Learning to Write My Story

When I began writing Learning to Lean Back in 2016, I thought I was reasonably well prepared.

I had an extraordinary collection of material accumulated over decades: thousands of photographs, hundreds of letters, handwritten notes, diaries, research records and files relating to the people, places and projects that had occupied my younger life. There were copies of speeches I had delivered to Rotary clubs in Brisbane, letters seeking financial assistance to travel to Jersey, and correspondence with people whose work I had admired.

I had been meticulous about keeping information, although considerably less disciplined about organising it. Much of it had survived in folders, boxes and files, sometimes in no particular order.

I am still not sure why I kept so much. Perhaps I had always imagined that one day I might write about those years. Or perhaps I simply found it difficult to discard anything associated with an experience I valued.

Whatever the reason, when I finally sat down to write, the material was there.

I also had a reasonable ability to put words together. Throughout my working life I had written reports, proposals, speeches and correspondence. I was accustomed to organising information and communicating ideas clearly.

I thought that would be enough.

It wasn't quite that simple.

I began by reconstructing events. Photographs, letters and diaries helped establish timelines, recover names and restore details that memory alone could no longer supply. An old letter sometimes reminded me of an encounter I had forgotten entirely. A photograph could bring back the atmosphere of a place, even when I could no longer recall the sequence of events surrounding it.

There were occasional surprises. Something I remembered happening on one visit might, according to the surviving records, have occurred on another. A person I thought I had met at a particular time appeared in correspondence written months earlier.

I learnt to treat memory with some caution.

At first, I wrote much as I remembered, following one experience into another. The manuscript gradually filled with childhood recollections, wildlife research, remote islands, travels through Europe and the Middle East, environmental campaigns and the years at Binna Burra.

There was certainly no shortage of material.

The difficulty was knowing what to do with it.

I had assumed that interesting experiences, carefully recorded, would eventually amount to an interesting book. But as the manuscript grew, I began to recognise the difference between preserving a record of events and telling a story that someone else might want to read.

I had accumulated the ingredients without quite understanding how to prepare the meal.

So I began learning about writing.

I read about memoir, autobiography, narrative structure and the ways writers transformed remembered experiences into coherent accounts. I became interested in techniques I had scarcely considered before, including in medias res, the practice of beginning in the middle of the action rather than leading the reader through everything that happened beforehand.

It was a simple idea, but it exposed one of my habits.

I tended to begin at the beginning.

If I was travelling somewhere, I wanted to explain why I was going, how the arrangements had been made, who was involved and what had happened along the way. Only then would I arrive at the experience I actually wanted to describe.

The reader, I slowly realised, might have been perfectly happy to arrive there several pages earlier.

I began to see how opening with a scene could draw someone into an experience, allowing the background to emerge as it became necessary. A chapter did not always need to begin with a journey, and an encounter did not require a lengthy introduction.

Of course, discovering a literary technique and knowing when to use it were entirely different matters.

I could hardly begin every chapter in the middle of something dramatic. Nor did I want the writing to feel contrived. These were experiences I had lived, not incidents invented to sustain a novel.

Finding the right balance took practice.

As I read more about memoir, I also encountered the familiar rules of writing.

Show, don't tell. Begin with a scene. Avoid too much exposition. Do not explain what the reader can already see. Finish the first draft before you begin editing it.

They were useful rules, particularly because they revealed habits I had not recognised in my own writing. But over time I also learnt that they were not laws.

"Show, don't tell" was a good example. A scene could bring an experience to life, but not every piece of background needed to be dramatised. Sometimes a few clear sentences of explanation were more effective than constructing another scene simply because the rule seemed to demand it.

The same was true of structure. I had launched into the memoir without anything resembling a fully developed plan. I followed memories, photographs and documents wherever they led, gradually discovering the shape of the book while I was writing it.

That probably broke another rule.

So did my habit of editing as I went.

