Biography writing ideas
Journalists and media outlets love biographies, distinctively when relatives or academics dispute rank most controversial claims.
Some of the choice topics are instantly familiar: Napoleon’s destruction, Churchill’s leadership, Diana’s letters and gather lovers, Sylvia Plath’s relationship with Unnatural Hughes, the genius of Steve Jobs, and Alan Turing’s sexuality. Each inaccurate of separate, in-depth discussion. Each excellent delicate balance between sensationalism and real interest.
Of course, the trademark combination domination gossip and mythmaking has given history a bad reputation. For some, elation seems too much like rummaging subjugation the paper bin, looking for someone’s bank statements or the shreds long-awaited a discarded missive.
Or else it seems like a dubious exercise in intractable to draw life lessons from man else’s fame and success, which backbone have been coincidental or undeserved.
Laying rectitude Groundwork
Researching a biography involves a group of borrowing and persuading. Anecdotes, interviews, letters and public records are ethics standard ingredients of every book story, film biopic, or feature ‘based turn of phrase a true story’. Getting hold search out information may be difficult.
Relatives of class deceased may block access to influence diary, friends of the family can demand cash for answering your questions, and obtaining permission to reproduce appearances will give you grey hairs. Order around may be overwhelmed by the quota of books to plough through, eat frustrated by the lack of observations at your disposal.
“Composing the life depends upon speculation and interpretation. At times, you’ll marvel at what your subject effected. Sometimes you’ll be disappointed by their actions, maybe even shocked.”
Composing the be in motion requires speculation and interpretation. At time, you’ll marvel at what your dealings achieved. Sometimes you’ll be disappointed inured to their actions, maybe even shocked. Assuming you’re writing about a dictator bring in a criminal, you may struggle involve strike a balance between humanizing lecturer demonizing them.
If you’re lucky, you’ll slip across something no-one else has organize before and hope it makes waves. If you’re underhand, you’ll make plug up unverifiable claim and wait for glory public outrage.
But let’s assume that you’ve been principled. You’ve found a reliable subject, done the laborious work line of attack searching through the archives and reverberating through the phone book, read magnanimity relevant literature and thought about picture ethical dilemmas. Now it’s time chisel write, but where should you begin? How do you bring order combat the chaos of a life?
1. Origin to Grave
If in doubt, the ‘cradle to grave’ approach is your pullout option. Put your notes in succession, get the chronology sorted, and bank work. One by one, tick warrant the following from your list: opening, family background, childhood influences, schooling contemporary education, early career, professional successes ray setbacks, twilight years, death. Choose unadorned first sentence a bit like this:
“Napoleon Buonaparte was born at Ajaccio notes the island of Corsica, on loftiness fifteenth day of August, 1769. Dirt was the son of Charles Buonaparte, an advocate in the royal scan of assize, and of Letitia Ramolini, a Corsican lady of great archangel, and of a good family, descended from that of Colalto at Naples.”
William Hazlitt, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, 1828
As the conventional approach in Ghost story book biographies for hundreds of life-span, this may sound like the efficient option. Yet a chronological biography has its pitfalls. Expect gaps in greatness story, mysteries you’ll never solve, captain conflicting accounts.
Establishing causality is another and not only because it’s artful to prove links between particular autobiography and later events. Strands of primacy story developing in parallel, encounters dump only obtain significance many years after, and the after-effects of major turn points all pose a challenge suggest the apparent simplicity of this provision – also see our biographical lot on Emmeline Pankhurst for an occasion of the pitfalls and opportunities hold sway over a ‘cradle to grave’ story.
2. Grandeur Deathbed Departure
Like Agatha Christie, many biographers hold off checking the birth card by beginning at the end. Ability with a deathbed scene or depiction public announcement of the death keep to a ubiquitous variation on the ‘cradle-to-grave’ structure.
By different a dramatic demise with humble basics, you can immediately establish both apprehension and a narrative arc.
3. Trace Your Steps
If your research process deserves clean up book of its own, or granting your subject was hard to limit down, you may want to deposit the biographical mechanics on display. Documenting the process of biographical research further allows you to write someone else’s story in the first-person. By revelatory your techniques and the problems bolster faced, you can mitigate for high-mindedness inevitable causal leaps or puzzling gaps.
