how to write a fictional biography

What is Autobiographical Fiction? An Introduction to the Genre

Sean Glatch | July 29, 2021 | 10 Comments

At some point along your fiction journey, you may have considered writing autobiographical fiction—perhaps writing an autobiographical novel, or a shorter work based on your life experience. Many famous authors have turned their life stories into compelling works of prose, from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield to Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian .

Most writers have life stories that can be turned into fiction, but what is the purpose of autobiographical fiction? Even more, what is autobiographical fiction?

Creative writers love to break conventions and bend genres, and autobiographical fiction (ABF) is a great hybrid of creative nonfiction and fiction. Still, ABF has certain conventions you need to know about if you want to conquer the genre. ABF stories are most often written as novel-length projects, so let’s explore how to write an autobiographical novel and grab hold of this slippery genre.

What is Autobiographical Fiction?

To offer a simple definition, autobiographical fiction is any work of fiction that is based on the real life events of the author. Autobiographical fiction is based on fact—but, importantly, not bound by fact.

Autobiographical fiction is based on fact—but, importantly, not bound by fact.

However, it’s hard to define ABF precisely, because ABF describes more of a spectrum than a genre. An ABF writer may choose to write about their life and simply change some names, embellish some descriptions, and alter the location. Or, writers of autobiographical fiction novels might loosely base their story on real life events, but they will change the plot, add additional characters, and explore “what if?” questions.

It’s better to define this tricky genre on a spectrum—including some autobiographical fiction examples. From most to least fictional, consider ABF on the following continuum. And no matter where your interests lie on this continuum, if you want more information on writing autobiographical short stories, novels, or anything in between, check out our course on writing autobiographical fiction with Jack Smith!

https://writers.com/classes/autobiographical-fiction

The Autobiographical Fiction Continuum

Below are some possibilities within autobiographical fiction, arranged from most fictional to most accurate to real events.

1. The Author Surrogate

Some writers choose to insert self-inspired characters into a mostly-fictional story. An author surrogate is when an author writes a character into their story for the sole purpose of having that character espouse the author’s beliefs. This character does not have to be major to the story, but they do play an important role in advancing the story’s themes and arguments.

A great example of the author surrogate is Nick Carroway, the first person narrator of The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses Carroway to comment on the story’s themes of greed and relationships. Though Carroway is distinct from Fitzgerald, the writer is certainly present in the story’s events and interpretations.

Of course, you can also have fun with it. Stan Lee has a cameo in most of the Marvel movies, and why shouldn’t he?

2. The Self-Insert

The self-insert is often confused with the author surrogate, since both literary techniques rely on the author embodying themselves as a character in the book. However, the self-insert is a bit more obvious than the author surrogate.

A famous example of this is Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. At several points in King’s heptalogy, a character named “King” talks about himself in relation to the greater narrative and is imbued with many of the author’s own traits, from his physical descriptions to the way he talks. In a story as genre-bent and metaphysical as The Dark Tower, it makes perfect sense for the author to write himself in the story.

3. Semi-Autobiographical Fiction

Semi-Autobiographical Fiction (SAF), also known as roman à clef , is any work of fiction wherein the central elements of both the narrator and the plot are based on the author themselves. The “semi” exists in the definition because the author may explore fictional hypotheticals, introduce fictional characters, or else digress from what happened in real life.

Many literary experts consider Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to be an example of a semi-autobiographical novel. Much of the plot, as well as many of the characters, resemble Plath’s own life and struggle with mental illness. Plath may have chosen to write this story as SAF because, sometimes, it is easier to tell one’s own story when it has the façade of fiction.

4. Fully Autobiographical Fiction

At the far end of the spectrum is completely autobiographical fiction. In this form of fiction, the author pulls directly from their life experiences and makes only aesthetic changes. Names, dates, and locations will be muddled, but the plot fully mirrors that of the author’s own life.

It’s hard to draw a line between SAF and ABF. Since readers don’t know the precise details of the author’s life, one can never be quite sure whether certain events of the story are fictional. For example, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins accurately examines the dissolution of the French Communist Party, but does she ever embellish her relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre? And Elif Batuman’s The Idiot is about the author’s experiences at Harvard, but how much of the novel is fact, and how much is distorted by memory?

When the past feels like fiction, why not write it as such?

When the past feels like fiction, why not write it as such? What’s important is that the genre is flexible and allows for a conversation between fictional and nonfictional elements. Some literary theorists abide by “Death of the Author,” in which the author’s opinions are unimportant to the work’s interpretation. If any genre directly challenges this assertion, it’s autobiographical fiction.

Why Write Autobiographical Fiction?

Alongside this discussion of the ABF spectrum, you might be wondering what the purpose of autobiographical fiction is. Why not just write a memoir or personal essay?

Every writer’s intentions for writing autobiographical fiction are different. We can’t say for certain why anyone chooses to write in ABF, but there are a few major reasons why authors generally write autobiographical fiction novels.

To Tell Better Stories

For many novelists, the purpose of autobiographical fiction is to create a more satisfying story that is based in the strangeness of truth. The form allows us to consider what an autobiographical piece needs to feel more “complete,” or to bring across its core truths, and then write accordingly.

Autobiographical fiction can create a more satisfying story that is based in the strangeness of truth.

ABF also allows you to explore using your life as a starting point: write alternate endings, explore “what if?” questions, and pursue a different ending. You already know how your story is told, but will you tell it differently after changing X, Y, and Z?

To Create a Bit of Distance

ABF may also allow us to explore difficult moments in our lives through a protective lens, such as Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar. When nonfiction is too bright, autobiographical fiction can help shade us from our own harsh realities by creating a degree of separation between ourselves and our personal histories. Ironically enough, fiction gives us opportunities to be more objective about our lives.

Autobiographical fiction can also be useful for some writers who want to write with a sense of anonymity. They may be protecting certain names and identities in their stories, and the ABF form allows them to mask otherwise personal details

Finally, you might write ABF simply to have fun with it. Writing isn’t always a serious business, so why not insert your life story into the plot of Macbeth ? What’s stopping you from injecting yourself into your own fictional world? The ABF genre is just as much of a literary technique as it is an opportunity to enjoy the fiction writing process, your way.

Autobiographical fiction is an opportunity to enjoy the fiction writing process, your way.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Some Starting Places

Whether you’re writing an author surrogate or pulling stories directly from your own life, writing autobiographical fiction requires some innovation. Creative genres require creative thinking, so while the following four methods are tried-and-true ways to write autobiographical fiction novels, they aren’t the only ones.

ABF commonly presents itself in the novel form. If you’re interested in writing an autobiographical novel, below are a few possible jumping-off points.

1. Begin with a Noun

If you are an ABF writer who wants their novel only loosely based in truth, start with a noun. Specifically, start with a person, place, thing, or idea that is true, but leave the rest of the story up to fiction.

For example, let’s say there was a time in your life where you were a chocolate taster, like Roald Dahl. You might decide to start your story with a chocolate factory, but then form characters and events around the themes of inequality.

Of course, Willy Wonka is purely fiction, and probably not a self-insert for Roald Dahl. You will still need to base some aspect of the story off of your own life to make it ABF, but starting with a noun can help base a fictional story on an inkling of truth.

2. Edit a Nonfiction Piece

You might decide that real-life events provide enough content for your story. If that’s the case, start by writing a memoir or autobiography, then edit after the first couple of drafts.

You have several options for editing your memoir into ABF, though you may already have a sense of direction after writing the first draft. To make it a true-to-life account, you can simply edit the nouns—change names, locations, dates, and objects so that the story remains anonymous.

Or, if “what if?” questions arise that you don’t want to leave open ended, you can write fictional scenes and change the ending.

3. Start with What You Don’t Know

The autobiographical novel helps us explore the incompleteness of our own memories. To remember is to distort, and many of us have personal histories that are hard to disentangle, dissect, and distinguish.

ABF allows us to explore what we don’t understand from our memories and create a story that makes sense. Many memoirists find that the act of writing nonfiction is cathartic, but when real life feels strange, writers can find catharsis in autobiographical fiction instead.

Write a novel that explores what you don’t know. Keep writing autobiographical fiction until you’re satisfied with the answer, or comfortable with the ambiguity.

4. Start with Two Disconnected Ideas

Sometimes, the fun of writing fiction comes when the author is able to connect two seemingly unconnected ideas. A great example of this is the story “ Especially Heinous ” by Carmen Maria Machado, which connects ghosts and magical realism to a New York murder mystery.

Why not connect random events from your own life? Psychologists call this “apophenia,” a state of mind in which we connect two things which actually have no relationship to each other. Taking an “apophenic” approach will help base your novel in truth but create a wholly different narrative, resulting in a novel that’s fun, engaging, and exploratory.

For example, you might try to connect an event that happened at your sixth birthday party to an event that happened on your lunch break last week. Or, you might try to construct a narrative based on a christmas present you received every year. Apophenia allows us to find magic and mystery in the details of our lives, and who’s to say the connections you develop aren’t true?

How to Write Autobiographical Fiction: Write with Friends!

Autobiographical fiction is a challenging form to master, since your story is attempting a relationship between fiction and nonfiction. If you’re stuck on a draft or need an extra set of eyes, joining a writing community will help you conquer the genre.

The instructors at Writers.com can get you there! Learn more about our courses and our community , and let’s work on writing your autobiographical novel together.

Sean Glatch

10 comments.

Re: ‘Shot into the darkness.’©SM

Thanks for your tips about writing biographical fiction or ABF. That is always a great “exciter’. That gave me ana idea, that is not really new, but if it worked could be interesting. Of course, it depends on who is in it.

