How My Death Saved My Life

Now that's an interesting title, isn't it? Fortunately, it doesn't refer to me and my life - it's the title of an autobiography by the American speaker, author and visionary, Denise Linn.

I encountered Denise Linn through listening to broadcasts on the internet from Hay House Radio. Denise has a regular radio show which I really enjoy listening to on my podcasts and she's one of my favourite broadcasters, lovely and warm and empathic and full of joy.

I did know a little bit about her life as she'd talked on air about the incident which provided the title for her book. When she was younger she was shot by a sniper and suffered horrendous injuries as a result. The medics thought that she wouldn't survive the attack and had to fight to save her life.

What I knew nothing about was her extraorinary childhood in which she had to cope with a mother who was a paranoid schizophrenic. It makes riveting reading, hearing about her turbulent early years. It's a real miracle that someone who endured an upbringing like hers could manage to turn into someone so calm and cheerful, who could help and inspire so many other people.

If you like biographies, or if you are interested in spirituality, healing or mysticism, I heartily recommend this fascinating book.

Writing Your Life Story

So You Want to Write Your Life Story?

Have you had lots of interesting things happen in your life that you'd like to share? Do you want to hand on memories about your parents and your childhood to your own children and grandchildren? Do you want to share your life story with other people, even if it's only with your closest friends and relatives?

Wanting to tell one's life story is what motivates many people to begin writing. I've heard many hours of autobiographical writing over the last twenty or so years since I began to write and to go to writing classes and groups. It's been a fascinating experience.

The immediacy of the experience and the detail that the writer is able to include can really bring this sort of writing to life. If you're writing about your own life, then you obviously care about your subject and that shows. It makes it compelling.

Pitfalls of Writing Autobiographically

There are a few pitfalls that people can fall into though when writing about their own experiences. One of these is trying to stick rigidly to the truth. Things don't happen tidily in real life. In a story, what you want to hear are the main events that have a bearing on the plot in a way that grabs the reader and makes for good reading.

But in real life, there are often digressions, delays, complications. It's easy to become so hung up about sticking to the letter of the truth that the story gets lost in and amongst the morass of detail. Sometimes a writer will defend what they've written, by saying, 'But that's what happened!' That may be, but there's no point in telling it like that if you're going to lose your readers.

Another thing that happens in real life is that there are often more people involved than you would choose to include in a story. Too many characters, real or fictitious, can be confusing for the reader. This is a particular problem when a real life story is being dramatised for film or television. As one dramatist wrote, 'People always have too many sisters'.

A solution to this problem is to conflate a few characters into one - take some people who have minor roles in the story and combine their actions and functions in one character. Of course, how you square this with the cousins and aunties that you're leaving out is your problem!

But probably the biggest problem that affects the readability of autobiographical writing is that writers feel they need to start at the beginning and keep on going. But really, what you're trying to do is tell a story, so you need a hook for the start of your autobiography just as you would for the start of a novel.

Write to Make Your Readers Want to Read

That might mean you will have to start with one of the big moments in the story rather than with your birth - after all, everyone gets born. It's hardly a unique occurrence! In my biography of Cliff Richard, I began the story, not at his birth or even in his childhood but at the big Wembley concert to celebrate his thirty years in show business. It meant I could start the story at a high spot, then go back and trace how he came from his early life to his long and illustrious career in pop music.

So when you're writing about your life, tell it like it is. But don't forget that people have got to want to read it, so tell it like a story too.

Starting a blog yesterday may have been a surprise to me, but it was a pleasant one. I've enjoyed my Accidental Blog and have been looking forward to writing another post on it.

Between yesterday and now, I've been wondering if there is a formula for a successful blog. What would I tell my students if they asked me how to write one?

I suppose the form of writing that comes closest to it is an opinion piece in a newspaper, and the essence of that is for the writer to reveal their personality and views. In the tabloids, of course, it helps to be controversial, vitriolic even, and to make a name for yourself as a bitch. I don't think I'll be taking that line with this blog.

I don't claim to be whiter than white, but slagging people off and humiliating them in public isn't what turns me on. I'd rather my listeners logged off feeling a little bit better about life, a little bit more knowledgeable, a little more hopeful.

So why bother reading this blog? Well, I hope that by getting to know how I approach my life, my writing, and my teaching, you will get the chance to reflect on your own life - and maybe even to learn more about yourself by starting to write.

Everyone can do it. Everyone has something to say, even though you might not be able to think of anything off the top of your head. In fact, writing, like any creative activity, can be immensely therapeutic.

Over the past twenty years, I've sat in writers' groups where I've been enthralled by ordinary people's true stories of the most extreme experiences in their lives - how they've coped when members of their families have suffered serious illness, accidents, suicide attempts, even.

Several people I know have turned to writing to make sense of their lives when they were turned upside down by a traumatic divorce or relationship breakdown.

But the stories I've heard haven't been all gloom and doom. I still love to recall the true life tale of an elderly friend, now sadly dead, about how as a boy he used to play with children in a large Irish family. My friend was an only child, so compared with lots of children in the thirties, he was relatively well off, and always always got his meat and two veg.

The Irish family were poor in monetary terms, but happy and well cared for, and the kids were never short of someone to play with.

One evening, my friend had been playing out with them. It got to tea time and he joined them at the dinner table - they didn't have much, just a big pan of potatoes, but he thought this huge communal meal was better than a feast.

Then it got to bath-time and bed-time. That night, the father of the house was in charge of getting his brood ready. One by one, he dealt with his offspring, conveyor-belt fashion - ushering them into the bath, then packing them off to bed. To my friend's delight, he became part of the conveyor belt, and so he found himself being sent to bed with all his chums. The dad obviously didn't clock that there was one extra that night. Well, I did say it was rather a large brood!

There was my friend, happy as Larry, lying top to tail with all his chums, several to a bed, as poor children did in those days. He thought he'd gone to heaven! He'd have gladly stayed there all night if his mum hadn't come looking for him.

That was an example of what my students would call 'autobiographical writing'. But more than that, it's life writing. It's not just the 'who did what and when' that matters. It's the little details that make up our lives, that make us who we are - 'life writing' in the broadest sense.

And that's what makes learning to write different from learning any other subject. When you learn to write, you're not just finding out how to string words together in sentences. You're discovering yourself.

As I tell my students: 'You're the best person to write your story. It's uniquely yours.'

If you have a memory to share, why not write it here as a comment? It's quick and easy to do.