WRITING LIVES (PART ONE)

Two of the most popular genres in books

are biographies and autobiographies.

Delving deeply into a famous person’s life and finding out information which fleshes out the events and involvements, is fascinating.

Even if the person about whom you want to write isn’t world-famous, but yourself or a worthy relative or friend who’s lived a full and expansive life and has been part of the history of the times, it’s well worth recording. The end result, whether it’s a portfolio of typed pages and photographs in a folder, or created into a real book, can become a vital and enduring heirloom.

Most writers of biographies or autobiographies approach the subject in a strictly linear fashion - a chronology of lifetime events.

They start with the story of the birth, the infancy and childhood, the school and then college education, and then travel the straight road along the career path, or the marriage or the work for social or charity organizations.

you may have been a beautiful baby, but will a reader other than your parents be interested in these years of your life?

Well, that’s certainly one way of doing it. But what if the reader doesn’t know the subject personally and isn’t a family member or close friend? Do you really think that a reader of a person’s life will want to know details about childhood or days at school?

Realising that life histories have to be written novelistically, recent biographers have approached the structure of writing about the life of a subject in a very different way.

I, personally, have done this in the last four books I’ve ghostwritten for famous politicians and business people.

The difference is that before I begin writing about a person’s life, I sit them down over a cup of coffee, and I ask them “What was the one pivotal, crucial, life-changing thing which happened to you? What was the event in your life, the meeting or discovery or event you witnessed, which set you on the path of what you’ve become today?”

It often takes them a few moments of reflection, but then the answer flows…..

”It was when I met an elderly woman who told me…..”

Or…….

“I was at University when a guest lecturer explained how he…..”

It’s that moment of insight, or sudden and glorious epiphany, which will enable you, the writer, to structure the rest of the book. Even if the event happened when you or your subject were in their mid-life, that’s where the book should begin.

Then, when you’ve recreated that epiphany in dramatic words (which will hold your readers spellbound), you can work backwards to what led up to the meeting…….maybe even starting from school and education or early working history. Or you use it as the springboard for the rest of the book, and you can come back to early childhood and education when a suitable event arises.

OK, but what do you do about your own, or your subject’s birth and early years? Well, if they’re truly important, you could introduce them in Chapter 6 when you talk about ‘Earliest Influences”….or just casually mention them, because except for immediate relatives, nobody’s going to be interested in those details, other than passing references to what type of a childhood it was.

So from the pivotal moment in a subject’s life which made everything change, you can then work backwards and forwards, unconstrained by time and place.

Even the most painstakingly accurate biography and autobiography can be written in a novelistic style, full of drama and intrigue, without diluting the facts or forsaking reality for the sake of a story. But at its most essential, a biography has got to be readable, and not written like some boring history book from the 1930’s.

And there’s another thing which will give a deeper perspective to the biographical details. Place the subject…..yourself or a family member or possibly a commissioned work…..into the history of the times. Say, for example, the subject was born in the 1940’s. It’s quite permissible to write about what was happening in politics or the Second World War. This material can simply be gained from reference libraries, or general reading in Wikipedia or Google. Of course, you can’t just copy and paste without attribution, but best to use it as reference and write it in your own words.