I would invite someone (who could write) to write a Semi-Biographical-Fiction book. I could write the synopsis as an azimuth, and I would start it, then together, we would finish it. No time no pressure. Know somebody? Yes, I ‘know’ how to write. So I would like to pair with someone also who would have some training. I don’t even need ideas, I lived it.

Hi Sydney, what an interesting idea! I don’t know anybody off the top of my head, however, you are welcome to join our community group on Facebook to discuss your writing ideas! https://www.facebook.com/groups/146546396684638/

Warmest, Sean

Great article!

My dilemna is how to deal with incovenient truths. Talking about them can expose loved ones and cause strained relationships or even legal action. But leaving out such material will significantly water down the emotional truth you want to convey.

This is the Problem I am having also I am having trouble remembering some of the details of certain stories in my life but it is based upon my trials and tribulations and big mistakes and choices that I made throughout my life I am not sure if I’m going to let anyone in my family read this before I have names changed and tell them that it is partially fictional

Thank you for clarifying the concept of the fictional autobiography/memoir.

I have been assisting my husband who has written a series of books that I have described as an impressionistic account of the people and events of his life as recorded by him in his journals but altered somewhat for the sake of privacy and the exercise of artistic license. As such, I feel they cannot be classified as nonfiction/memoir and are better represented as fictional autobiography/memoir. A major difficulty arises when submitting the books to self-publishing platforms such as Kindle Direct and Ingram Spark. These platforms do not offer ABF in their listings of categories, nor is there a comparable BISAC subject code. The closest match there is for Biographical Fiction—close, but still not accurate. Do you have any suggestions for dealing with this?

This is a great question! And unfortunately I don’t have a great response–self-publishing platforms have a lot of control over how you can market your work.

Part of the reason there isn’t an “autobiographical fiction” category is because it’s not a unique enough genre. At the end of the day, genre categories are marketing tools, and if there isn’t a large enough difference between biographical and auto biographical fiction (other than who’s writing it), self-publishing services won’t bother with the distinction. You might be able to petition one of those services to create the category, but unless a lot of people are asking for that, you probably won’t have much success.

My best advice is to clarify the book’s genre and intent in the actual book description. Search engine optimization is a major component of online retail sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble; if you hone in on the book’s description and pitch it towards the right audiences, you will be able to make up for the lack of a specific category.

I’m not an expert in KDP or Ingram Spark, so if other authors have more experience working with these platforms, your insight is greatly appreciated.

Best of luck to you and your husband!

Quite educative on ABF.It appeals to me.20 years ago a friend urged me to be a writer but i dismissed the idea ! Today i feel inclined to the idea.

You should definitely do it, Peter!

My name is Bill, I am 73 years of age, ad currently living a retiring life with my wife in Adelaide. Without going into details, I have lived a complex, varied and sometimes difficult life, ending with my current situation here now. Some people I’ve known have suggested that I should write a book of my life, and I have considered doing so. In fact I have attempted on several occasions without success, due to memory loss (amongst other things). My daughter suggested I get someone to help me through the process, eg get a student writer/journelist/etc to help . That sounded like a good idea at the time, but now at home by myself., I’m not so sure. Am I knocking on the best option doorway?, or, can you suggest where else to seek assistance.

Thanks for much for the autofiction article. I am unable to find an example of a query letter for the genre, Any ideas on where I could find?

Writing a Novel Inspired by Your Life? The Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Autobiographical Fiction

in Writing on 12/09/17

Are you writing autobiographical fiction?

Recently I heard back from a literary agent who had requested my full manuscript: an upper middle grade contemporary that I wrote after reading some of my adolescent diaries. Here’s part of what the agent said:

I was seriously getting flashbacks to my first relationships–dating in eighth/ninth grade was SO AWKWARD! You absolutely nail that in this story. I like the set-up a lot in terms of the characters, dynamics, and the unfolding dilemma. However, I’m afraid it began to feel a little too mired in the reality of eighth grade (the back-and-forth wondering, highs and lows of the day) and thus a little slow pacing-wise.

When I read the email to my husband, he said, “so she didn’t like it because it was too realistic ?”

Yes, this is one of the problems with writing autobiographical fiction. Sometimes it’s hard to decide what “real stuff” you should leave out.

My manuscript isn’t exactly autobiographical, but it was certainly influenced by my actual adolescent thoughts, feelings, and experiences. There’s even one line in the novel that I lifted verbatim from my ninth grade diary because it was too perfect not to use (or so I thought).

What’s the difference between writing autobiographical fiction and writing a novel “inspired by” your life?

So how would I classify my manuscript? Probably on the end of “inspired by.” The main character is an eighth grade girl who loves math and writes poetry… pretty similar to myself as a teenager. The relationship she has with one of the boy characters was also heavily inspired by one of my first dating experiences. But the actual events of the novel are made-up.

Still, it’s been scary to send this manuscript into the world. When an agent rejects the book it’s hard not to feel like it’s my experiences and feelings that are being rejected.

Are you writing a novel inspired by your life? The Do's and Don'ts of Writing Autobiographical Fiction!

Writing autobiographical fiction: Do’s and Don’ts

When I first started writing the novel that was loosely based on my own diaries, I was embarrassed to tell people where the idea had come from. I was afraid they’d think I was vain or not being creative. But the truth is, you can write about anything — your life or otherwise — as long as you do it well.

Using our own experiences can be a great jumping-off point for a novel… as long as we concentrate on telling a great story instead of sticking too closely to what actually happened.

So if you’re writing autobiographical fiction, or a novel inspired by your life, how do you do it well? Here are a few suggestions…

DO consider whether the story you want to write is going to be interesting to people other than you , your friends, and your immediate family. If the answer is no, you could still write the book (maybe you just need to get it out of your system!), but you may not want to query agents with it. Give it to your family and friends instead.

DON’T worry about sticking to what actually happened. If you’re choosing to write fiction , you can (and should!) make changes to real characters and events. Take the real life event as a starting point then run with it into the fictional realm. Brainstorm how you can add, embellish, and change to make a truly compelling novel. Your life should be the inspiration, not the blueprint. You can decide later whether what you’ve written is autobiographical fiction, semi-autobiographical, or simply “inspired by” real events.

DO consider writing in third person. That can help give you enough distance to fictionalize real events.

DON’T write your novel as a series of diary entries unless you really, really, REALLY think it works best that way. Often we come across old journals and think, “this would make a great story!” But that doesn’t mean we need to stick to the diary entry format. In fact, I’ve written another post called 5 Challenges to Writing a Diary Novel that explains why the diary entry format is extremely difficult to do well.

DO consider if you’d rather write a memoir. If you find yourself not wanting to fictionalize your story, maybe you should be writing nonfiction instead.

DO write what you feel compelled to write. For a long time I resisted writing fiction inspired by my own experiences (even though I wanted to) because I thought that wouldn’t be “creative” enough. On the other hand, some people take too much to heart the “write what you know” adage and think they can only write about their own experiences. In the end, you should write what you want to write. Because writing what you’re passionate about is going to make the best story.

DO watch your word count. When we’re writing autobiographical fiction, it’s easy to include things that seem important to you but are not actually important to the story. An autobiographical novel with an excessive word count is a major red flag to agents and editors — makes it seem like you don’t know how to edit yourself. Check out Writer’s Digest’s guide to word count here .

DON’T get defensive and DO be open to constructive criticism. It can be hard to hear criticism about your writing no matter what, but it’s even harder when the story is inspired by your life and the main character bears a strong resemblance to you. When someone says, “this part didn’t seem realistic” or “I didn’t understand the character’s motivation” it can be hard not to get defensive. Keep in mind that “but it really did happen” isn’t enough justification for including something in your novel when it isn’t working in the context of the story. Try to hear the criticism as a way to improve your story and not as a judgement on your actual experiences.

DO consider how people will react to your story. Libel in fiction is very rare. Writers don’t often get sued, and when they do, they usually win. (First Amendment rights!) So I wouldn’t worry so much about the legal issues (although you can read here about libel in fiction and defamation and invasion of privacy ). Even though you’re probably not going to get sued, the things you write could still upset people and damage important relationships. If you’re writing a story with characters that are loosely based on people you know, it may be worth thinking about how they will feel about what you’re writing, and if you’re okay with their reaction. You may want to fictionalize their characters more, or talk to them about what you’ve written before it’s published.

As for my own manuscript, I’m going to really think hard about what’s necessary to the story and what’s not, in order to speed up the pacing and heighten the drama. In doing this, I’m going to get further from my own experiences and deeper into the realm of fiction, which is where this story belongs.

Are you writing autobiographical fiction or a novel inspired by your life? How’s it going? What challenges are you facing?

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How to write a biography: 7 life-writing ideas

Biography – literally ‘life writing’ – poses a variety of challenges. Balancing historical narration and day-to-day incident, for example. Or choosing what to include and what to leave out. Read 7 ideas on how to write a biography, with examples from biographical writing:

Post author By Jordan
4 Comments on How to write a biography: 7 life-writing ideas

7 life-writing ideas:

Create compelling voice
Think about representation
Decide on narrative style
Use illustrative anecdotes
Find interest in the mundane
Avoid hagiography
Fictionalize where necessary

First: What type of biography do you want to write?

There are many different types of biography, both in fiction and non-fiction.

Popular types of biographical books

If you want to write non-fiction, you may be working on either an autobiography (a book about your life) or memoir , or a biography of a public figure.

Biographies can straddle both fiction and non-fiction, too. Many authors have written semi-fictionalized biographical stories (such as Now Novel writing coach Hedi Lampert’s novel , The Trouble with My Aunt ) with the author themselves as a main or supporting character.

