Writing a biography or autobiography

Chas Jones

This article was first published in the May 2005 edition of Writers' Forum magazine and is reproduced here by kind permission of the Editor.

If you want to see your work in print, and learn about the trade of writing, you could do worse than write somebody else’s story. Your subject provides the framework, so you can focus on the writing.

Your book won’t make the bestseller lists but it should recover the costs of publication. If you are thinking of writing a biography or memoir, you might find my journey to publication with Ordinary Heroes enlightening. It began when I picked up a twenty page diary and ended six years later watching people browse the book in Borders.

I contacted Bill Harvey the diarist and was astonished to discover my dad was his sergeant. This made it personal. My father had told me nothing of his war, so this was a chance to fill that gap. I was hooked.

More diaries followed and soon I had several contrasting characters who shared the same experience but provided different perspectives on the historic events in which they were actors. Now I had my cast of characters who were able to carry a story. However, it needed a focus as biography cannot be about ‘everything’. Eliminating some favourite characters was a hard lesson I had to learn.

Everyday life can be pretty dull. Old soldiers will tell you that war is total boredom, punctuated with short episodes of complete terror. Private soldiers had particularly boring lives. I had to look for the story buried beneath the detail. It was these high and low points that people would want to read about. I decided the essential story would not be an action-packed war story but would follow my subjects’ transition from proud young soldiers to worthless prisoners.

Their early adventures with the fledgling SAS required just a few pages. There is not much to engage a reader in describing arduous training regimes or aborted missions. But waiting, isolated by the uncertainties of captivity, gave the subjects time to reflect.

The diaries told me what they did. Interviews with the survivors told me how they felt. But the second surprise was how little the subjects knew, or had subsequently learned, about their role in the war. The diaries gave some clues but provided no context. Human stories emerged from the archive of the local paper. Numerous visits to the National Archive followed. The people who staff archive-enquiry desks are the patient servants of scholarship and they quickly had me studying the relevant documents.

The adrenalin rush as you confirm one story or uncover a new lead is tremendous. Discovering Winston Churchill’s scribble agreeing ‘to bury’ the finding of one report was a buzz. This told me my diarists were indeed wandering round France after D-Day, when they were officially all back in Britain.

On the other side of the account, three days were ‘wasted’ trying to discover who had decided to build the defences at El Alamein. Not a single reference or hint of a plan emerged. So I accepted the account given by these humble soldiers that they themselves had selected this insignificant railway-halt as the location for the defences for the battle that Churchill would later call ‘the end of the beginning’. These were significant footnotes in our wartime history.

Once I had mastered the material, it was time to plan the book and turn the material into a story that people might want to read.

At some point in the planning process, the essence of the story emerged. For me it was a rather magic moment. Suddenly, the story of my group was clear to me. Into this structure each of the subjects was introduced. Chapter headings provided my framework and highlighted the need for more material to maintain the narrative.

Planning was refined during the first half of the writing process. For example, the first and last chapters soon split into several, smaller chapters and one chapter vanished.

Writing had to fit into a busy life. I could not devote much time to it, so I needed my plan to prevent wasting evenings unpicking patterns woven into the fabric of my story at the wrong point. I could travel faster, and with more confidence, if I knew where I was going. I could write small sections travelling on the train knowing where they would fit.

I have never been afraid to rewrite a section or even a whole chapter. The word processor can make us lazy as we attempt to recycle words from another context. Rewriting is often easier than trying to fiddle about with the existing words to make them read well.

If you are hoping to make your way as a writer, you have to let other people read what you write. I did this at an early stage so I could absorb the outside perspectives into my writing. That is what writing groups are for.

I was told my story jumped from intimate narrative to the cool retelling of history. It was true. The solution was not obvious until I stumbled upon the letters that General Erwin Rommel wrote to his wife throughout his campaigns. Because he was an actor in nearly all the key events of my story, their regular correspondence provided the historic perspective. It took an outsider to spot the awkward transition.

I won’t pretend I liked the criticism but the result is better for my readers’ critical input. You can protect your fragile morale with any number of excuses. Writers need readers, so some compromises may be necessary to make the work accessible. It is much better to find the faults before your work is published.

Holding a copy of your book and learning how to promote it are experiences every writer needs. New technology means that I don’t have to dedicate a room to store unsold copies of the book paid for with a top-up mortgage.

With print on demand, small batches of books can be ordered when I need them and the costs of publishing are not excessive. The technology has been harnessed by firms like WritersServices to deliver books to order through bookshops and online sellers such as Amazon.

The Internet also makes it easier to sell books into specialist markets but the reality is that my book is probably going to have only local and specialist appeal. I never expected to make a living from this biography. But the BBC want to make a little film about it, so who knows?

The writing lessons I have learned are numerous. The pleasure of seeing my book in print was wonderful. The emails from readers are a great boost to the morale and the first reviews have been excellent. It all helps when marketing the book but that is another story. So now I am moving on to write about the grandsons of Lady Godiva at the Battle of Fulford.

Chas Jones published his book Ordinary Heroes through WritersPrintShop, WritersServices’ service for self-publishing authors.

You can buy the book online at www.ordinaryheroes.info.

www.battleoffulford.org.uk is his site for the newly discovered Battle of Fulford, which will be the subject of his next book, and explains his reference to the grandsons of Lady Godiva.

© Chas Jones 2005

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