The Author’s Art – How it’s done – Donald Hedges. (Copyright)
Putting
together an autobiography.
There are many ways of putting together an
autobiography; one can either zone in on particular stories, or highlights of
one’s life or one can culture selected or edited highlights. Which one would
you choose?
Depending on memories, I would tend to go the
route of remembering from the earliest times. It sounds more authentic. The
alternative is to get edited highlights or particular stories which may seem
authentic, or they may not.
It’s like saying, I sprang fully formed from my
mother’s womb and now I am 26 and I remember this, or that. Yes but the
question is what were the particular circumstances which led you to the
position that you remember this or that. This is where background comes into
it.
One must in fact show that one did not spring
fully formed into any one situation. For example in my first book “In the role
of boy” I did not spring as a mature adult into the situation of going to New
York. There would have been qualifications to get first and an employer to find
before I could have found that money to get the air ticket to New York.
The reader must therefore be allowed to ask
“How?” How did he become a tax senior, in my case? If you just tell the tale of
how you were a tax senior, you are essentially missing the point.
This means that one has to create a background,
which I hope I have done in the book that I am describing; my background was
that I was a tax officer in London and was with the Revenue for four years in
my 30’s. Before going to university to do a BA(Hons) Accounting degree which I
passed.
Having done that degree, I then did one or two
tax assignments before I went to RP in Winchester, one was for a firm called
SMS in Southampton, the other for a firm called MC in London, E3. I was
therefore confident in processing self- assessment cases in bulk and with
accuracy. In April 1999 I therefore took this job on with RP and earned £10.00
an hour with it which was extremely good money. It took only one’s week’s work
in June 1999 to be able to buy an air ticket.
That’s part of the formation of how I got my
holiday. But it is not the whole formation. The back story that one might
enquire into is how I got to be a tax senior in the first place and how I got
into the Inland Revenue. Also, how it was that I came to have a certain amount
of accounting knowledge.
I got into Accounting because I was in charge of
a railway booking office in Oxshott; that place is in Surrey. I was originally
in Hampton Court for three months but the awkwardness of the chief clerk there
and the fact that he kept upsetting me was pressing on the Area Manager and he
moved me.
I therefore got to do all the accounting records
at this station; they were not especially complex but they had to be right
because they involved large amounts of cash. I taught myself most of it and
learned how to do it properly and carefully.
Somehow I was good at it and my balances were
99% spot on right. I resolved to go to college after I left British Rail so
that I could get educational qualifications to add to the mix. I attended
Brooklands Technical College and got an RSA Book-keeping qualification and RSA
Communications certificate in the final examinations.
I got into the Inland Revenue because I had at
least two Ordinary Levels and later I admitted to having five O Levels so they
promoted me to Tax Officer. Later on I did specialist work with Repayments and
I did some Institute of Taxation study.
At that stage I was 36; I spent the next 5 years
trying to get into college/university and in 1992 was accepted. This point I
really regard as the part of a life-changing situation. I had moved away from
London and had embarked upon a BA(Hons) Accounting degree at Southampton
Institute.
Those five years before going on to the degree
course involved getting most of an AAT qualification (1986-1987). I had a
significant amount of challenge trying to convince the Prof in charge of
Accounting at Southampton Institute that I would be a suitable candidate but he
did give in at the end of the interview and allow me to do the course.
The point is that I could have only included in
the book about my degree but then people would want to know how I got there; in
every autobiography there has to be a causal link between one event and the
other. Otherwise it becomes a bit of nonsense.
A lot of the stuff that I did in London and the
jobs that I did led to my change of life circumstances. The case I make is I
had embarked upon a distinct change of course in my life leading to my place at
Southampton Institute. That process started when I embarked upon learning
accounts at British Rail. I could see that this would be very useful in the
future.
As I said before, you have to show the causal
link between your occupations in an autobiography otherwise it just becomes a
series of disjointed stories.
If we go back even further than that, I had a
lot of administrative experience gained at school. You will have read that I
was secretary of the sixth form committee and editor of the House newsletter.
My mother had got me a typewriter at the age of 14 and I had learned to type on
it. My Dad got me another machine later. I used to type all my assignments for
school whereby most other pupils were still writing theirs.
After school I got a job with Inner London
Education Authority but before that I had copy typing jobs with many other
people, Knight Frank and Rutley, Paymaster General, etc. When I left ILEA I got
a copy typing and secretarial job with the Ministry of Works working for the
top brass in the building inspectorate.
I continued to do administrative work for
committees when I was at teacher training college and in the interval (summer
vacations) I got temp jobs at famous employers such as Granada Group Ltd where
I met Lord SB and other notables. I had a head for administrative work.
It was not such a question of getting lucky
breaks (full formation) but of building up skills when and where I could so
that I could get work. Eventually after years of work I got into something much
bigger, the attempt to get a degree.
There’s always someone who can’t stand the fact
that people are successful; I had plenty of that from my friends in Surbiton,
one or two I especially remember said that I would never get anywhere and they
carried on saying that despite the fact that I got nearer and nearer my goal.
They could not stand the fact that I was changing.
My university years, both with Southampton
Institute (1992-1995) and the Open University (2003-2012) gave me the
ammunition with which to write properly; you have to write properly if you are
doing academic writing, you really do not have any other choice.
When I was with the Institute I must have done
at least 22 assignments and at the Open University another 20. Academic writing
has to be right and it has to be properly sourced. I am glad to say that I got
really good marks in almost all my assignments with both universities.
That brings me up to the present day, how come I
wrote my autobiography? The answer that readily comes to mind is because all
down the years since I was 14 that is exactly the kind of thing that I was
training for all down the years. That and many memories of what I had been
doing since I was at secondary school and the making of connections between
events.
Tell your reader what the connections are; don’t
let them guess. It isn’t a surprise how you got to where you are today. Save
the surprises for the novels which you are going to write. The autobiography
should be a series of connected events. Mine is not always but there is a
pretty straight-forward line between then and now.
I hope your autobiography is successful and
please don’t forget to make the connections between things. Don’t spring fully
formed on to the page, otherwise the poor reader will be in a state of having
to suspend belief.