For example, in Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys , the author invents a brother. This fictional addition allows for lively debates between him and this imaginary relative about urban spaces and race politics in the city of Johannesburg.

Novelized biographies (such as Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre ) often follow a central character’s life arc in a linear way , from early life to later years or even death.

Other types of fictional biography include fictional letters and diaries. These allow you to play with other modes of representation.

For example, Sue Townsend’s popular Adrian Mole series (the first book being The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ ), presented as a British teenage boy’s diary.

Let’s examine 7 ideas about how to write a biography:

1. Create compelling voice

You could say that voice is a crucial ingredient of any story , especially in first person (where the narrator is the character).

In autobiography, in particular, you want your reader to form a clear sense of who is telling the story. Are they funny? Serious? Angry? Inventive? Philosophical? Just a little bit insane?

Consider the comical, self-aware voice that comes through from page 1 of Townsend’s novel. The first chapter, under the heading ‘THURSDAY JANUARY 1ST’, begins:

These are my New Year’s resolutions: 1. I will help the blind across the road. 2. I will hang my trousers up. 3. I will put the sleeves back on my records. 4. I will not start smoking. 5. I will stop squeezing my spots. 6. I will be kind to the dog. 7. I will help the poor and ignorant. 8. After hearing the disgusting noises from downstairs last night, I have also vowed never to drink alcohol. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (1982), p. 5.

Adrian Mole’s resolutions range from the virtuous to the droll (e.g. helping the ‘poor and ignorant’; scathing remarks on his parents’ drunken ‘disgusting noises’).

From the opening page there’s a clear sense of the voice of the subject of this diary-format biography. We form a sense of Mole’s desires, faults, attitudes and beliefs straight away.

2. Think about representation

Whether you’re writing fictional or non-fictional biography, how you represent events or tell the story is a creative decision.

Besides curating content (choosing what formative experiences, dramatic incidents, background details you include), there are different ways to approach representation , the way you tell the story.

As respected literary biographer Hermione Lee says, in an interview with James Rivington , there’s a difference between ‘autopsy’ and ‘portraiture’:

Autopsy, yes. There is a kind of biographical process that is, necessarily, cutting into the dead corpse, however ghoulish that can seem. You are as ruthlessly as possible trying to dissect and analyse the nature of the life. The other approach is more akin to portraiture: to see how the person looked from the outside, how they affected and influenced people, what their friendships were like, how they were one thing to one person and another thing to another person. I think you have get at both inside and outside if you can. Hermione Lee, interviewed by James Rivington for The British Academy

What Lee touches on is the issue of representation .

How will you mix biographical and historical facts (e.g. born here, raised there, had this key experience) with more painterly ways of revealing character ?

How to write biography - Hermione Lee quote | Now Novel

3. Decide on narrative style

Deciding how to write a biography means choosing between many available narrative modes or styles.

Will your story run from A to B to C, documenting each decade in a person’s life? Or will it be a crisscross portrait cutting back and forth in time?

A fragmentary style of narration may suit certain subjects and contexts better than a linear story. Says Lee:

I think that biography has to be watchful of making life seem too predictable, or determinist, or shaped, or ordered. Biographies go through fashions. There used to be a fashion for making the study run smoothly and look definitive – ‘this leads to this leads to this.’ I think life-stories are more bitty and piecemeal. Hermione Lee, interview for The British Academy

Example of inventive narrative style: Roland Barthes

As an example, Roland Barthes, a pioneer in semiotics (the study of signs and symbols and their interpretation), famously wrote an autobiography in fragments called Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes .

In this book, Barthes includes the preface ‘it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel’.

What follows are captioned images from Barthes’ life, and then titled fragments where Barthes reflects on incidents, places, experiences and the development of his body of work.

For example, in a short section about the discomfort of writing called ‘Truth and Assertion’, Barthes refers to himself in third person , expressing discomfort in how words committed to paper express more than our original aims:

His (sometimes acute) discomfort—mounting some evenings, after writing the whole day, to a kind of fear—was generated by his sense of producing a double discourse, whose mode overreached its aim, somehow: for the aim of his discourse is not truth, and yet this discourse is assertive. (This kind of embarrassment started, for him, very early; he strives to master it — for otherwise he would have to stop writing — by reminding himself that it is language which is assertive, not he). Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes , p. 48, available here.

Fragments provide a fitting choice of narrative style for an unconventional autobiography that is as much a self-portrait of Barthes as a questioner of seemingly self-evident truths, as it is the representation of his life.

Barthes’ use of third-person and questioning reflections on the act of writing creates the ‘looking from the outside’ effect Hermione Lee describes as ‘portraiture’ in biography. Even as Barthes creates a self-portrait, he resists the idea of the ‘assertive’ author, the ‘completeness’ of the ‘final report’.

4. Use illustrative anecdotes

An English professor once asked his third year class ‘What is an anecdote?’

A girl put up her hand and answered, ‘It’s what you give someone when they’ve been bitten by a snake’, to which he replied ‘Please don’t ask someone for an anecdote if you’re ever bitten by a snake, for they will talk and talk and you will die.’

This is an anecdote. These usually short, often humorous stories about events involving a particular person are great fodder for biographies. They may illustrate a person’s quick wit or surly, non-communicative demeanor .

In biography, a brief anecdote may be all the reader needs to develop a sense of a key figure – a parent, friend, lover, rival or other.

Example of illustrative anecdotes: Dorothy Parker

The writer, poet and satirist Dorothy Parker is known for her witty comebacks and phrases.

One anecdote illustrating this character gives an alleged exchange between Parker and a snooty woman at an event, where both were trying to enter through a door at the same time:

It is recorded that Mrs. Parker and a snooty debutante were both going in to supper at a party: the debutante made elaborate way, saying sweetly “Age before beauty, Mrs. Parker.” “And pearls before swine,” said Mrs. Parker, sweeping in. Dorothy Parker, attributed. More on this anecdote at Quote Investigator.

Parker’s clever comeback to the woman’s quip about her being the older (and the implication she is less beautiful) evokes Jesus’s sermon on the Mount in which he said ‘Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine…’

The anecdote is a brilliant illustration of Parker as a quick-witted person with a sharp tongue and an ear for comedy. An anecdotal exchange here conveys a good sense of personality.

5. Find interest in the mundane

When we think about how a biography is written, we might think in terms of grand, important or scandalous events. Yet a biography is not a gossip column.

Lee makes this important point in her interview, regarding Virginia Woolf’s eventual suicide.

In writing the author’s biography, Lee describes the pitfalls of writing it as though Woolf was thinking about suicide every day.

It would possibly be sensationalizing (rather than allowing multiple ‘Woolfs’ to come through) to assume this linearity:

When, as in the case of Virginia Woolf, you have a very important, much-read woman writer who kills herself, there is a powerful desire to make the story move towards that point. You see that also in the life of Sylvia Plath – perhaps even more, because she was so much younger. It becomes all about the suicide. […] So one of my motives in writing about Virginia Woolf was to get away from the determinist sense of a story that had to end that way. Lee, interview for The British Academy

How do we make the repetitive, ‘boring’ parts of life interesting in life-writing?

Skip over them (e.g. ‘For the next 5 years she was busy establishing the Hogarth Press. Then…’)
Show their interesting place within a wider arc (e.g. ‘With every manuscript the Press put out, she gained a keener understanding of X that would lead to …’)

Writing biographical books - Hermione Lee quote | Now Novel

6. Avoid hagiography

Hagiography, the term for the writing of the lives of saints, also means ‘to display a subject undue reverence’ in writing.

The British statesman Arhtur Balfour is alleged to have said ‘Biography should be written by an acute enemy.’

There’s truth in this, since an enemy would dissect their rival’s life without mercy. Perform a thorough autopsy, and paint a colourful (even if unflattering) portrait.

In deciding how to write a biography, make sure you choose incidents that reflect multiple dimensions of the subject’s life. Their glorious and inglorious moments.

For example, to write the story of a now-revered author as the story of success after success may ring false for readers who know about the 12 rejections their first manuscript received.

Plan the scenes and incidents of a biography the way you would build a character profile. Ask, ‘What are the subject’s…’

Impressive moments?
Cringe moments?

7. Fictionalize where necessary

Author and essayist Geoff Dyer has written books in many forms, from travelogues blending fiction and non-fiction to books about writing biography ( Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with DH Lawrence ).

Dyer’s book But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz is an example of his genre-defying approach.

Part biography of renowned jazz musicians (including Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk), part homage to the improvisational and playful language of jazz, it combines historical details, photography and discussion of music. Rather than tell a linear story of each musician’s life, Dyer captures fleeting moments and experiences in a manner evocative of jazz music’s ephemeral nature.

This approach naturally involves plenty of fictionalizing, filling in and describing unknown details.

For example, here Dyer imagines a road trip where Duke Ellington’s driver muses on their road-tripping and the impossibility of recording every detail:

He’d bought the car in ’49, intending just to hop around New York, but soon he was driving Duke all over the country. Several times he’d had an impulse to keep a notebook record of how far they’d traveled but always he came to thinking how he wished he’d done it right from the start and so, each time he thought of it, he gave up the idea and fell to calculating vaguely cumulative distances, remembering the countries and towns they had passed through. Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz (1991), p. 4.

Adding fictionalized events, such as particular exchanges between Duke Ellington and a driver that may not have happened ‘exactly that way’, is a useful part of biography. Like the driver’s thought process, there are ‘vaguely cumulative distances’ you, the biographer, must calculate and recreate for your reader.

