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Straightforward Publishing - Nicholas Corder

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91 pages

English

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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.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Straightforward Publishing
Date de parution	29 septembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781802361858
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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A Straightforward Guide to
WRITING YOUR OWN LIFE STORY
A Straightforward Guide to
WRITING YOUR OWN LIFE STORY
Nicholas Corder
Straightforward Publishing www.straightforwardpublishing.co.uk
Straightforward Guides
Nicholas Corder Revised Edition 2022
Nicholas Corder has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.
ISBN: 978-1-80236-103-2 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-80236-185-8 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-80236-178-0
Printed by 4edge www.4edge.co.uk Typeset by Frabjous Books
Cover design by BW Studio Derby
Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that the information contained within this book is correct at the time of going to press, the author and publisher can take no responsibility for the errors or omissions contained within.
Acknowledgements
Teaching is a two-way process. You always learn more from your students than anyone else. So, this book is for all those students who have helped shape the ideas that have gone into it.
As ever, I m indebted to my wife, Pauline. She keeps me going with cups of tea and coffee, reads early drafts and encourages me when the going gets tough.
I d also like to thank Roger at Straightforward Publishing, who sticks with me as an author, despite the vagaries of the publishing world.
Lastly, but most importantly, I d like to thank you for either buying this book or borrowing it from the library. You are a person of taste and refinement. I wish you the best of luck with your project.
Also by Nicholas Corder
Non-Fiction
Escape from the Rat Race - Downshifting to a Richer Life
Learning to Teach Adults - An Introduction
Successful Non-fiction Writing
Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Staffordshire and the Potteries
Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Cumbria
Writing Good, Plain English
Creating Convincing Characters
Fiction
The Bone Mill
Plays
Nigel s Wrist
Jacobson s Organ
Cash and Carrie
Star Struck
A Midsummer Night s Travesty
Shagathon
Bingo Royale
Fire in Her Belly
Talent
Catching Lightning in a Bottle
Twilight Robbery
Contents
Introduction
Section 1 - Getting Started and Keeping Going
1 Why Do You Want to Write Your Life Story?
2 Stirring up Those Memories
3 Planning Your Book
4 Climbing Mount Everest without a Sherpa
Section 2 - Writing Techniques
5 From Narrative Summary to Writing in Scenes
6 Titles and Openings
7 The People in Your Life
8 An Ear for Dialogue
9 Writing about Places
10 Adding a Pinch More Spice
Section 3 - Editing and Polishing
11 Rewriting, Revising and Editing Your Work
12 Pitfalls for the Life Story Writer
13 Preparing Your Manuscript
Appendix A Further Reading - Autobiographies, Memoirs, Life Stories
Appendix B Useful Reference Books
Introduction
This is my mother s version of the story
Summer 1919. A troop carrier pulls away from its temporary mooring in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It is carrying soldiers under the command of General Ironside, destined for the White Sea port of Archangel. Here, they will fight in support of the White Russians, the Tsarist force that is attempting to wrest control of Russia from its new communist leaders.
Amongst the men on board, most of them already hardened by several years of fighting, is Sergeant Frederick Corder of the Royal Engineers, an exiled Londoner. He is essentially being paid a bounty for this trip, which he needs in order to have enough money to marry Ethel Pepper. Fred, a big, burly man, built like a rugby forward, is already a veteran of the Great War. He walks with a slight limp. He has been wounded in the knee and his left leg is bent at an angle that gives him the nickname K-leg amongst his fellow NCOs.
According to my late mother, by pure coincidence, amongst the crowds of well-wishers gathered on the quayside to cheer the ship on its way to the Baltic is a slim local lad called Roland Wood. Roland is one of six children living in the then fashionable West End of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He is training to be an architect. He too has served in the Great War, but as a volunteer. He wears a moustache to hide the scars left by shrapnel wounds, sustained whilst a young subaltern in Belgium, where he had been left for dead during a futile advance by the Northumberland Fusiliers. He has spent the last two years in and out of sanatoria, fighting to regain the use of an arm that his father begged surgeons not to amputate.
