least gave the kids in my classes something to sniff before they nodded off. The year I took my Maths O-level (roughly the equivalent of GCSE if you’re a youngster or School Cert. If you’re an oldie), my teacher said that he reckoned that somebody would be bringing one of those new-fangled calculators before the school year was out. He was right. And that calculator had set some indulged lad’s parents back about £30.

Jobs have disappeared. I once worked as a figure clerk. A small group of us had to take invoices and add up the numbers on them and pass them on to a crabby woman with terminal halitosis who then transferred our calculations into to a massive ledger that was wider than her desk. By this stage we had the fabulously modern technology that was a calculator with a built-in till roll that we had to share between six of us when crabby woman wasn’t hogging it. Nowadays this kind of work is all done by a computer, which spits out automatic invoices, that are then mechanically folded into envelopes or increasingly sent via the miracle of the web to our home computers, where we open them and wonder how on earth they got the final total so badly wrong. We then spend a week trying to get a human being to sort it out. Indeed, just a generation ago, when such jobs as shorthand-typist and secretary were still commonplace, employment agents asked you if you knew how to use an electric typewriter. (‘Can you work a golf-ball?’)

Thirty years or so ago, it would have seemed an outlandish idea that I could type this into a computer, using a keyboard, then rearrange the text to suit me. A handful of people were just beginning to buy word-processors, often made by Amstrad. The daisy-wheel printer of my first word-processor, which you had to cajole into printing with a continuous sheet of folded, perforated, tractor-fed paper was so noisy, I had to put a towel underneath it to stop it from shaking the whole of my single-glazed, non-centrally-heated house.

The current generation manages to type into a telephone, which serves as calendar, notebook, camera, to-do list, giant reference encyclopaedia and just about everything else known unto humanity. And just with their thumbs.

They too, when they are old, slow and fat will wonder at how the generation that follows them simply attaches electrodes and ‘thinks’ their words into a gadget smaller than a cigarette packet. In a hundred years’ time, someone will find this book in an antique shop selling such quaint items of yesteryear (’people used to read them you know’) and laugh outrageously as the yellowing pages disintegrate under their fingers at just how wrong my predictions are before climbing into their driverless cars and swooshing off on autopilot to their sleeping pods.

What you do every day will fascinate the generations to come. And this is a great reason for writing your own story. And it doesn’t have to be the whole of your life. It’s also entirely valid just to write about a single episode or part of your life. You may simply want to tell the story of the years you spent in the army, or of your time as a Land Girl. Perhaps you were a nurse and want to show how things were in the old days. You remember the old Nightingale wards, the days when patients could smoke in the dayroom, when we had convalescent homes and the absolute fear of the hospital matron.

Maybe, you simply want to write about your travels. Just think how much this has all changed, even in the last twenty years. Once, even a trip from London to Paris was a huge adventure in exotica. Nowadays, the physical distance has been reduced by clever rail and aeroplane links. Where once we went to Morecambe, now we go to Mexico.

Amongst the odd things I’ve collected over the years is a small hard-backed home-bound book of collated, type-written sheets, picked up at a car boot sale (and will we one day have to explain what a car boot sale used to be?). It is bound in a dodgy green cover. There is a hand-written inscription in the front that reads ‘To Jane and George – Memories of a happy holiday in France, August, 1950’. Now, August 1950 is still within the living memory of a good number of folks and a trip to France seems like a commonplace event. However, there is the fascination of a world that has already disappeared. As I write, Paris still exists, as does the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysées, all of which get a good mention. Other things, however, have altered dramatically.

We journey to France now by plane, roll-on-roll-off ferry, fast boat or the channel tunnel. No longer is it a fourteen-hours-or-more trip on the overnight boat-train lugging a wheel-less suitcase along the platform to the quayside or having your car winched in a huge net into the hold. The currency of France in the pages of this little home-bound book is the Franc (in fact, I suspect it may even be the old Franc), not the Euro. Nowadays, we can take as much money as we want in and out of France, but those were the days of strict currency control. I remember sneaking an extra £5 through in a shoe once, although I still wake in fear that I have been rumbled by the authorities.

And who in an era of electronic currency would spend an hour at a Bureau de Change...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Also By Nicholas Corder
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section 1 Getting Started and Keeping Going
• Section 2 Writing Techniques
• Section 3 Editing and Polishing
• Appendix A Further Reading - Autobiographies, Memoirs, Life Stories
• Appendix B Useful Reference Books