Writing a fiction or non-fiction (or semi-fictional) biographical novel? Get constructive, considere d feedback from a writing coach.

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Tags biography , life-writing , memoir

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

4 replies on “How to write a biography: 7 life-writing ideas”

This article is brilliant, useful and educational which I admired the most and I can’t wait to read more. Thanks for the topic you’ve shared!

Thank you, Rosella. Thanks for reading our blog and sharing your feedback.

I would like to write a biography of someone who is a brother to me. Inorder to be remembered forever.

That sounds wonderful. Have you started writing or planning it?

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How to Write a Biography: 11 Step Guide + Book Template

So you’d like to know how to write a biography. We can help with that! Learning how to write a biography doesn’t have to be intimidating. In fact, it can be a lot of fun!

In this guide, we show you how to write a biography from the initial book idea all the way through to publishing your book , and we throw in a free template to help you on your way.

Ready to learn how to start a biography ? Let’s jump right in.

Get Our 6″ x 9″ Pre-Formatted Book Template for Word or Mac

We will send you a Book Template for US Trade (standard paperback size).

How to Write a Biography in 11 Simple Steps

Here are the steps you need to take to learn how to write a biography:

1. Read other biographies

Austin Kleon, Author of Steal Like an Artist , says “the writer tries to master words. All of these pursuits involve the study of those who have come before and the effort to build upon their work in some way.”

In other words, if you want to learn how to write a biography, you need to read the best biographies written by other excellent authors!

In this case, it would behoove you to read several biographies – whether historical, celebrity, or business biographies is up to you and your sub-genre.

A good author to start with? Walter Isaacson . He’s written highly acclaimed biographies on everyone from Abraham Lincoln and Steve Jobs to Leonardo Da Vinci and Elon Musk.

Once you’ve read some well-crafted biographies, you’ll have a better idea of how to start a biography of your own.

2. Identify your subject

In order to learn how to start a biography, you need to choose who you’d like to write about – if you don’t already have someone in mind.

The most important factor will be, of course, your interest in the person you’re planning to write about. You’ll spend months (or even years) deep-diving into this person’s history, so you want to choose someone who you’re unlikely to tire of.

When learning how to write a biography, here are few factors to consider:

How impactful has your potential subject’s life been? In other words, will people care to learn more about this person?
How readily available is information about your potential subject? Biographies require extensive research, so it’s critical to choose someone who has enough information out there to dig into! Consider whether your subject has done interviews, written journals, has family or a partner willing to speak with you, and more.
Are there already books written about your potential subject? Just because there’s an existing biography about the person you’re interested in doesn’t (necessarily) mean you can’t write another one. But if there are two or three biographies, you may want to reconsider. If you do choose to write about someone who has already been well-documented, be mindful about approaching the topic with a new angle or perspective. For instance, there are several biographies about George Washington, but author Alexis Coe wrote one about how Washington isn’t “quite the man we remember.” This brilliant iteration has over 12,000 ratings on Goodreads .
Is there a market demand for a book about your potential subject? If you’re learning how to write a biography, you need to be mindful of whether folks will want to read it. Do some research to determine if readers will be receptive to a book about the person you’re interested in.

Related: Is a Biography a Primary Source?

3. Get permission to write about your subject

We’ll start by stating the obvious. It’s a good idea to get permission to write about your subject, even if you’re not legally required to. For one thing, it’s just good manners. Plus, you’re much more likely to get unfettered access to the information and sources you need to write your book.

But do you have to get permission? It depends.

In some cases, if your subject is considered a “public figure,” permission may not be required. The definition of a public figure varies depending on your jurisdiction, so you should always consult a lawyer before writing a biography.

If you do decide to proceed without permission, be mindful of how your book will be received and any legal issues that may arise. That’s why we always recommend asking permission from your subject when learning how to write a biography.

Difference Between A Memoir and Biography
Autobiography vs Biography: Differences and Similarities

4. Create an outline

The next step of learning how to write a biography is to outline your story. It’s critical to outline your biography before you begin writing it. Among other things, it helps ensure you cover every topic you’d like to and get the book in the correct chronological order. It also helps you identify themes that emerge as you organize your ideas.

Need help creating your outline? Learn how to do it (and take advantage of free templates!) in our guide to outlining a book .

5. Select a working title (using a title generator)

Now is the fun part of learning how to write a biography! It’s time to create a working title for your book. A working title is just what it sounds like: it’s a title that works – for now.

Of course, it’s helpful to have something to call the book as you’re working on it. And it encourages you to think about the message you’d like your book to convey. When your biography is complete, you can always do a little more research on how to write book titles for your specific sub-genre and update your working title accordingly.

Or, you can decide you still love your initial title and publish your book with that one!

We’ve made it easy for you to develop a working title – or multiple – using our book title generator .

Book Title Generator

Don't like it?

6. Write a rough draft

Okay, now it’s time to start writing your rough draft. Don’t be intimidated; just focus on getting something down on the page. As experts on all things writing and self-publishing, we’ve got a rough draft writing guide to help you get through this phase of writing a biography.

Remember to be as balanced and objective as possible when learning how to write a biography.

Make good use of your primary and secondary sources, and double-check all of your facts. You’ve got this!

7. Self-edit

There are several different types of editing that we recommend each manuscript undergo. But before you give your rough draft to anyone else to review, you should edit it yourself.

The first step to self-editing?

Take a break! It’s essential to give your mind some time to recuperate before you go over your work. And never self-edit as you go!

After you’ve completed your break, here are a few things to consider as you edit:

Grammar. This one is self-explanatory and usually the easiest. You can use an AI editor to make a first pass and quickly catch obvious spelling errors. Depending on prompts and your experience with the tool, you can also use AI to catch some grammar and syntax issues as well.
Content and structure . This is the time to make sure the bones of your piece are good. Make sure your content flows logically (and in chronological order), no important pieces of information are missing, and there isn’t redundant or unhelpful information.
Clarity and consistency. Keep an eye out for any confusing copy and ensure your tone is uniform throughout the book.
Try reading your draft aloud. You’d be surprised at how many errors, shifts in tone, or other things you’d like to change that you don’t notice while reading in your head. Go ahead and do a read-through of your draft out loud.

8. Work with an editor

Once you’ve created the best draft you can, it’s time to hire an editor . As we mentioned, there are multiple types of book editing, so you’ll need to choose the one(s) that are best for you and your project when learning how to write a biography.

For instance, you can work with a developmental editor who helps with big-picture stuff. Think book structure, organization, and overall storytelling. Or you might work with a line editor who focuses on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and the like.

There are also specialized copy editors, content editors, fact-checkers, and more.

It’s in your best interest to do a substantial amount of research before choosing an editor since they’ll have a large impact on your book. Many editors are open to doing a paid trial so you can see their work before you sign them on for the entire book.

9. Hire a book cover designer

Once you’ve worked with your editor(s) to finalize your book, it’s time to get your book ready to go out into the world. So the next step in learning how to write a biography is to hire a book cover designer to create a cover that grabs readers’ attention (pssst: did you know that all SelfPublishing authors get done-for-you professional book design? Ask us about it !).

10. Get an ISBN

The next step in learning how to write a biography is getting an ISBN number for your book – or an International Standard Book Number. It’s a unique way to identify your book and is critical for ordering, inventory tracking, and more.

Bear in mind that each rendition of your book – regardless of when you publish them – will need their own ISBN numbers. So if you initially publish as a softcover and hardcover book and then decide to publish an ebook with the same exact content, you’ll need 3 total ISBN numbers.

To get an ISBN, head to ISBN.org and follow the steps they provide. Or reference our guide right here for step-by-step instructions (complete with photos) on how to get an ISBN number for self-published books.

11. Create a launch plan

Now is the most exciting part of learning how to write a biography. It’s time to get your book out into the world! You’ll need to map out your plan, schedule events , finalize your pricing strategy, and more.

And you can’t just launch your book in a single day. When you go through all the work of learning how to write a biography, you want your book to succeed – and that requires a strategic marketing plan . Luckily, we have an entire guide to launching a book to help you figure it out.

Get your free book template!

Learning how to write a biography can be challenging, but when you have a clear plan and guidance, the process is much easier. We’ve helped thousands of aspiring authors just like you write and self-publish their own books. We know what works – and how to become a successfully published author faster.

Take the first step today and down the book template below!

And, if you need additional help with learning how to write a biography, remember that we’re standing by to assist you. Just schedule a book consultation and one of our team members will help answer any of your questions about the writing or self-publishing process.

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Blog • Perfecting your Craft

Posted on Jun 05, 2024

How to Write an Autobiography: The Story of Your Life

About the author.

Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.

About Savannah Cordova

Savannah is a senior editor with Reedsy and a published writer whose work has appeared on Slate, Kirkus, and BookTrib. Her short fiction has appeared in the Owl Canyon Press anthology, "No Bars and a Dead Battery".

Anyone who’s lived a long, interesting life (as many of us have in one way or another!) may dream of someday turning their life into a book. However, the practicalities of how to write an autobiography can be daunting — especially to those who don’t have much writing experience.

If you feel ready to write your autobiography but aren’t sure where to start, this guide will take you from opening lines to (hopefully) publishing your autobiography for all the world to read.

1. Understand what an autobiography entails

When asked to picture an autobiography, you might think of a celebrity tell-all or political memoir. This isn’t inaccurate ; a memoir would definitely fall under the autobiography umbrella. But to be really precise, there are a few key differences between memoirs and autobiographies:

Memoirs tend to be more thematic and focus on a central narrative (similar to a novel), whereas an autobiography is highly factual and reads more like “classic” nonfiction.
Memoirs focus on a specific period or theme in a person’s life, while autobiographies aim to give a complete, chronological picture.
Lastly, many memoirs are written while the writer is still young. An autobiography, though, should be written later in one’s life — at a point where one’s life story can be told comprehensively.

