Biography Writing

Outlining

Another key to writing a biography is to know how to collect the information that you are going to include. Generally, it is best to start with an outline so you will know what details are going to be included in the biography. Do you want to focus on a person's whole life, or do you want to focus on a significant or specific aspect of what that person has done?

Organizing

Biographies should generally be organized chronologically. Since a biography is a non-fictional account of a person's life, starting at the beginning of the life would probably provide details for the rest of the story.

Other ways to consider writing a biography, perhaps if you are more advanced in the field of biography writing, are:

• By topic. Focus on topics that affected the person's life and detail them one by one.
• Through interviews. Ask people what they thought of the individual and any stories that they would like to share. Tell the tale through a series of interviews.
• In media res. A literary term meaning "in the middle of things," stories written in the in media res style will begin in the middle of the tale, and then go backward, work forward to where the story began, and then progress to the end

The key to organizing a biography is to tell the story in a way that makes sense with the details of the person about whom the biography is written. Researching other biographies is an excellent way to get ideas of how to organize the biography that you want to write.

• Birth and Childhood - Providing details about the location where someone was raised and what time period that person was raised in are necessary to give your readers a historical context. For example, if you are writing about a black person living in the south during the Civil War or a Jewish individual in Germany during the Holocaust, your reader needs to know that to set a tone for the type of situation that the person was in.

• Adult Life - The majority of your biography is going to focus on the person's adult life when the significant events started to occur in the subject matter's life. Perhaps it was during college, courtship to a future spouse, or the birth of a first child. In any case, you want to open your first chapter on this person's adult life with some sort of notable event.

• Handling Death - If the subject of your story is deceased, you should mention that somewhere in the biography. If the person was of a particular religious background, you could incorporate those elements as well.

Determining how to divide up your chapters and what points you want the book to discuss will help you determine what information you need to gather. For example, if you plan to write a biography only on someone's service in a war, then you wouldn't necessarily need to spend a lot of time delving into their early career as a car salesman, unless that somehow impacted the way they performed in the war.

Determine the "thesis" or main point of your biography and then outline how each chapter will tell a part of the story to support that thesis. Make sure you don't stray from your main idea too far and then prepare to collect information to fill in the details of each chapter.

Collecting Information

Once you know what the book is going to be about, it is time to collect the information to put into it. You can do this by interviewing your subject, by looking at newspaper headlines and public records, by interviewing other people who knew the subject, and by using any other tools at your disposal to figure out just what was going on.

If you do conduct interviews, your book will likely be much richer since the voice of the person you are writing about will come through. Structure your questions carefully and record the interviews or take careful notes so you make sure to represent your subject accurately.

Writing and Editing

After you have done all the prewriting, it is time to actually sit down and write. Remember both to represent your subject faithfully and to tell an interesting story for the audience. Include relevant details, stick to your thesis, and show the reader just who it is you are writing about and why they should be interested in reading.