Conventional advice often suggests completing a draft before becoming too concerned with revision. I rarely managed that. I would return to earlier chapters, tighten passages, restructure scenes and sometimes rewrite substantial sections while the rest of the manuscript was still taking shape.

Whether any of this ultimately mattered, I am not sure.

It may simply have been the way I needed to work. But I am fairly certain it made the process more difficult at times. Constantly moving between writing and editing could interrupt momentum. Discovering a new technique might send me back through chapters I thought I had finished. There were periods when I became so absorbed in questions of structure, voice and correctness that writing itself stopped being enjoyable.

At times, I developed what I suppose was writer's block. At others, I simply lost interest in the manuscript for a while.

Eventually I came to understand that rules were most useful once I understood why they existed. After that, they could be followed, adapted or occasionally ignored.

The important thing was not whether I had obeyed them.

It was whether the writing worked.

Understanding that did not remove the need to learn the craft. I still had to think about pacing, scene construction, character development, dialogue and the relationship between action and reflection. I examined how writers moved between events without explaining every connection, and how chapters could contribute to a larger narrative without losing their individuality.

The more I learnt, the more weaknesses I recognised in my own manuscript.

One of the most persistent was my tendency to overexplain.

My scientific training encouraged accuracy and detail. If I described a sea turtle nesting on a beach, I wanted the behaviour to be properly understood. If I wrote about a conservation issue, I wanted to establish its historical context. If I introduced someone whose work had influenced me, I wanted the reader to appreciate who that person was.

None of this was unreasonable. But taken together, the explanations could overwhelm the experience.

Having such an extensive archive probably made matters worse. An old letter might contain an interesting observation, a diary entry could supply a forgotten detail, and a research report might offer useful background. Because I had preserved the information, I was reluctant to leave it out.

I had to learn that something could be historically accurate, personally significant and completely unnecessary to the scene I was writing.

I also had an unfortunate habit of explaining what I had just described. I might spend several paragraphs reconstructing an encounter, then add another telling the reader what it meant, apparently concerned that the point might otherwise be missed.

It took me a surprisingly long time to recognise how often I did this.

Gradually, I began to understand that the reader had a part to play. A scene needed sufficient detail to be clear, but not so much explanation that there was nothing left to imagine or interpret.

The movement of an animal through darkness, the sand beneath my feet, or a few words exchanged in an unfamiliar place could sometimes convey more than several paragraphs of commentary.

Learning to trust the reader was perhaps one of the most difficult lessons.

I had spent much of my working life communicating information as clearly and completely as possible. Now I was discovering that effective storytelling sometimes depended on knowing when to stop explaining.

The question of narrative voice presented another challenge.

I knew how I wanted the memoir to sound, but initially found it difficult to describe. I wanted the writing to be clear, observational and reasonably restrained. I wanted the landscapes, animals and people to appear as I remembered them, without unnecessary embellishment.

I didn't want to make myself seem more adventurous, courageous or perceptive than I had been.

The difficulty became particularly apparent when I began using artificial intelligence to assist with the editing of the manuscript.

At first, the possibilities were appealing. I could submit a chapter for structural analysis, ask for an assessment of pacing, or explore whether a passage might work better in another position. The technology could identify repetition, compare sections and offer suggestions that might otherwise have taken considerable time to develop.

Some of this was genuinely useful.

But I soon discovered that a polished revision was not necessarily an improvement.

A passage I had written simply could return decorated with metaphors I would never have used. A quiet observation acquired a significance I hadn't intended. A moment of uncertainty became an inspiring lesson in courage.

The sentences were often fluent, occasionally elegant, but they didn't sound like me.

I found myself removing much of what had been added, sometimes spending longer restoring the original tone than I would have spent revising the passage myself.

There was a certain absurdity in using a sophisticated writing tool and then having to explain, repeatedly, that I wanted less sophisticated writing.

