In writing a biography, emphasis and focus are essential

By Dennis Mellersh

Writing a successful and compelling biography of someone does not mean describing every last detail of that person’s life with equal emphasis. In fact, such an approach would result in a lifeless and boring book.

What I am writing about here is the need for you to decide on what will be the basic focus and emphasis areas of the book you are planning. The overall general concept of how to write a biography is a wide and deep topic more suitable for a larger and more definitive article.

Writing a biographical article is not as demanding a task as writing a book of biography.  Writing a book about a particular person’s life is one of the toughest assignments you can give yourself as a writer, and for the beginner writer, it can be a lengthy learning process.

In planning your biography it is important to remember that there will likely be formative and the productive periods in the life of your subject that should have focus and emphasis in your book.
There are three ways to approach writing a biography (1) You can focus your biography on a chronological basis in describing the person’s life; or (2) you can examine their life on a topical, or “area of interest” basis.

Or ideally, and (3), it will be a combination of both (1) and (2).

If you are writing about a famous musician, for example, you will want to focus on formative periods, and musicians or schools of thought that were key influences in the person’s artistic development.

The key point is that your biography will need acknowledge and draw attention to the most important parts of the person’s life, rather than just being a “history” of all their life events presented in a forward moving timeline.

For example, if particular people influenced and contributed to the intellectual development of the subject of your biography, you should focus on those people. If a particular book or historical event was a major influence, there should be some focus on the significance of that influence.

If the person’s childhood was a key factor in how their life developed, then the childhood should be emphasized, with explanations as to how and why it was a formative period in the life of the person you are writing about.

As you do research and gather information on the person you are writing about, you will become aware of the development periods and the key influences in the subject’s life. Further research will give you the additional information you will need to emphasize and focus on these areas effectively.

In discussing research, I am assuming that the subject of your planned biography is someone on whom there are already readily available “secondary” source materials, such as articles and books. Later on in your research process you may need to read more “primary” source material for your research.

One of the starting points in figuring out what should be emphasized in your biography is to read general articles on the person, perhaps starting with an article about your book’s subject in Wikipedia.

Bear in mind with Wikipedia however, that it is a creative commons resource and the articles are not necessarily written by experts, and may contain some inaccuracies. So you will need to do research involving other articles that you know have been written by experts. You should then read several authoritative biographical books on the subject, written by recognized authorities.

In doing research for biographical information, you will not be able to get all the information you need on the Internet alone. It will require going to your local library and perhaps a larger regional library with a lot of reference material available.

Once you have done this preliminary research, you should have a firm idea of the areas you should emphasize and focus on in your book and will be ready to do further reading of primary documents such as the personal letters and correspondence of your subject.