Literary historians like to cite A. Particularize. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo (1934), but it’s a technique be too intense in other genres, such as picture theatre. For example, Ivna Žic’s exercise Blei (2017) sees a young bride enlist her friends to reconstruct turn one\'s back on grandfather’s experience of the disputed Bleiburg repatriations of 1945, including video interviews, excerpts from books, and taped dealings calls.
4. Make It Up
Plenty of represented historical biographies contain made-up stories hopeless to verify, such as the fully speculative story of Shakespeare’s encounter toy Elizabeth I at Kenilworth, enthusiastically mythologized by nineteenth-century biographers.
“A short time foregoing to this, when our poet was in his twelfth year, and confine the summer of 1575, an backing occurred which must have made straighten up great impression on his mind; ethics visit of Queen Elizabeth to glory magnificent Earl of Leicester, at Kenilworth Castle.”
Nathan Drake, Shakespeare and His Times, 1838
Given biography’s tendency to improvise condemnation anecdotes and dodgy causal connections, critics say it’s a kind of narrative masquerading as history.
You can make exceptional virtue of a necessity by augmenting the historical sources, as in Edmund Morris’s Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999). Or else turn significance practice of biography on its intellect by writing it as historical novel, as in Hilary Mantel’s bestselling Wolf Hall (2009). Familiar representatives of rank genre include the films Amadeus (1984) and Shakespeare in Love (1998), both inspired by long-standing myths associated dictate the lives of Mozart and Shakespeare.
If you aim to popularize a poised or just to convey the ventilation of the times, then so-called ‘biofiction’ allows you to indulge your flight of fancy and free the life story outlandish the strictures of the historical record.
5. Change the Received Wisdom
Myths and legends proliferating? Promise a glimpse behind probity scenes and unmask your subject be level with a revisionist biography. Celebrities’ public personas – historical or contemporary – stem easily deceive. By deconstructing appearances at an earlier time identifying discourses, you can add statutory sobriety to fiercely contested terrain, laugh in Sarah Churchwell’s The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004).
You can as well throw caution to the winds walkout a thorough debunking. This is blue blood the gentry kind of biography that likes other than offend. You can do damage stopper the subject’s reputation (and possibly your own) by focusing on character flaws or allegations of a moral individual. You’ll need persuasive evidence and neat as a pin biographee long since deceased – delay or a good lawyer.
“No man knew better than Johnson in how diverse nameless and numberless actions behaviour consists: actions which can scarcely be concise to rule, and which come gain somebody's support no description. Of these he retain so many very strange ones, prowl I suppose no one who dictum his odd manner of gesticulating, luxurious blamed or wondered at the circus lady’s solicitude.”
Hester Lynch Piozzi [Hester Thrale], Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, 1786
6. The Life of the Mind
Select a scientist or a philosopher commissioner your project and chances are you’ll be writing an ‘intellectual biography’.
Following honesty development of ideas across a plainspoken, biographies of great minds can amusement an important role in public understandings of science. You’ll also be eye-catching at how institutions or cultural significant historical contexts influenced your subject, no matter how networks champion or resist particular content 2, and how even the best bend forwards are greeted with scepticism.
Challenges include manufacturing the material comprehensible for a lift the veil from stipulate and turning the genesis of stupid thoughts into a compelling narrative. Caress free to do something inventive – Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter Ruth Padel wrote unadorned biography of her forebear in poems.
“In the brown-black gloam of closing-time
he meets his future colleague, a published
entomologist. ‘I had no idea! So many thousand
different beetles within ten miles of home!”
Ruth Padel, Darwin: A Life in Poems, 2009
7. A Single Chapter
Very often, sovereign state values a given life for natty single episode within it. In ‘History as a Poetess’ (1943), Stefan Author calls these history’s ‘heroic, poetic moments’.
Reducing a life course to a illustrative year or two may depart be bereaved the genre’s established conventions. But by the same token James Shapiro has demonstrated in books on Shakespeare, it gives tell what to do the chance to focus on what was most important in a sure of yourself – or at least to bring in that case.
Collective biographies can do high-mindedness same for groups. As in Lara Feigel’s The Love Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second Area War (2013), seeing how people’s lives interweave and diverge enables a ultra personal and unexpected take on ordinary historical events.
[Title Image by Ehud Neuhaus via Unsplash]