How to Write a Biography

Taken and adapted from: http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/writing/how-to-write-a-biography.html

Whether you are hoping to become a published author or you just have a school assignment to write
about another person, writing a biography requires special care and tact. In a biography, you are
telling the story of someone's life. You thus have to make sure you present them accurately and that
you write interesting and engaging information that leaves your reader feeling as though they learned
something from your writing.

Writing a Biography
A biography is defined as a story written about someone's life. This means that the first key to
writing a biography is to choose your subject to write about.

Choosing a Subject
When you choose who to write about someone in a biography, there are a number of factors to
consider.
 You must determine whether the person is interesting enough to write a biography about. A
lot will depend on the person's experiences and on how long the biography has to be. For
example, while you might be able to write a short biography on someone who hasn't had a lot of
life experience or done a lot of interesting things, writing a long biography would be much more
difficult.
 You might want to write about famous people or political figures, as their lives are
universally viewed as exciting or as having had an impact.
This isn't to say that every person you write a biography about must be a famous figure. Plenty of
ordinary people have extraordinary stories that can be very interesting - as long as you tell them well
and focus the biography narrowly enough on the things that matter.

Getting Permission
Once you have chosen a subject, you likely will need to get the permission of the subject to write the
biography. This isn't always a prerequisite - plenty of "unauthorized" biographies have been written
about celebrities based on information available in the public domain. However, a biography is
usually much more interesting and can give a much fuller picture of the subject's life if the subject
cooperates and is willing to talk to you about what you are writing.
In addition, if you do not get permission and you wish to publish your biography, you must be very
careful that you don't print anything untrue or false that could be viewed as slander or libel. If you
hurt someone's reputation through your unauthorized biography by printing untrue facts about them,
you could be subject to a lawsuit otherwise.

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.

Video excercise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8XepJ_ksfw