An autobiography is also different from a biography in that it is always narrated by the subject. Note that we’ve said “narrated” instead of “written” because, indeed, many autobiographies are created with the help of ghostwriters!

Ghostwritten autobiographies aren’t just for celebrities, either. People from all walks of life work with ghostwriters to record their stories or simply guide them through the process.

If that sounds like you, have a look through our vetted ghostwriters on the Reedsy marketplace . You might just find your dream collaborator!

MEET GHOSTWRITERS

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Your mission? A fantastic book. Find the perfect writer to complete it on Reedsy.

Should you write a memoir or an autobiography?

In other words, if you’re still young (be honest here!), and/or if the book you want to write is more a series of vignettes revolving around a central theme, you may have a memoir on your hands. If that’s the case, check out our guide to how to write a memoir for more tailored advice.

But if you’ve already lived a long, interesting life — one that you feel prepared to share chronologically and completely — then an autobiography is the medium for you.

2. Outline your life's main “beats”

You might think you don’t need to be too picky about what to include in your autobiography since it’s supposed to be a “complete” account — and you’d be mostly right! That said, even in a fairly exhaustive autobiography, it’s still useful to identify the key “beats” before you begin.

What should you include in an autobiography?

While each person’s autobiography will be unique to them, readers expect certain “beats” to be covered. To get the ball rolling, here’s a list of classic autobiographical beats to hit:

🐣 Your birth and family background – possibly including how your parents met, where they were living at the time of your birth, whether you have any siblings, etc.
📚 Your early days at school – including the friends you made (whether long-lasting or not), your academic achievements (and failures), and any critical moments related to your future goals/actions.
🧑🏽‍💻 Your first job – this is often enlightening for readers, particularly if it had some bearing on your later career; whether because you realized that you loved the work or, more likely, that you didn’t want to work your first job forever.
👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩 Your first relationship – similar to your first job, this is often a major stepping stone into adulthood and understanding your priorities.
Moving house;
Having children;
Getting promoted;
Receiving an award;
Traveling somewhere new;
Or discovering anything significant about yourself.
💼 Your retirement – if applicable, this will likely be one of the last beats you cover; it might include why you decided to retire, how you are spending your time nowadays, and any plans for the future.

Remember that each beat you include should contribute to a holistic portrait of your life — whether it’s something that shaped your character or lends context to another parallel moment later on.

But not everything will be relevant. There’s no need to include random things that have no bearing on any other event or important element of your life; that said, the lucky thing about memory is that you likely won’t recall most of those things anyway!

Need some help outlining your autobiography? Check out our Biography Outline Template below — while not entirely chronological, it’s a great starting point for any aspiring autobiographical author.

FREE RESOURCE

Biography Outline Template

Craft a satisfying story arc for your biography with our free template.

3. Try to write in chronological order

Having come up with a solid outline, you should now feel (somewhat) prepared to start writing your autobiography… and, ideally, to start writing it in chronological order.

While many books can be drafted non-chronologically, an autobiography is not one of them. This is because each new chapter quite literally builds on the last; this is different even from a memoir, which often skips around in time and leaves out details. The best way to ensure you’re not missing anything is to write your autobiography as chronologically as possible!

How to start an autobiography

On the note of starting your autobiography, it’s pretty straightforward: begin either with your birth or slightly before, e.g., with your parents. Unlike a memoir, which can start in medias res ( in the middle of the action ), an autobiography should start ab ovo , or “from the egg.”

This is one of the biggest benefits of writing chronologically: you always know where to start, and indeed, what should come next. Here are two strong autobiography openings to give a sense of how yours might sound:

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb

When I was born, people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my father. I arrived at dawn as the last star blinked out… I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.

Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca and William Novak:

Nicola Iacocca, my father, arrived in this country in 1902 at the age of twelve — poor, alone, and scared. He used to say the only thing he was sure of when he got here was that the world was round. And that was only because another Italian boy named Christopher Columbus had preceded him by 410 years, almost to the day.

Though each opening takes a different tack — Yousafzai’s autobiography begins with her actual birth, while Iacocca’s begins even earlier, with his father’s arrival in America — both serve as effective starts to their respective books and set the tone for what’s to come.

4. Include plenty of detail

In case we haven’t drilled down on this enough, let’s reiterate once more: an autobiography should be a complete overview of your life from beginning to end. That means that as you get into properly writing it, you should include as much detail as you can remember.

Taking one of our previous suggested beats — “your first job” — as an example, here are a few questions you might ask yourself to recount your memories in more detail:

How did you get your first job?
What made you want to work there?
What was the environment/atmosphere like — physically and emotionally?
What was your greatest accomplishment at this job? Your greatest failure?
What did you learn from working there? How did it affect your later career?

As you can probably tell from these questions, the natural corollary to the advice of “be detailed!” is to also be honest . Don’t shy away from your failures or regrets — an autobiography without mistakes is not an autobiography, but rather a puff piece.

Examples of strong biographical detail

For those wondering how to inject detail into their writing, here are two examples from great autobiographies that do exactly that. Each takes a different approach to engage readers — perhaps you can pick up some descriptive techniques to suit your own life story.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

There was no natural light in my cell; a single bulb burned overhead twenty-four hours a day. I did not have a wristwatch and I often thought it was the middle of the night when it was only late afternoon. I had nothing to read, nothing to write on or with, no one to talk to [...] After a time in solitary, I relished the company even of the insects in my cell, and found myself on the verge of initiating conversations with a cockroach.

This passage’s evocative details — the single lightbulb, Mandela’s loss of his internal clock — convey the crushing loneliness of solitary confinement, yet also add levity with the bit about cockroaches.

This give-and-take style may be useful if you, too, are writing an autobiography which includes difficult or traumatic elements. Don’t shy away from the hard parts, but don’t let solemnity overpower your personality and voice!

Becoming by Michelle Obama

When you’re little, a piano can look like it has a thousand keys. You’re staring at an expanse of black and white that stretches farther than two small arms can reach. [...] The keys on Robbie’s piano had a subtle unevenness of color and shape, places where bits of ivory had broken off over time, leaving them looking like a set of bad teeth.

This passage uses sensory details and an intimate tone to draw readers in, describing not just how the piano looks, but how it feels to play. All this makes for a very compelling narrative style — almost like that of a novel. If you want your autobiography to flow this way, try reading more nonfiction in this style (indeed, many memoirs read quite similarly).

📚 Looking for more examples of brilliant biographical writing? Check out this list of The 30 Best Biographies of All Time to inspire you.

5. Do research to fill in the gaps

No matter how carefully you rack your brains, you won’t be able to recall every detail of your life. That’s where research comes in! Here are a couple of things you can do to learn more about yourself and your past.

Interview friends and family

While you’ve likely retained the core of each important life memory, some details will still elude you. For these, you might call on friends, family members, and anyone else who was in your life at the time — interviewing them should help flesh things out in your autobiography.

You might try a few different interview strategies, depending on what you’re hoping to achieve:

Ask specific questions based on what you can’t remember/don’t know (e.g. “Whose wedding was that again?” or “Why did Dad quit that job in Pasadena?”);
Ask your subject to recount everything they can about an event (e.g. “Tell me how you remember our high school graduation”); or
Ask them if they have any key memories of you which they would like to talk about.

The first interview style will be the quickest, but the latter two might yield more interesting results. If you’re prioritizing thoroughness, we’d highly recommend calling up a few old friends or close family members, sitting down, and recording your interview for a few hours.

Do “traditional" research if needed

Having written as much as you can, and interviewed other people to add their stories, you might still find yourself missing information. If applicable, this is where you could turn to “traditional” research — that is, looking up relevant records and documentation, or even taking a field trip or two to previous neighborhoods.

It’s up to you how far to go with this; just don’t go mad, and try to avoid any rabbit holes that tempt you to write an entirely new book. (Then again, that could always be your next project! Check out our post on how to write a nonfiction book to learn more.)

6. Give your draft a discerning edit

You’ve finally finished a detailed draft — congratulations! Even if you don’t do anything else with your autobiography, your friends and family will be wildly impressed, and your descendants will have a fascinatingly thorough record of your life.

But if you want to publish your autobiography — or even if you suspect it hasn’t turned out quite as expected — you’ll now need to enter the editing stage. There are a few different types of editing to consider for your autobiography, including:

Structural editing to heighten the impact of your key beats;
Line editing to improve the syntax, flow, and clarity of your sentences; and
Fact-checking and proofreading to ensure your book doesn’t contain any errors.

Again, it’s up to you how extensively you want to edit your autobiography. If you’re doing it yourself, we’d suggest going top-to-bottom — first structural editing, then line editing, then proofreading — to avoid unnecessary work. ( Check out this post on how to self-edit your book for key tips!)

And if this all feels overwhelming, you can always work with a professional editor to get your autobiography in tip-top shape . Autobiography and memoir specialists can help turn your work into an Iacocca-worthy masterpiece.

MEET EDITORS

Polish your book with expert help

7. Format and publish your autobiography

Now comes the really fun part, if you so choose it — formatting and publishing your autobiography for everyone to read!

Biography fans out there will know that auto/biographies often contain a selection of personal photos within the text. If you’re envisioning this, it will require specialty formatting; you’ll either need to intersperse photos throughout the text or format your book with a “photo section” in the middle (the more common option).

