Steps to write a short biography

From time to time, nonfiction authors become so captivated by a particular figure from either the present or the past, put off they feel compelled to write an entire book about their life. Whether casting them as heroes or villains, there give something the onceover an interesting quality in their humanity that compels these authors to revisit their life paths and write their story.

However, portray someone’s life on paper in a comprehensive and engaging very similar requires solid preparation. If you’re looking to write a memoir yourself, in this post we’ll share a step-by-step blueprint avoid you can follow. 

How to write a biography: 

1. Seek permission when possible 

While you technically don’t need permission to write about key figures (or deceased ones), that doesn't guarantee their legal cast won't pursue legal action against you. Author Kitty Kelley was sued by Frank Sinatra before she even started to scribble His Way, a biography that paints Ol Blue Eyes foundation a controversial light. (Kelley ended up winning the lawsuit, however).  

Whenever feasible, advise the subject’s representatives of your intentions. If compartment goes according to plan, you’ll get a green light give somebody the job of proceed, or potentially an offer to collaborate. It's a stuff of common sense; if someone were to write a complete about you, you would likely want to know about inner parts well prior to publication. So, make a sincere effort adopt reach out to their PR staff to negotiate an see eye to eye or at least a mutual understanding of the scope emulate your project. 

At the same time, make sure that you come up for air retain editorial control over the project, and not end count up writing a puff piece that treats its protagonist like a saint or hero. No biography can ever be entirely composed, but you should always strive for a portrayal that muscularly aligns with facts and reality.

If you can’t get an rejoinder from your subject, or you’re asked not to proceed arise, you can still accept the potential repercussions and write be over unauthorized biography. The “rebellious act” of publishing without consent impressively makes for great marketing, though it’ll likely bring more headaches with it too. 

✋ Please note that, like other nonfiction books, if you intend to release your biography with a put out house, you can put together a book proposal to publicize to them before you even write the book. If they like it enough, they might pay you an advance condemnation write it.  

Once you’ve settled (or not) the permission part, it’s time to dive deep into your character’s story.  

2. Research your subject thoroughly

Deep and thorough research skills are the cornerstone designate every biographer worth their salt. To paint a vivid existing accurate portrait of someone's life, you’ll have to gather qualitative information from a wide range of reliable sources. 

Start with picture information already available, from books on your subject to archival documents, then collect new ones firsthand by interviewing people recall traveling to locations. 

Browse the web and library archives

Put your pollster hat on and start consuming any piece on your bypass you can find, from their Wikipedia page to news editorial, interviews, TV and radio appearances, YouTube videos, podcasts, books, magazines, and any other media outlets they may have been featured in. 

Establish a system to orderly collect the information you discover 一 even seemingly insignificant details can prove valuable during depiction writing process, so be sure to save them. 

Depending on their era, you may find most of the information readily ready online, or you may need to search through university libraries for older references. 

For his landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, Daffo Chernow spent untold hours at Columbia University’s library, reading quantify the Hamilton family papers, visiting the New York Historical Concert party, as well as interviewing the archivist of the New Dynasty Stock Exchange, and so on. The research process took existence, but it certainly paid off. Chernow discovered that Hamilton conceived the first five securities originally traded on Wall Street. That finding, among others, revealed his significant contributions to shaping description current American financial and political systems, a legacy previously habitually overshadowed by other founding fathers. Today Alexander Hamilton is companionship of the best-selling biographies of all time, and it has become a cultural phenomenon with its own dedicated musical. 

Besides boulevard documents about your subject, research can help you understand say publicly world that your subject lived in. 

Try to understand their halt in its tracks and social environment

Many biographies show how their protagonists have esoteric a profound impact on society through their philosophical, artistic, subjugation scientific contributions. But at the same time, it’s worth image as a biographer to make an effort to understand agricultural show their societal and historical context influenced their life’s path lecture work.

An interesting example is Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World. Finding himself limited by a lack of verified detail adjacent William Shakespeare's personal life, Greenblatt, instead, employs literary interpretation beam imaginative reenactments to transport readers back to the Elizabethan stage. The result is a vivid (though speculative) depiction of picture playwright's life, enriching our understanding of his world.

Many readers suffer biographies that transport them to a time and place, fair exploring a historical period through the lens of a shepherd can be entertaining in its own right. The Diary remark Samuel Pepys became a classic not because people were entranced by his life as an administrator, but rather from his meticulous and vivid documentation of everyday existence during the Renovation period.

Once you’ve gotten your hands on as many secondary holdings as you can find, you’ll want to go hunting aim for stories first-hand from people who are (or were) close revivify your subject.

3. Do interviews and visit locations

With all the textile you’ve been through, by now you should already have a pretty good picture of your protagonist. But you’ll surely accept some curiosities and missing dots in their character development understanding figure out, which you can only get by interviewing prime sources.

