Book Review: How to Do Biography, A Primer

Nigel Hamilton’s tome is much more entertaining than I expected it to be. I mean, 400 pages! How could that be, well, fun?

Weighty topic. Weighty in weight. So it was a delightful surprise to find myself enjoying, as much as I did, the sections I read.

Full disclosure. I did not read the entire book. Yet. There were sections I’m not interested in even a tad. Autobiography and memoir? Meh. I don’t ever want to write those. And this exploration was about improving what I write.

Even the sections I am interested in, I didn’t get all the way through. I’ll be dipping into this book as I continue my quest to learn about writing better biographies.

How to Do Biography, a Primer is, as I told you last week, one of the few available texts on biography writing how-tos. So what sections did I find helpful thus far?

First, let me tell you what’s here. The book is divided into three sections comprising sixteen chapters. Chapter titles are:

The Task of Biography

What Is Your Agenda?

Defining Your Audience

Researching Your Subject

The Shape of a Life

The Starting Point

Birthing Your Subject

Childhood and Youth

Love Stories

Life’s Work

The Twilight Years

Ending Your Story

Autobiography and Memoirs

Memoir

Truth—and Its Consequences

The Afterlife

Now tell me you didn’t find some of those chapters intriguing! I dipped in and out of sections and chapters, letting my interests lead me.

He begins the first chapter with this:

You wish to write or produce a “life”, but wisely pause to think about the task. I have no wish to hold you up; but no would-be biographer, in my view, should embark on the depiction of a real life without bothering to know something about how—and why—previous biographies have addressed the real individual in the past—and with what results.

He goes on in the following chapters to talk about successful and unsuccessful biographies, and what made them that way. In the chapter, Researching Your Subject, Hamilton makes a clear case for understanding historical methodology and biographical research. The bottom line for him is ethical. You cannot exclude information that doesn’t fit your bias, nor accept iffy research that does. You cannot partially use quotes to fit your bias. In this chapter he also discusses research sources, and he makes it interesting.

In “The Starting Point,” he shows myriad ways biographers open their books. He compares writing biography to writing a musical composition. Both have notes that must be arranged in pleasing, satisfying, cohesive, and coherent ways. When successful, they both sing.

At the end, there is a chapter, “Truth---and Its Consequences”, that is very informative. We don’t always consider the impact of truth-telling, or in some cases the word choices we make to tell truth, and how our work can hurt feelings or harm reputations. Telling the truth isn’t always admirable. He raises some very interesting points with his examples. I am not an apologist for his perspective, but what he wrote should be considered by every biographer.

There is much more for me to garner, so I’ll probably be writing again about Hamilton’s book. But why wait for me? If you are writing biography, buy your own copy of How to Do Biography, A Primer.

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10 Tips for How to Write Biographies

Now this was interesting to learn about!

Last summer I wrote the first draft of a biography for middle grade readers. I was passionate about my Intrepid Woman, filled with enthusiasm for the project, eager to share the bits I knew, and then, BOOM!

My writing group, bless their honest and insightful hearts, told me, essentially, “Umm. That’s not it. Try again.”

Well, okay, then. I get it. I challenged myself with two new-to-me writing tasks. Writing biography (when I been noveling for many years) and writing for middle graders (when I have written for adults for many years). To use the vernacular, I guess I sucked!

I am grateful to them for helping me identify what my heart knew wasn’t working. So what’s a passionate, enthusiastic, eager wannabe biographer to do? What I always do. I hunt for resources to help me. I can learn anything. I know that about myself. I taught me to write plays, and I can teach me to write biography.

So I made a couple of trips to America’s Book Store (aka Amazon) using different descriptors to find book on how to write biographies. I found two. There were beaucoup books on writing memoir, but only three for how to write bios and two about writing bios.

One of the how-to books, 24 pages, had one review and it was one-star. Another book is 166 pages from the University of Nebraska press with no reviews and almost 15 years old. Also, at $45, I’d be paying almost 30¢ a page to read it. The last book is a 400 page reprint edition from the Harvard University Press, but it does have four and a half stars.

Does it surprise you, too, given the popularity of biographies, that there are so few resources on how to write them?

Two! So what’s a wannabe biographer to do? Of course, I ordered the 400-page How to Do Biography, a Primer by Nigel Hamilton, and then I went searching for classes and other online resources.

My initial search was more than disappointing. There were few resources out there. Some YouTube vids and a few articles, but not what I expected. There is a dearth of resources on how to write biographies. There are tons on other forms, like writing comedy or horror, but surprisingly few for bios.

From combing the Internet, I did identify some common principles, some of which are “duhs” like “do research.” Umm. Okay. I guess that’s a good idea.

Biographies are about people who stories reveal struggles, conflicts, and accomplishments. The biography elements that I came up with and others I found in my search on biography writing are these:

1)   Identify in a page or two, why this person caught your attention and what is important about the person’s life. From this identify the overarching theme you will use in your biography.

2)   Write an engaging opening with quotes or anecdote to hook the reader just as fiction does. Like stories, bios have a beginning, middle, and end.

3)   Make a timeline of everything you can from the person’s life and then circle the ones you will use. But put them all out there for consideration. All bios give demographic info (birth, death, locale).

4)   Create a biography outline by taking the circled events from #3 and make headers and detailed notes on each.

5)   Get creative with your research by contacting authors of books or articles you read to see if they will share some of their resources so you are not just reading their summaries.

6)   Identify the point of view and text structure you will use: chronological, cause-effect, description, comparison, or problem-solution.

7)   Develop an understanding of the era and location of the person through the biography.

8)   Create a tone appropriate to the material. Find a voice that will engage readers.

9)   Keep incidents, dialogue, and historical personages as accurate as possible by using primary sources where available. When not, use secondary sources that help you understand the times, events, and locales for accurate re-creation.

10)  Avoid stereotyping. Don’t create a hagiography. Rather let the real person show through the biography.

Next week, I’ll share insights from Hamilton’s book as well as from my secret strategy—mentor texts.

I will learn how to write biographies. I love to read them, so I can learn to write them.

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