You can do this with free book formatting tools like Reedsy Studio . Or if you’re not confident in your formatting abilities, consider hiring a professional typesetter to help !

As for publishing, many autobiographers choose to self-publish their books to get them out as quickly as possible, and to have more control over the process. However, if you’re interested in selling your autobiography to a publisher — a reasonable option if you are a businessperson, and especially if you already have a decent following — we’d suggest this post on how to write a non-fiction query letter to get you started.

Whatever path you take, whether you decide to publish it or not, writing the story of your life is an incredibly enlightening endeavor. If you're interested in novels instead, check out this advice from NYT bestselling author Caroline Leavitt ! We hope this guide has helped you on your journey; indeed, as autobiographical writing teaches us, the journey really is the greatest reward.

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Columns > Published on February 29th, 2012

Autobiographical Fiction: Using Your Real Life To Craft Great Fiction

There is a fine line between a fictionalized autobiography or memoir and autobiographical fiction. In both cases, the author includes tidbits about his or her life. The difference is to what extent. Fictionalized autobiographies are mostly a truthful telling of the author’s experience with sections fictionalized to “protect the innocent”, filling gaps where memory fails, and occasionally rearranging events for maximum narrative effect. Generally speaking, the reader is to believe the author’s account and take it for truth.

On the other hand, autobiographical fiction is primarily comprised of made up events and characters that may be based on the author’s own experience and self. The protagonist might be modeled after the author and do at least some of the things the author has actually done in his or her life. However, the ratio of truth to fiction will be somewhat small.

Of course, there are a plethora of variations—writers (as you know) don’t like to be held to a genre. And some of the best books out there are nearly impossible to categorize as being either memoir or fiction. Unless the writer is like Dave Eggers, who obsessively detailed all the possible fictionalizations that appear in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , we as readers are not likely to know what percentage of a memoir has been fictionalized nor how much of a writer’s own life appears in a book labeled as fiction.

In this article, though, I will focus on autobiographical fiction, or works that are primarily made up and billed to the reader as such, but which contain characters and events from the author’s real life. Keeping in mind that the goal is to write fiction, I have a few ideas on how to make it work.

Don’t focus on the facts

It can easily be argued that all fiction is autobiographical in some way because it undoubtedly contains elements of the author’s actual experience. A writer who pens a story about a school can be assumed to have either attended school or know people that have. The school does not need to be the writer’s school nor resemble it in any real way; the concept of “school” exists in the writer’s memory and is therefore based on some type of real experience. Place often appears in autobiographical stories. It’s well known that Stephen King based The Shining on a real hotel in Colorado, and that most of his stories take place in Maine because, well, he’s from there. The stories he writes are not about him. He is not a possessed father stalking his family in a remote mountain resort, but his experience of having actually stayed in the Stanley Hotel informed his fiction. Mr. King is actually a pretty nice guy with a vivid imagination, a writer who can transform a real memory into an entirely new world inside the pages of his novels.

Let’s use King’s book Under the Dome as an example. In the book, King creates a detailed and credible environment—a small town in Maine—that is inexplicably covered by an impenetrable dome one day. While the situation of being stuck under a dome is outrageous, and certainly not autobiographical, the world of the small town and its citizens is entirely realistic, a genuine portrait of a typical small Northeastern village. King is able to write authentically about such a town because of his own experience as a Maine resident. Without a doubt, his real experiences informed his fictional town.

In this way, King used the best of his personal experience combined with real fictional prowess. If people or places in the book were based on actual people and places, their similarity would be effectively obscured by the overall plot.

Cut the crap

When converting truth to fiction, it's best to cull only the essential and leave all the rest. Fiction writers have complete license to keep only the best tidbits of the story. Even memoirs can benefit from a little cutting. Keeping only the juiciest bits and tossing the less-than-interesting parts into the compost is a smart way to use a piece of truth to its full fictional advantage.

Let’s use a real story from my own life as an example to work from:

The summer after I graduated high school, my best friend and I decided to spend our day off down at the river that ran through our small Colorado town. A few hours into our excursion, us happily wading in the cool water and sunning ourselves, a man appeared on the opposite side of the river, roughly 150 feet away from us. I watched as he descended the bank. I looked away, undisturbed as it’s a popular spot. When I looked back up, he was ankle deep in the water, and totally naked. He waved to us. Sensing it was time to go, my friend and I quickly packed our stuff and all but ran back to her car along the tiny path that went from the sandy area of riverbank where we had been hanging out to the road. The path, narrow and steep in places, was up the bank from the river, and a layer of trees obscured the river’s edge. About halfway back to the car, we heard a voice address us from the trees. “You don’t have to leave on my account.” We both looked down in horror to see the naked man had somehow crossed the river and was now standing within feet of us. How he’d arrived there so quickly, we’ll never know. The river was wide at that section and, in order to have appeared ahead of us in the trees as we tried to escape, the naked man would have had to wade upstream across the rushing, 2-3 foot deep water, walking on slippery rocks the entire way as the river was not deep enough to swim in. Surprised, we mumbled something about having to go and bolted down the path toward her car. When we got there, we checked under the car, in the backseat and then locked ourselves in. When I looked back at the river as we peeled out, he was nowhere to be seen.

Now there are many elements to this story, and most of them aren’t interesting in the bigger picture. For one, who cares who it was, where or when it was. The juiciest morsel of this story, and the only thing I would preserve should I someday work it into a piece of fiction, is the fact of the naked man miraculously fording a white-water river to freak-out a couple of girls. I might keep his quote for the sheer absurdity of it, but not necessarily. The rest of the details I’d leave out or change completely to fit better in the fictionalized world that I am creating.

Change the ending

Unlike memoir, which can be forgiven for presenting events in a less-than narratively perfect way, any real life details in autobiographical fiction must neatly line up with other plot elements in the story. Say, for instance, you are the real life Hamlet, and not only did you live, but a few other people in your story did also. Some of those flesh wounds from the final scene turned out to be not-so-bad, and a few people went on to lead relatively normal lives when it was all said and done. Well that’s great for you, but it doesn’t make for such good storytelling. The only ending that makes sense in Hamlet, the one that will leave the most impact is for the hero and the villains to die in order for the final resolution to be possible.

Same is true for any fictional adaptation of an autobiographical story. David Copperfield is a not-so-thinly veiled autobiography of Charles Dickens’ life, with whole sections, such as David/Charles’ work in a blacking factory as a young boy, pulled directly from Dickens' life. But, entire chapters are pure fiction, as it should be. For one, Charles was not an orphan, though he spent some time almost on his own while his father served time in debtor’s prison. Like David, Charles married a woman he turned out to be not-so-fond of after all, but she didn’t die childless as David's Dora did. Rather, she bore him many children before their marriage fizzled and he ran off with an actress (long after David Copperfield was published.) Ultimately, David Copperfield can only be considered a versioning of Dickens’ real, self adjusted enough to create good, rich fiction. Of course, Dickens’ wrote the end of David’s story long before his own story ended, so he could not end David's life as his eventually ended. Instead, he gave David the ending that best fit the life Dickens wrote for him on the page. While there may have been similarities, ultimately Dickens knew it was the story that must prevail and so wrote accordingly. He's known as a master of fiction, and David Copperfield is one of those fictional masterpieces in which he used the best from his real life and made up the rest.

Now You Try

As I did in article above, select a story from your own life. It can be a silly story like mine, something laughed at over at parties, or it can be more serious or life-altering. Distil it down to the most essential element. What exactly makes the story compelling. Then try to write a new story that uses that little tidbit of truth, but is otherwise fictional. Please share in the comments below or email me directly: [email protected] .

About the author

Taylor Houston is a genuine Word Nerd living in Portland, OR where she works as a technical writer for an engineering firm and volunteers on the planning committee for Wordstock, a local organization dedicated to writing education.

She holds a degree in Creative Writing and Spanish from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. In the English graduate program at Penn State , she taught college composition courses and hosted a poetry club for a group of high school writers.

While living in Seattle, Taylor started and taught a free writing class called Writer’s Cramp (see the website). She has also taught middle school Language Arts & Spanish, tutored college students, and mentored at several Seattle writing establishments such as Richard Hugo House. She’s presented on panels at Associated Writing Programs Conference and the Pennsylvania College English Conference and led writing groups in New York, Pennsylvania, and Colorado for writers of all ages & abilities. She loves to read, write, teach & debate the Oxford Comma with anyone who will stand still long enough.

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Learn How to Write a Biography: A Step-by-Step Guide.
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Learn How to Write a Biography: A Step-by-Step Guide.

Human lives are intricate tapestries woven with experiences, emotions, challenges, and triumphs. Biographies and autobiographies serve as windows into these remarkable stories, offering insight into the lives of individuals who have left their mark on history or those who wish to chronicle their own journeys.

I n this guide, we will explore the art of writing biographies and autobiographies, delving into the nuances of both genres and providing valuable tips on how to craft compelling narratives.

