The short way to write a biography book

By Dennis Mellersh

There is a short way to write a biography, but, alas, it is not a short-cut, nor is it an “easy” or “10-day” method.”

Normally when one thinks of a traditional biography, we envisage a full-length book devoted to examining the life of one individual.

As an alternative, there are two basic approaches with the “short” technique:

(1) Write a short biography and publish it as a small book, likely as an e-book
(2) Write a number of short biographies and compile them into one full-length book

However you decide to proceed, you will need to learn the art of writing a short biography.

The key to writing a successful short biography is to focus on a single theme in the life of the person you are writing about.

Why a single theme?

If you try to provide total biographical breadth in a short biography, you will end up writing little more than a synopsis, or factual condensation of the person’s life.

This total coverage approach provides some breadth in describing a life, but it has no depth. It will have fact-centric highlights relating to the person, but it would have little appeal to the serious biography reader – the reader you want to interest.  It might, however, be of interest to someone who simply wanted a collection of historical facts, such as for a school essay, for example. This is the type of deficiency you may find in some short biographical articles on the Internet, for example.

But, to repeat, there is a way to make a short biography interesting, compelling, and of interest to serious readers, and that is to focus on one aspect, or theme that resonates in the life of the person you are writing about.

The theme could be any one of a variety of factors that are central to the person’s life. It might be: childhood influences, education, an individual who significantly altered the subject’s life, a major intellectual or emotional focus of the person’s life, what inspired the individual, problems that profoundly affected the person’s development…any number of themes could be appropriate, depending on the life of the person you want to write a book about.

Here’s an example of the themed approach. If you want to write a book about the lives of famous writers, you could write about a famous author who did his or her best work when they were young. Or at the other end of the spectrum, you might want to write about an author who did not do their best and most successful writing until late in life.

The main point is to focus on a unique aspect of a life and then build your biography around that.

To make a full-length book from your short biographies, keep writing until you have, say 10 to 30 of them. At that point you will have enough for a full length book, depending of course, on the length of each individual biography. The individual stories of the lives you are exploring will be like the chapters in a traditional biography book written about a single person.