Rachel's Round-up

Four years ago I announced to the world I was going to write a memoir about my late father. Why? Was the question I was asked (by those who didn’t know my father).

Well, let me begin. My father was a larger-than-life character, who inspired me, and many others, in multiple areas of our lives. When he died, albeit before his time due to a lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude that I had had this man as my father.

Working as I do in the field of organisation development/learning and development, I have long been involved with management and leadership development. I have designed, delivered, commissioned and outsourced many programmes over the years, and continue to do so. I am well familiar with the plethora of management theories, platitudes and gurus that abound. But if you stop and ask me, who was the most influential leader in my life, it was, short and simple, my father, Alan Carter.

With his passing I felt I wanted to capture many of the lessons I had learnt from him. Throughout my life, watching his example, I took silent notes. And these are the tenets I live my life by now. I was at a loss, however, how to capture all these small instances of learning, how to present them to the world, and for whom.

I wrestled with these thoughts until one day, my husband simply said, why don’t you write a biography? My first reaction was, don’t be ridiculous. How could I possibly do that? At the time I was writing blogs and found it no problem at all to rattle off a couple of pages, with a good story as an opener, a few key points of insight and learning, and a conclusion. I had the whole process down pat. But how to capture someone’s whole life – someone who packed as much in as my father? No clue. I literally had no idea how to begin, other than an overwhelming sense that this certainly would be a most fitting legacy to my father, and that I should try.

So I began. I googled ‘how to write a memoir’ and ‘how to write a biography’ and found not much. I wasn’t even sure which I was writing. So I decided not to worry about someone else’s blue-print, and just to start. At the beginning.

The beginning of someone’s life is easy. You can start with their birth and childhood. You can delve into who their parents were and how they helped to form their character. All this I did. What I found though is it is easy to disappear down rabbit holes. I was reading fantastic accounts we have in our family. We have letters and correspondence from my father’s grandparents. These were fascinating, but ultimately, they were a story for another day, and I had to leave these out of the book. So there-in lies my first learning:

Be clear on the story you are trying to tell.

My second learning was around organisation. I had so much information: diaries, letters, blogs, I was drowning. I needed a way to capture what information I had and where it would be useful. I had a few systems I used, spreadsheets, folder systems, and time-lines. These could have been better, but they were good enough.

Start with a system to order your information.

My third learning was around research. I had lots of information, but there were still gaps. How I wished I’d paid more attention when my father had talked about his career over the years for instance! I drew up a list of his friends and ex-colleagues that I wanted to speak to. At the early stages I was hesitant to contact people, seemingly out of the blue, to talk about someone that had died some years before, when their connection may have been decades earlier. I wish I’d bitten the bullet earlier on that one. This one was around self-belief, and me doubting in the fact that there actually would be a book at the end and that people would be happy to contribute. As it turns out, everyone I managed to get hold of was delighted to contribute, and the conversations I had were valuable for the book and meaningful for me in many ways.

Plug your information gaps early.

My fourth learning was from others. Once I’d gone as far as I could with researching and writing, I had the task of organizing my words into some semblance of order, so it worked as a cohesive whole with a narrative, rather than a collection of stories and incidents. I was stuck on how to do this, and at this point reached out to a book coach. All my questions on ‘how should I…’ I could now ask. This got me through the ‘hard’ middle section of the process, ordering what I’d done and creating a structure, which is the biggest challenge when you have a whole life story to cover.

Get expert guidance when you need it

My fifth and most critical learning, however, was around self-belief. The whole process, from start to finish, took four years. There were months in that time where I did nothing to push the project forward, either due to other distractions in life (think pandemic), or because I was stuck, or didn’t have the self-belief to push myself forward. In the end, it took a little (or actually big) miracle to set me straight. Call it what you will, but to me a divine intervention showed me that I HAD to finish the book. Literally from that moment on, I did what I hadn’t been able to do before and focused in on pulling everything together into my first draft. I found I had written plenty, it just needed arranging, a few gaps to fill, and adding in the extra material that came my way, gave me the rounded book I was searching for.

Believing makes all the difference.

So what advice would I give to anyone else wanting to start a similar project?

Believe you can do it.

Rachel’s first book ‘My Father, Alan Carter’ is now in print. You can get a copy here: https://cartapublishing.com/