WRITING LIVES (PART TWO)

Writing about lives is one of the most popular genres in book sales today.

SOME time ago, I wrote a blog about writing a life story, either your own, a family member, or that of somebody who commissioned you. Many readers have written to ask me to expand on the different ways of doing this.

As I wrote in the earlier blog, one of the most popular genres in High Street and online bookshops are stories about real people and their lives. Biographies and autobiographies are fascinating to read, as they explain so much we didn’t know about the background of people who so much a are part of our lives, like sports stars, politicians and actors.

Other people’s lives are transfixing, whether they’re about the stories of the famous or your family’s history. Maybe you’ve lived through personal challenges, and your way of dealing with them will benefit others; perhaps you’ve lived through some amazing times, and you feel your life will hold sufficient interest for others to want to read; or perhaps you just want to record the life of a near and beloved relative, just for members of the family.

Terrific! But if you’re writing a 5,000 word mini-life, or a detailed 100,000 word biography, there are some basic guidelines which, if followed, will make the work vastly more readable.

WHERE TO BEGIN?

It’s pretty obvious that the usual place to begin a biography is at the birth of the subject….the hospital, the home, the parentage, the family, the nurturing….and then go on to childhood, days at school, university etc.

No matter how interesting it may be to your subject, why would anyone be interested in reading about their antics in a nursery?

I’ve written half a dozen well-published and widely-read autobiographies (yes, I was the ghost-writer) of famous people, but not one began when the subject wore diapers. Instead, I sat with the subject and spent a couple of hours expanding on two simple questions I asked at the outset. “What was the single most important thing which ever happened in your life? What was the one thing you remember which turned your life around, and started you on this trajectory?”

The answer usually came back, “When I met my wife” or “When I opened up my first business” or “Winning the most important race in which I’ve ever competed.”

But when you begin to ask for the reasons that this was the most important event in their life, and drill down into both the circumstances, and what led up to them, something else usually emerges. That so-called single event had a precursor. It didn’t arise out of nowhere. It was caused because the subject was ready to receive it.

But what caused it? As you drill down, other things will suddenly occur. Your subject may say, “it was when I risked my last $100 to buy a second hand computer, which gave me an idea for…..” or “Even though my dad had trained me since school, I realised that I needed a more professional athletics trainer….”

Now you have a place to start your story..…even if the event happened when the subject was in their mid-life, because once the epiphany has been recorded and written and is the introduction to the book, then you can work backwards and forwards in their timescale, as the story takes you. It won’t be confusing to a reader, as a story doesn’t have to be chronological to be understood.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED?

You’re writing about events in a subject’s life which happened in, say, the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s or perhaps even earlier. That was a long time ago, which means that for most readers, these aren’t lived events, but the subject matter of history books or Hollywood movies. So you have to create a landscape against which your subject’s life is painted. It doesn’t have to be a detailed landscape, but readers have to know what was happening locally, nationally and internationally for the events in your subject’s life to make sense. So what else was happening at the time in which the subject was born…..went to school…..university……started work? What was happening in the person’s city? Country? In the world?

What else was happening in the world?

Say you’re writing about an elderly subject who was born in the 1930’s. The world was about to explode into the Second World War when your subject was in nappies; but if you write about the wider world beyond your subject’s home and environment, then it puts things into both a local, national and international perspective. Readers can relate to events in a person’s home, if they see that family witin the context of history. This means that you can write about the tension in the newspapers, the meetings between world leaders, even when i has nothing to do with your subject……not in detail, but perhaps like this….

“…..as Jeffrey was entering Year 3 of Smithville Primary School, on the other side of the world, other young boys and girls were starting their education. Nobody realised, though, how devastating the next decade would become because of the unresolved hatreds in Central Europe. Germany’s dictator Adolf Hitler was secretly preparing his forces to invade Poland, which would be the spark igniting the Second World War. Local officials in Smithville, however, were more concerned about crowd behaviour at the baseball match as police had already arrested four people for abusive behaviour.”

How can you find out what happened in those years? Simple Google searches will give you some detail, and if you follow the links, you’ll find sufficient information through the Internet to be able to write background which will enhance what you’re writing. In this way, the life of your subject will be lived out in your book through real events, real people and real places. You don’t have to go into detail…..just give the subject’s life a context.

WRITE THE LIFE STORY AS YOU WOULD A NOVEL

Write a life story as though you were writing a novel

And finally, when readers come to a book about a person’s life, they want to be involved, absorbed, and excited by the narrative. Just because you’re writing about a person’s life, it doesn’t mean that your style has to be totally serious or sententious; nor that you need to devote page after page to the boring parts of a person’s life. Nor does it mean that you have to be totally factual. On the one hand, you’re writing the true details of a person’s life; but on the other, you’re writing a book which you want to interest and excite readers about that life.

So if, in 1955 your subject’s parents bought their first car, and you don’t know which make or model, then you could frame that incident in one of two ways.

Either….”….and so they purchased a new car, which they used on weekends to go for family picnics….”

or better….

…..”….and so the whole family travelled to the showroom, where a sleek two litre black Jaguar Mark IV, which they immediately dubbed ‘The Beast’, caught their hearts. From now on, the family would spend every weekend exploring the countryside beyond the town in which they lived….”

Accuracy is important, but so is the entertainment value of what you’re writing. Otherwise, you could reduce your subject’s life to a series of dot points. So think of yourself not as a chronicler, nor an historian, nor as a journalist….but as a novelist. Without making up important stuff, write the life as an adventure, with all the nuances of a fiction writer, except you’re telling the truth about a person. These days, biographers are changing the way they write about subject’s lives. Some are even making up conversations between dead people, which could….should….maybe even did….happen. Who knows?

I once submitted a chapter I’d written to a very well-known businessman. It detailed his life before joining the company in which he later rose and became Chairman. I’d taken a few minor liberties, and had him participating as a member of an audience in a famous incident in his city. He never told me whether or not he’d been in the audience, but it put that time of his life into an interesting perspective.

He read it, smiled, looked at me and said, “You know, I remember that moment as if it were yesterday.”

I admitted I’d created his participation, and he shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Well, it’s the sort of thing I would have done.”

Which says it all.