Three-and-a-half years after I started writing my autobiography, I am now starting to edit. A lot of people have helped me along the way, particularly my wife, Laurie, who can remember every detail of our life together. But a lot of people have asked me, “why?” I have been writing because there are a lot of things that my children don’t know anything about. The good, the bad and the ugly.
So where do you begin? Why not the day you were born? Now that I have most of the good and bad down on paper, I am starting to edit it. Some of the stuff I wrote about initially falls into the wastebasket because it is not interesting enough to keep in the finished version. I am very fortunate in that I have always been a pack rat and have tons of memorabilia from a career of traveling the world with my skis and camera for about five decades. That memorabilia of course triggers a lot of memories.
The first thing you do is buy five or six ink cartridges for your computer printer, then about 10 reams of paper.
The second thing you must do is write everything down that you can think of. I printed up about 100 pages with months of a given year down on the left-hand side of the page. Pick out any significant event in your life that you can remember the date of and put it in the page that has that number year at the top. For example, the first day you ever went skiing.
In my case, I had 88 pages with a different year at the top of each. I remembered the best day of windsurfing in my life when I windsurfed from Maui to Molokai with three good friends. Luckily, I wrote of many of these adventures years ago when writing one of my columns and I’ve saved all of those.
Then, what about my first day on skis in 1937 in a small patch of snow on the side of the road to Mount Waterman in Southern California? When I wrote that information, I had to write about other things that happened in my life at that same time, such as the Boy Scout trips to Yosemite, my long bicycle trips, and my first photography efforts.
Keep that three-ring binder where you can make notes in it. I also purchased a 50-cent, spiral-bound, small notebook and kept it handy with a ballpoint pen. Every time a memory slid across my brain, I wrote it down.
Have you ever lost a marriage through death or divorce? Your kids need to know what happened and when. The faults of these events falls somewhere, and when you write about them it gives you a new perspective. I have found that writing my bio has really helped me understand why I did some of the stupid things that I did in my life. It is easy to blame stupidity, but you will find that in many cases, as you write about them, you did them for selfish reasons. Writing your bio is similar to therapy. If you are honest with yourself, looking in the rear view mirror of your own life can be very rewarding.
I wrote about my very unsuccessful foray into the television world. I produced 30 ski shows for national television and it became such a financial disaster that I had to reduce my filmmaking company staff from 47 people to five and sell every piece of equipment, except two cameras and an editing bench. I averted bankruptcy, but it took me almost five years to pay off all of the debt. I cannot blame anyone but myself for letting it happen and in the long run it added to the problems that led to my divorce a few years later.
Otto Lang, who gave me my first job as a ski instructor, wrote his bio on a yellow legal pad with a ballpoint pen. He said, “There are a lot of things that happened in my life that my children don’t know about.” I started writing mine for my three children. Isn’t that enough?