Understanding Biography and Autobiography

Biography: Exploring Lives Beyond the Surface A biography is a literary exploration that unveils the intricate layers of a person’s existence, transcending the mere listing of events. It provides a comprehensive account of an individual’s life, offering insights into their achievements, struggles, societal impact, and distinct qualities that define them. These narratives serve as windows into history, allowing readers to traverse time and understand the legacy left by remarkable individuals. Biographies are usually crafted by biographers, individuals skilled in research and storytelling. They undertake a meticulous journey of gathering information from diverse sources, such as historical records, interviews, letters, and secondary literature. The biographer’s role is to curate these fragments of information into a coherent narrative, painting a vivid portrait of the subject. This comprehensive approach lends credibility and depth to the portrayal, enriching the reader’s understanding of the subject’s contributions and character. Example: Consider the biography of Mahatma Gandhi. A biographer compiling his life story would explore not only his role in India’s fight for independence but also his principles of nonviolence, his experiments with truth, and his impact on the world’s political landscape. By presenting a holistic view of Gandhi’s life, the biography reveals the nuances of his personality, beliefs, and the larger context in which he operated.
Autobiography: The Intimate Dialogue of Self-Discovery An autobiography is a narrative journey undertaken by the subject themselves—a profound sharing of one’s life experiences, emotions, and reflections. This genre provides readers with an intimate insight into the subject’s psyche, allowing them to witness their life’s trajectory through personal recollections. Autobiographies carry a unique authenticity, as they are composed from the vantage point of the person who lived those moments, providing a firsthand account of their journey. Autobiographies draw from the subject’s reservoir of memories, emotions, and introspections. This self-exploration leads to a narrative that is often more than a linear chronicle; it becomes a tapestry woven with the threads of emotions, thoughts, and personal revelations. By directly communicating with the reader, the autobiographer creates a powerful connection, allowing readers to step into their shoes and experience their story from within. Example: A notable example of an autobiography is “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank. Written during her time in hiding during World War II, the book offers a candid portrayal of Anne’s life, fears, hopes, and dreams. Through her own words, readers gain a deep understanding of the challenges faced by Jews during the Holocaust, as well as the resilience and humanity that Anne exudes even in the face of adversity.

Writing a Biography:

Research: The Foundation of a Compelling Biography Thorough research is the cornerstone of a captivating biography. Delve into reputable sources like books, articles, interviews, and archives to gather a comprehensive view of your subject’s life. By immersing yourself in these materials, you gain insights into their experiences, motivations, and contributions. Scrutinise the historical context to understand the era’s impact on their journey. Successful research forms the bedrock of your biography, enabling you to present an accurate and nuanced portrayal that resonates with readers. It’s through meticulous research that you uncover the hidden stories and connect the dots, allowing the subject’s essence to shine through the pages.

Selecting a Focus: Defining the Narrative Scope Choosing a focal point is essential for a well-structured biography. Decide whether to cover the subject’s entire life or concentrate on specific periods or achievements. This decision shapes the narrative’s trajectory, preventing it from becoming overwhelming or disjointed. A focused approach allows you to delve deeply into pivotal moments, providing a more profound understanding of the subject’s journey. By clarifying the scope, you enable readers to follow a coherent storyline, making it easier for them to engage with the subject’s life in a meaningful way.

Structuring the Biography: Chronology and Themes The organisation of your biography greatly impacts its readability. Structure your work into logical sections or chapters, employing either a chronological or thematic arrangement. Begin with an engaging introduction that captures readers’ attention and provides essential context. A chronological structure follows the subject’s life in sequential order, offering a clear timeline of events. Alternatively, a thematic structure groups events by themes, allowing you to explore different facets of the subject’s life. A well-structured biography guides readers smoothly through the subject’s experiences, fostering a deeper connection and understanding.

Show, Don’t Tell: Evocative Storytelling Vivid descriptions, anecdotes, and quotes breathe life into your biography. Rather than merely listing facts, employ descriptive language to recreate scenes and emotions, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the subject’s world. Use anecdotes to illustrate key moments, capturing the essence of the subject’s character and the impact of events on their journey. Integrating quotes from the subject, contemporaries, or relevant sources adds authenticity and depth. Through this technique, you transport readers into the subject’s experiences, enabling them to witness the moments that shaped their lives.

Balanced Perspective: Portraying Strengths and Flaws A balanced portrayal adds credibility and depth to your biography. While it’s tempting to focus solely on accomplishments, a well-rounded view includes the subject’s strengths and flaws. This authenticity humanises the subject, making it relatable and multidimensional. By acknowledging both successes and challenges, readers gain a more honest understanding of their journey. Balancing positives and negatives helps readers empathise with the subject, connecting them on a deeper level and offering a more genuine insight into their lives.

Engaging Emotions: Creating Emotional Resonance Emotions are a potent tool in biography writing. Delve into the subject’s feelings, struggles, and aspirations to create an emotional connection with readers. By tapping into their emotional experiences, you make the narrative relatable and engaging. Sharing personal challenges and triumphs allows readers to empathise and reflect on their own lives. This emotional resonance elevates the biography from a mere factual account to a compelling and moving story that lingers in readers’ minds, leaving a lasting impact.

Citing Sources: Ensuring Accuracy and Credibility Accurate information is vital in biography writing. Properly cite your sources to maintain credibility and integrity. Clear citations not only lend authority to your work but also provide readers with the opportunity to explore further if they desire. Accurate referencing safeguards against misinformation and ensures that your portrayal is based on reliable evidence. In addition to enhancing your credibility, thorough citations demonstrate your commitment to thorough research and ethical writing practises, contributing to the overall trustworthiness of your biography.

Complete Guide to Write a Biography. Start Writing Your Biography Now

Writing an Autobiography:

Reflecting on Significant Moments and Experiences Initiating an autobiography involves introspection into your life’s pivotal moments. Delve into memories that have influenced your journey, such as turning points, challenges, relationships, and achievements. Reflect on these experiences, dissecting their impact on your personal growth and development. By contemplating these key events, you gain insight into the narrative threads that weave your life story together. This reflective process sets the foundation for an authentic autobiography that resonates with readers on a profound level.

Developing Your Unique Voice and Tone Crafting an autobiography demands a consistent voice and tone that reflect your personality. Write in a way that feels true to you, capturing your unique perspective and emotions. Authenticity is key, as it allows readers to connect with your narrative on a personal level. Whether your tone is introspective, humorous, or contemplative, ensure it aligns with the essence of your experiences. By embracing your genuine voice, you create an autobiography that not only tells your story but also conveys the essence of who you are.

Structured Storytelling for Engagement While autobiographies can be more flexible in structure compared to biographies, organising your narrative into coherent sections or themes enhances its readability. By grouping related experiences together, you provide readers with a clearer understanding of the themes that have shaped your life. This structure helps maintain their engagement by guiding them through your journey in a logical and compelling manner. While allowing for creativity, a structured approach ensures that your autobiography remains focused and accessible.

Embracing honesty and authenticity Honesty is the bedrock of an impactful autobiography. Share not only your triumphs but also your mistakes and failures. Authenticity creates relatability, allowing readers to connect with your humanity and vulnerabilities. Your journey’s challenges and setbacks are just as integral to your story as your successes. By being candid about your experiences, you demonstrate resilience and growth, inspiring readers to reflect on their own paths. This level of authenticity fosters a deeper connection, making your autobiography a source of empathy and encouragement.

Adding Depth Through Reflection Incorporate reflection to imbue your autobiography with depth and meaning. Explore the lessons you’ve learned from your experiences and the transformations they’ve prompted. Delve into how these moments shaped your beliefs, values, and perspective on life. By offering insights gained from introspection, you provide readers with wisdom and a broader understanding of your journey. Reflection transforms your autobiography from a chronicle of events into a thoughtful exploration of personal growth and the profound impact of life’s moments.

Creating vivid details for immersion Immerse readers in your world by employing sensory details and vivid descriptions. Paint a picture with words, allowing readers to visualise the scenes and emotions you’re describing. By incorporating sensory elements like sights, sounds, smells, and feelings, you transport readers into the moments you’re recounting. This immersive experience draws them closer to your story, fostering a stronger connection. Vivid details not only make your autobiography more engaging but also enable readers to forge a deeper connection with your experiences and emotions.

In the realm of literature, biographies and autobiographies stand as powerful testaments to the diversity and richness of human existence. Whether you’re capturing the life of a historical figure or penning your own life story, the art of writing these genres involves meticulous research, introspection, and a keen understanding of human emotions.

Through carefully chosen words and evocative storytelling, biographers and autobiographers alike can craft narratives that resonate with readers and offer a deeper understanding of the human experience. So, whether you’re writing about the extraordinary or the everyday, embrace the challenge and privilege of narrating lives through the written word.

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How to Write a Biography: A Step-by-Step Guide

By Hannah Yang

What is a biography, a step-by-step guide to writing a biography, tips for how to write a great biography, conclusion on how to write a biography.

Writing a biography can be a rewarding endeavor, but it can also feel a bit daunting if you’ve never written one before.

Whether you’re capturing the life story of a famous person, a family member, or even yourself, creating a compelling biography involves a mix of thorough research, narrative skill, and a personal touch.

So, how exactly do you write a successful biography?

In this guide, we’ll break down the essentials to help you craft a biography that’s both informative and engaging, as well as our top tips for how to make it truly shine.

A biography is a detailed account of someone’s life.

A well-written biography needs to be objective and accurate. At the same time, it needs to depict more than just the basic facts like birth, education, work, relationships, and death—it should also portray the subject’s personal experience of those events.

So, in addition to being a good researcher, a good biographer also needs to be a good storyteller. You should provide insights into the subject’s personality, motivations, and impact on the world around them.

What’s the Difference Between a Biography, a Memoir, and an Autobiography?

What's the difference between biography, memoir and autobiography?

Understanding the distinctions between different genres of life writing is crucial for both writers and readers. Here’s a quick breakdown of the key differences between a biography and other related genres.