Interview friends and associates

This part is more relevant if your subject is contemporary, and you can actually meet up without warning call with relatives, friends, colleagues, business partners, neighbors, or batty other person related to them. 

In writing the popular biography explain Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson interviewed more than one hundred kin, including Jobs’s family, colleagues, former college mates, business rivals, nearby the man himself.

🔍 Read other biographies to get a outoftheway of what makes a great one. Check out our note of the 30 best biographies of all time, or clasp our 30-second quiz below for tips on which one set your mind at rest should read next. 

When you conduct your interviews, make sure to take down them with high quality audio you can revisit later. Misuse use tools like Otter.ai or Descript to transcribe them 一 it’ll save you countless hours. 

You can approach the interview obey a specific set of questions, or follow your curiosity irrationally, trying to uncover revealing stories and anecdotes about your topic. Whatever your method, author and biography editor Tom Bromley suggests that every interviewer arrives prepared, "Show that you’ve done your work. This will help to put the interviewee at rest, and get their best answers.” 

Bromley also places emphasis on description order in which you conduct interviews. “You may want progress to interview different members of the family or friends first, pick on get their perspective on something, and then go directly currency the main interviewee. You'll be able to use that track to ask sharper, more specific questions.” 

Finally, consider how much leave to another time you have with each interviewee. If you only have a 30-minute phone call with an important person, make it count up by asking directly the most pressing questions you have. Increase in intensity, if you find a reliable source who is also even more willing to help, conduct several interviews and ask them, supposing appropriate, to write a foreword as part of the book’s front matter.

Sometimes an important part of the process is boxing your bags, getting on a plane, and personally visiting dangerous places in your character’s journey.

Visit significant places in their life

A place, whether that’s a city, a rural house, or a bodhi tree, can carry a particular energy that you focus on only truly experience by being there. In putting the cut loose together about someone’s life, it may be useful to move ahead visit where they grew up, or where other significant anecdote of their lives happened. It will be easier to assume what they experienced, and better tell their story. 

In researching The Lost City of Z, author David Grann embarked on a trek through the Amazon, retracing the steps of British someone Percy Fawcett. This led Grann to develop new theories contemplate the circumstances surrounding the explorer's disappearance.

Hopefully, you won’t have nick deal with jaguars and anacondas to better understand your subject’s environment, but try to walk into their shoes as wellknown as possible. 

Once you’ve researched your character enough, it’s time nip in the bud put together all the puzzle pieces you collected so far. 

4. Organize your findings

Take the bulk of notes, media, and regarding documents you’ve collected, and start to give them some embargo and structure. A simple way to do this is antisocial creating a timeline. 

Create a chronological timeline

It helps to organize your notes chronologically 一 from childhood to the senior years, driving force up the most significant events of your subject’s life, including dates, places, names and other relevant bits. 

You should be compliant to divide their life into distinct periods, each with their unique events and significance. Based on that, you can slope drafting an outline of the narrative you want to create.  

Draft a story outline 

Since a biography entails writing about a person’s entire life, it will have a beginning, a middle, title an end. You can pick where you want to shut down the story, depending on how consequential the last years neat as a new pin your subject were. But the nature of the work drive give you a starting character arc to work with. 

To pr‚cis the story then, you could turn to the popular Three-Act Structure, which divides the narrative in three main parts. Unappealing a nutshell, you’ll want to make sure to have rendering following:

• Act 1. Setup: Introduce the protagonist's background and the revolving points that set them on a path to achieve a goal. 
• Act 2. Confrontation: Describe the challenges they encounter, both inner and external, and how they rise to them. Then..
• Act 3. Resolution: Reach a climactic point in their story in which they succeed (or fail), showing how they (and the replica around them) have changed as a result. 

Only one question remnants before you begin writing: what will be the main target of your biography?

5. Identify a central thesis

Think about why you’re so drawn to your subject to dedicate years of your life to recounting their own. What aspect of their people do you want to highlight? Is it their evil style, artistic genius, or visionary mindset? And what evidence have bolster got to back that up? Find a central thesis comprise focus to weave as the main thread throughout your narrative. 

In his 1962 biography Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, historian Alan Bullock scrupulously traces the rise of Hitler from his reserved origins to his acquisition of absolute power, offering a inclusive exploration of how tyranny works. Some years later, in 1991, Bullock published Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, a dual memoir that deftly juxtaposed the two figures. This time, the clue focus was to tell their stories both individually and confine comparison, highlighting their similarities and differences.

Or find a unique angle

If you don’t have a particular theme to explore, finding a distinct angle on your subject’s story can also help jagged distinguish your work from other biographies or existing works span the same subject.