Eventually I began developing guides to my own narrative voice. I wrote down what I wanted the prose to do and, perhaps more importantly, what I wanted it to avoid.

I emphasised observation, accuracy and restraint. I wanted emotion to emerge from what happened rather than from declarations about how profoundly I had been affected. I wanted the natural world to remain real, not become a decorative setting for personal revelation.

I also wanted the younger version of myself to retain his uncertainty and occasional lack of judgement, rather than acquiring the wisdom of the older man writing the account.

It was a rather elaborate exercise in learning how to write like myself.

Nevertheless, it helped.

I became better at recognising when a passage sounded artificial, when an explanation interrupted a scene, or when a conclusion told the reader something that had already been made clear.

I also learnt to regard the manuscript analyses with some caution.

They could identify genuine weaknesses, but they sometimes imposed interpretations that were tidier than the experiences themselves. There was a tendency to discover lessons, turning points and resolutions where I remembered none.

I had to distinguish between useful editorial advice and suggestions that would change the nature of the story.

The longer I worked, the more I realised that improving the manuscript did not always mean adding something. Often it meant removing an explanation, shortening a transition or allowing a scene to end without commentary.

By then, however, the manuscript had grown to approximately 125,000 words.

Some chapters contained lengthy introductions. Others included historical background that might have been useful in a research report but sat awkwardly within a personal narrative.

There were passages I liked simply because I had enjoyed writing them.

I began cutting.

One of the rules I had encountered was to cut ruthlessly — remove what did not earn its place.

Understanding the rule was easy enough. Following it was not.

Letting go of so much of the story did not come easily. I had spent years reconstructing events, checking dates, finding correspondence and recovering details I did not want to lose. Some passages mattered to me simply because the experiences mattered.

Descriptions were shortened, explanations removed and incidents reconsidered. Some chapters became more focused, but others remained awkward despite the reductions. I would remove several paragraphs, reread the chapter, and realise that the problem lay in its construction rather than its length.

Gradually, I accepted that editing alone would not be enough.

I had to rewrite much of the book.

This was probably the most demanding part of the entire process.

Some chapters needed to begin in different places. Others required substantial reorganisation. Scenes buried beneath background information had to be brought forward, while explanations that once seemed essential were moved, condensed or discarded.

Occasionally, a passage that had occupied several pages could be reduced to a few sentences without losing anything important. At other times, an incident originally mentioned almost in passing deserved to become a scene of its own.

There were times when I wondered whether I was improving the manuscript or simply dismantling years of work.

Eventually, however, I recognised something important.

The research did not disappear simply because it was no longer in the manuscript.

The letters, photographs, diaries and records remained. Their value did not depend upon every detail appearing in the finished book.

I could preserve an experience without necessarily including it in the memoir. Some passages might become separate stories. Others could remain part of my personal archive, available to my family or to anyone interested in the history of the places and people involved.

Not everything had to fit within the same narrative.

The manuscript eventually came down from approximately 125,000 words to 56,000.

More than half of what I had written was gone, and much of what remained had been substantially rewritten.

The numbers are striking, although they don't quite convey what the process involved. I wasn't simply making a long manuscript shorter. I was learning to distinguish between the information I wanted to preserve and the experiences I needed to convey.

I had to acknowledge that some passages were repetitive, that certain chapters lacked direction, and that an interesting incident did not necessarily deserve several pages simply because it had happened to me.

I became more willing to question my original decisions.

Looking back, I can better understand why the writing took almost ten years. I began without fully appreciating the demands of memoir writing, and much of what I learnt came through recognising weaknesses in work I had already completed.

Each new understanding sent me back to earlier chapters. A change in one section sometimes required adjustments elsewhere. An improvement in structure could expose problems with pacing, while shortening an explanation might reveal that a scene needed more detail.

It was seldom a straightforward progression.

I had been learning to write the memoir while writing it.

The people who appeared in the book required particular care. I wanted to acknowledge those who had influenced me without exaggerating their roles or suggesting that every encounter had altered the course of my life.