My mother s surviving brother, Denis, doubts that this story was true. He can t think of any reason why Granddad Roland (his own father) would go down to the docks. Besides, if it were a weekday, he would be working. There was no coincidence. It s family folklore. Well, that s a shame as it ruins a half-decent anecdote. Or it could be true, but Denis never heard it told. Perhaps I should have checked the business with the sanatoria with him as well.
Well, we will never know. I d love to be able to ask some questions about this of the people involved. True, some archival research might reveal which ship Fred sailed on. It might also disclose what day of the week, or how long, it stopped over in Newcastle. If it were there on a Sunday, perhaps Roland might have gone to have a look.
This is the tiniest tip of an iceberg of things I wish I knew about my family s history. For instance, shortly before my father s death I asked him where my grandfather Fred had been wounded.
In the knee, said my father.
No whereabouts in France?
I don t know, said my father. I never asked him about his war and he never asked me about mine.
It was like this for men of those two generations, called up to fight in global conflicts. They talked little about these events. But this much I do know. Somewhere in Northern France or Belgium, Fred was shot through the knee and fell onto the barbed wire, providing a convenient human bridge for the others in his platoon to cross German lines.
Family lore also holds it that Fred s father was a violent alcoholic, who despite an excellent job in the House of Commons, drank his family into poverty. It s just a story. Fred himself is prone to sudden and irrational mood swings. He enlisted in 1913, as soon as he was old enough to run away from his troubled home. He certainly managed to establish a distance between himself and his family, whoever might have been at fault for this schism. When we came across him as a teenager in the 1911 census, Fred had several brothers and sisters my father had never even heard of. Somewhere in here is a juicy tale of a huge family row whose details we will, alas, never know. Indeed, Fred never speaks about his childhood, save to lecture his own children on the dangers of alcohol.
So, there are scant details of Grandfather Fred s life. But among the tatty possessions that have been passed on to me is a photograph album that must have been started by him. It dates from an era when far fewer photos were taken. Some of the pictures on the same page have intervals of 20 years between them. But amongst the handful that date from the 1910s are a couple of Fred in Great War France, posing with fellow NCOs outside the Nissen Hut at a transit camp that also doubled as a convalescent camp. There are even a few pictures that date from the under-reported North Russian campaign.
I never knew Frederick and have only the faintest childhood memory of Roland. The two men were ordinary lads, not untypical of their day and age. One was fortunate to live in relative affluence at a time when most city-dwellers lived in conditions that would horrify us today - their house was one of the first in Newcastle to have electricity. The other was unfortunate to have been reared by a desperate, alcoholic brute, but lucky enough to be intelligent, able and ambitious. They probably had no realization that they were living in extraordinary times. Both were lucky to have survived the greatest slaughter of young men in European history. Perhaps readers of a certain age will remember the smoke-filled silences of the men who belonged to the generations who fought World Wars. They rarely spoke about what had happened to them. One of my great uncles used to relate a funny tale about meeting up with his two brothers on the beach at Dunkirk. This was the only story he ever told about the evacuation. Apparently, amongst the other things that happened to him was that he had to bury a baby on the beach. But all of this is just family stories, half-remembered, half-understood and, quite possibly entirely mythical.
If only we had more information about our own families. Wouldn t it be great if they had left behind something for us to read? How much better we might understand their lives and, thus, how the past has come to make us.
Like Fred and Roland, we all leave a few doodles of our own across the margins of history. In Fred and Roland s case, there are some stiff, formal photographs, usually in uniform, a few medals, a cigarette box. For years, my study wall boasted the clever, well-drawn copies of Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Goofy that Roland drew for my mother s bedroom wall in the 1930s. They had been passed around the family for generations of young children to enjoy and somehow, as is the way in families, found their way back to me. They are now in the keeping of my great-nephew Charlie and great-niece Ivy. There s not much else.
Generations that follow us will find our names in the Census, on the deeds of properties, on electoral rolls, on membership lists in the archives of Trades Unions or professional bodies. We might have a box of keepsakes - the blazer badge, the school report condemning us as mediocre and lazy ( works well when pushed ), a love letter, a certificate of baptism, a commemorative coin a disk drive full of unlabelled digital photos, and handwritten letter