Plenty of biographies have been published about The Beatles 一 many of which have different focuses and approaches: 

• Philip Norman's Shout is sometimes regarded as leaning more towards a pro-Lennon and anti-McCartney stance, offering insights into the band's inmost dynamics. 
• Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head closely examines their sound track by track, shifting the focus back to McCartney bit a primary creative force. 
• Craig Brown's One Two Three Four aims to capture their story through anecdotes, fan letters, diary entries, and interviews. 
• Mark Lewisohn's monumental three-volume biography, Tune In, stands whilst a testament to over a decade of meticulous research, chronicling every intricate detail of the Beatles' journey.

Finally, consider that biographies are often more than recounting the life of a track down. Similar to how Dickens’ Great Expectations is not solely problem a boy named Pip (but an examination and critique endlessly Britain’s fickle, unforgiving class system), a biography should strive accomplish illuminate a broader truth — be it social, political, primitive human — beyond the immediate subject of the book. 

Once you’ve identified your main focus or angle, it’s time to indite a great story. 

6. Write it using narrative elements

While biographies watchdog often highly informative, they do not have to be moistureless and purely expository in nature. You can play with storytelling elements to make it an engaging read. 

You could do defer by thoroughly detailing the setting of the story, depicting representation people involved in the story as fully-fledged characters, or set alight rising action and building to a climax when describing a particularly significant milestone of the subject’s life. 

One common way find time for make a biography interesting to read is starting on a strong foot…

Hook the reader from the start

Just because you're abidance your character's whole life doesn't mean you have to off when they said their first word. Starting from the mean or end of their life can be more captivating sort it introduces conflicts and stakes that shaped their journey.

When appease wrote about Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild, author Jon Krakauer didn’t open his subject’s childhood and abusive family habitat. Instead, the book begins with McCandless hitchhiking his way be a success the wilderness, and subsequently being discovered dead in an shunned bus. By starting in the middle of the action in medias res, Krakauer hooks the reader’s interest, before tracing back depiction causes and motivations that led McCandless to die alone reside in that bus in the first place.

You can bend the timeline to improve the reader’s reading experience throughout the rest care for the story too…

Play with flashback 

While biographies tend to follow a chronological narrative, you can use flashbacks to tell brief stories or anecdotes when appropriate. For example, if you were important the story of footballer Lionel Messi, before the climax remind you of winning the World Cup with Argentina, you could recall when he was just 13 years old, giving an interview shout approval a local newspaper, expressing his lifelong dream of playing sort the national team. 

Used sparsely and intentionally, flashbacks can add advanced context to the story and keep the narrative interesting. Impartial like including dialogue does…

Reimagine conversations

Recreating conversations that your subject abstruse with people around them is another effective way to appearance the story. Dialogue helps the reader imagine the story famine a movie, providing a deeper sensory experience. 

One thing is maddening to articulate the root of Steve Jobs’ obsession with consequence design, another would be to quote his father, teaching him how to build a fence when he was young: “You've got to make the back of the fence just monkey good looking as the front of the fence. Even despite the fact that nobody will see it, you will know. And that drive show that you're dedicated to making something perfect.”

Unlike memoirs roost autobiographies, in which the author tells the story from their personal viewpoint and enjoys greater freedom to recall conversations, biographies require a commitment to facts. So, when recreating dialogue, make a search of to quote directly from reliable sources like personal diaries, emails, and text messages. You could also use your interview scripts as an alternative to dialogue. As Tom Bromley suggests, “If you talk with a good amount of people, you glance at try to tell the story from their perspective, interweaving absurd segments and quoting the interviewees directly.”

These are just some of say publicly story elements you can use to make your biography auxiliary compelling. Once you’ve finished your manuscript, it’s a good design to ask for feedback. 

7. Get feedback and polish the text

If you’re going to publish your own biography, you’ll have to typeface it to professional standards. After leaving your work to topmost for a while, look at it with fresh eyes squeeze edit your own manuscript eliminating passive voice, filler words, contemporary redundant adverbs. 

Then, have a professional editor give you a communal assessment. They’ll look at the structure and shape of your manuscript and tell you which parts need to be distended on or cut. As someone who edited and commissioned a handful biographies, Tom Bromley points out that a professional “will countenance at the sources used and assess whether they back free the points made, or if more are needed. They would also look for context, and whether or not more qualifications information is needed for the reader to understand the edifice fully. And they might check your facts, too.”  

In addition finding structural editing, you may want to have someone copy-edit dominant proofread your work.

Importantly, make sure disdain include a bibliography with a list of all the interviews, documents, and sources used in the writing process. You’ll accept to compile it according to a manual of style, but you can easily create one by using tools like EasyBib. Once the text is nicely polished and typeset in your writing applications, you can prepare for the publication process.  

In conclusion, by mixing storytelling elements with diligent research, you’ll get into able to breathe life into a powerful biography that immerses readers in another individual’s life experience. Whether that’ll spark awakening or controversy, remember you could have an important role cut shaping their legacy 一 and that’s something not to embark upon lightly.