Some relationships were important despite being brief. Others developed gradually, through shared work or experience. I tried to portray people as I remembered them, allowing their personalities to emerge through what happened between us.

I was equally conscious of the need to be fair to my younger self without protecting him from criticism.

There were occasions when I had been awkward, uncertain, overconfident or simply wrong. Looking back, I could recognise mistakes I had not understood at the time. But I did not want to rewrite the past by making myself wiser than I had been.

These questions were not always easy to resolve. Memory is selective, and written records rarely capture the full complexity of a relationship or an encounter.

I could only work with what I remembered, what I could establish from the surviving evidence, and what seemed fair to the people involved.

By early 2026, I had accumulated an extraordinary collection of manuscript analyses, writing guides, structural assessments and revised chapters. Added to the original letters, photographs and research, the files generated by the writing process had become an archive of their own.

Some documents contradicted others. Advice that had seemed useful at one stage became irrelevant after subsequent revisions. I could spend hours considering a suggested change, only to decide that the original passage worked better.

I began to suspect that another analysis might reveal less about the manuscript than about my reluctance to declare it finished.

Even when I was satisfied with a chapter, I could usually find a sentence that might be tightened or a transition that could be improved.

But correcting every imperfection did not necessarily make the writing better.

At some point, I had to learn when to leave something alone.

The final revisions became less concerned with literary techniques and more concerned with fairly simple questions. Did the scene feel as I remembered it? Could the reader understand where I was and what was happening? Was the information necessary? Had I said enough, or too much?

I could answer these questions more confidently than I had when I began.

Eventually, the manuscript passed into editing, design and production.

The concerns became smaller and more practical. A photograph needed repositioning. A chapter title required correction. A sentence had survived that should have been removed. Fonts, page layouts, proofs and cover details demanded attention.

After years spent considering the structure and meaning of the story, I found myself discussing the size of a motif on the spine.

There was something reassuring about that.

The book was becoming a physical object, with pages and dimensions, rather than a manuscript that could be endlessly rearranged.

Now, with publication approaching, I have begun sorting through the folders accumulated during the writing process.

There are really two collections.

The first contains the letters, diaries, photographs and records I preserved during my younger life, often without knowing why. The second documents almost ten years spent trying to turn those experiences into a memoir.

The first helped me reconstruct what happened. The second records my attempts to learn how to tell it.

I am glad I kept the original material. Without it, much of the detail that gives the memoir its substance would have been lost or left to uncertain memory.

As for the writing guides, structural analyses and dozens of intermediate drafts, I suspect I can now discard much of them. They served their purpose, even when their advice was eventually rejected.

There is a certain irony in spending so long learning how to write more simply.

I began with an abundance of material and an assumption that careful description would be enough. I ended by removing more than half the manuscript, rewriting much of what remained, and learning that a reader did not need every fact, explanation or reflection I could provide.

I had wanted to record a decade of experiences. It took almost another decade to learn how to shape them into a book.

Yet, with publication now only weeks away, I am still uncertain whether I have succeeded.

Soon, I expect to hold a printed copy of Learning to Lean Back in my hands. It is something I have imagined for years. But even now, after all the research, writing and rewriting, I cannot say with confidence that I have written a good memoir.

I know the care I have taken with the memories, the people and the places. But that does not guarantee that someone else will find the story engaging.

I still wonder whether readers will become absorbed in those places and experiences, whether they will find the people interesting, and whether I have explained too much, or perhaps not enough.

I suspect I could spend another year examining these questions without being any closer to answering them.

The manuscript has found its final shape. The proofs have been checked, the cover approved, and the process of publication is moving forward. There are still practical matters to resolve, but the writing itself has reached the point where I can do little more to it.

Perhaps that is where the work ends. Not with certainty that I have written something worthwhile, but with the recognition that I have taken it as far as I can.

The rest belongs to the reader.