Biography: a detailed account of a person’s life, usually written in the third-person POV and supported by extensive research

Autobiography: a self-written account of the author’s own life, usually written in the first person POV and following a chronological order

Memoir: a collection of memories that an individual writes about moments or events that took place in their life, usually in the first person POV and in an introspective and personal way

Narrative nonfiction: a book that tells true stories using the techniques of fiction writing, such as character development, narrative arc, and detailed settings

Best Biography Examples to Study

The best way to learn how to write well is to read other successful books within the genre you’re writing.

Here are five great biographies to add to your reading list. For a longer list, check out our article on the 20 best biographies to read .

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand: the incredible true story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympian and World War II hero.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson: a comprehensive and engaging account of the Apple co-founder’s life.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow: the biography that inspired the hit musical, providing a deep dive into Hamilton ’ s life and legacy.

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford: a nuanced story that uncovers the family connection between the three Millay sisters and their mother.

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston: the story of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade.

As with writing any book, writing a biography is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s easier to think of it as a series of smaller steps than as one big challenge to tackle.

Let’s break down the process step by step.

1. Choose Your Subject

Decide who you want to write about. It could be a well-known celebrity, a historical figure, or someone close to you.

In addition to figuring out who you’re writing about, this is also the step where you figure out why you want to write about them. Why is this a story worth telling, and what makes you interested in it?

Maybe the subject of your biography overcame major hardships in life to achieve success, and that story will inspire others facing similar struggles. Or maybe they made a really unique contribution to the world that not enough people know about, and you want to shine a bigger spotlight on that impact.

Knowing why you’re telling this story will help you make the right decisions about how to research, outline, draft, and edit your biography.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is a crucial step in writing a good biography. You should tailor your biography to the interests and knowledge level of your audience.

A biography for a general audience will differ from one written for experts in a particular field. For example, two biographies about Emily Dickinson would be vastly different if one is written for young children and the other is written for adult poets.

3. Conduct Research

Dive deep into your research. Use a variety of sources to get a well-rounded view of your subject’s life. Take detailed notes and organize your findings.

Gather as much information as you can about your subject. This includes primary sources like interviews, letters, and diaries, as well as secondary sources such as books, articles, and documentaries.

Here are some primary sources to look for:

Letters and diaries: These provide intimate insights into the subject’s thoughts, feelings, and daily life, and can often be found in family archives, libraries, and historical societies.

Birth, marriage, and death certificates: These documents can provide crucial dates and familial relationships.

Census data: Census records can provide demographic information and track changes over time.

Property records: These can reveal where the subject lived and owned property.

Employment and school records: These records offer formalized insights into the subject’s education and career.

Military records: If applicable, military records can provide information on service, ranks, and honors.

Photos and videos: Look for photographs and videos in public libraries, historical societies, online databases like the Library of Congress, and family photo albums.

Historical newspapers: Access archives of local and national newspapers for articles, interviews, and obituaries related to the subject.

Digital archives: Use online resources like ProQuest, Chronicling America, and newspaper databases available through public libraries.

You can also look for secondary sources, which provide more context and perspective, such as:

Existing biographies: Search for existing biographies and books about the subject or their era. How does your project stand out from the crowd?

Academic articles and papers: Access journals through university libraries, which often have extensive collections of scholarly articles.

Documentaries and biographical films: You can often find these on streaming services or public television archives.

Websites and blogs: Look for reputable websites and blogs dedicated to the subject or related fields.

Social media platforms: The things people say on social media can offer insights into public perception about your subject.

Finally, you can also conduct your own interviews. Talk to the subject if they’re still alive, as well as their friends, family, and colleagues. You can ask them for personal anecdotes to add more color to your book, or more information to fill in any gaps in your knowledge.

4. Ask Engaging Questions

Great biographers start from a place of curiosity. Before you start writing, you should know the answers to the following questions:

What makes your subject’s story worth telling?

What was your subject’s childhood like?

What were your subject’s early interests and hobbies?

What level of education did your subject achieve and where did they study?

What was your subject’s personality like?

What were their beliefs and values?

How did your subject’s personality and beliefs change over time?

What were the major turning points in your subject’s life?

How was your subject affected by the major political, cultural, and societal events that occurred throughout their life?

What did their career path look like?

What were their major accomplishments?

What were their major failures?

How did they contribute to their field, their country, or their community?

Were they involved in any major controversies or scandals?

Who were the most important people in the subject’s life, such as friends, partners, or mentors?

If the subject is no longer living, how did they pass away?

What lasting impact did the subject leave behind?

5. Create an Outline

An outline helps you structure your biography. You can write an extensive outline that includes every scene you need to write, or you can keep it simple and just make a list of high-level bullet points—whatever works best for your writing process.

The best structure to use will depend on the shape of the story you’re trying to tell. Think about what your subject’s life looked like and what core messages you’re trying to leave the reader with.

If you want to keep things simple, you can simply go in chronological order. Tell the story from the birth of your subject to the death of your subject, or to the present day if this person is still living.

You can also use a more thematically organized structure, similar to what you would find on a Wikipedia page. You could break your book down into sections such as major life events, personal relationships, core accomplishments, challenges, and legacy.

Or, if you want to be more creative, you can use a nonlinear story structure, jumping between recent events and older flashbacks based on which events feel thematically tied together.

6. Write Your First Draft

Now that you have an outline, it’s time to sit down and write your first draft.

Your opening chapters should hook the reader and give a preview of what’s to come. Highlight a compelling aspect of the subject’s life to draw readers in.

In your middle chapters, cover all the key events you need to include about your subject’s life and weave in themes and anecdotes that reveal their personality and impact.

In your final chapters, wrap up your biography by summarizing the subject’s legacy and reflecting on their overall significance. This provides closure and leaves the reader with a lasting impression.

Remember that it’s okay if your first draft isn’t perfect. Your goal is simply to get words down on the page so you have something to edit.

7. Make Developmental Revisions

Now that you’re done with your first draft, it’s time to make big-picture revisions.

Review your biography for coherence and organization. Does the overall structure make sense? Are there any arcs or themes that aren’t given enough attention? Are there scenes or chapters that don’t need to be included?

8. Make Line Edits

Once you’ve completed your developmental edits, it’s time to make smaller line edits. This is your time to edit for grammar, punctuation, and style.

Make sure you keep a consistent voice throughout the book. Some biographies feel more conversational and humorous, while others are serious and sophisticated.

To get through your editing faster, you can run your manuscript through ProWritingAid , which will automatically catch errors, point out stylistic inconsistencies, and help you rephrase confusing sentences.

Don’t be afraid to ask others for feedback. No good book is written in a vacuum, and you can ask critique partners and beta readers to help you improve your work.

What makes a great biography stand out from the rest? Here are our best tips for how to take your manuscript to the next level.

Tip 1: Focus on Key Themes

Identify the central themes or patterns in the subject’s life—the ones that will really make readers keep thinking about your book. These could be related to the subject’s struggles, achievements, relationships, or values.

Tip 2: Balance Facts and Narrative

A good biography should read like a story, not a list of facts.

Use narrative techniques like imagery, character development, and dialogue to create a compelling and coherent story.

Tip 3: Add Your Own Perspective

Biographies need to be objective, but that doesn’t mean the author has to be entirely invisible. Including your own perspective can make the biography relatable and engaging.

Letting your voice shine can help illustrate the subject ’ s character and bring their story to life. It will also help make your biography stand out from the crowd.

Tip 4: Create a Timeline

Organize the key events of the subject’s life in chronological order. This will help you see the bigger picture and ensure you cover all important aspects.

Tip 5: Be Considerate

Because biographies are about real people, you should be mindful of who will be impacted by the story you’re telling, especially if your subject is still alive or still has living family members.

If the subject is still alive, ask them for permission to tell their story before you start writing. This also helps ensure that you don’t get sued.

Writing a biography is a journey of discovery, not just about the subject, but also about the craft of storytelling.

By combining thorough research, a clear structure, and engaging narrative techniques, you can create a biography that not only informs but also inspires and captivates your readers.

Don’t forget to run your manuscript through ProWritingAid so you can make sure your prose is as polished as possible.

Now, pick your subject, gather your resources, and start writing—there’s a fascinating story waiting to be told.

Good luck, and happy writing!

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Hannah Yang

Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer who writes about all things strange and surreal. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, The Dark, and elsewhere, and two of her stories have been finalists for the Locus Award. Her favorite hobbies include watercolor painting, playing guitar, and rock climbing. You can follow her work on hannahyang.com, or subscribe to her newsletter for publication updates.

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How to Write a Character Bio (With Examples!)

If you’re starting a new roleplay (RP) or Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG), then one of the things you will be expected to provide is a character biography. If you aren’t familiar with writing character bios, then you might be a little stumped on what exactly needs to be included, and what is better left out.

Although there is no perfect, established way of writing a biography for a character, there are a couple of things you could do to make it more effective and useful to your fellow roleplayers and TTRPG players. But first, you should make sure you understand exactly what a character bio entails before writing your own.

This article is specifically about creating character bios for roleplays, tabletop games, and other collaborative writing settings. If you’re looking for how to create a character for a story, try checking out How to Make Characters Interesting, Complex, and Unique instead.

What is a Character Bio?

A character bio, also known as a character profile or character biography, is a brief overview of your character that you can provide to others prior to the start of a game or roleplay. It gives them an introduction to your character before the narrative actually begins, which makes it easier to create plots and interact between characters.

Generally, a character bio includes basic information about the character, such as their name, appearance, and behavior, but it can also include topics such as backstory and motivations. Bios can look different depending on what they are being used for, the genre of the story, and the other players’ preferences.

Why is a Character Bio Important?

Character bios make it much easier for other players or RP partners to get to know your character. By providing information on your character up front, you can allow others to get to know them, build relationships between characters, and come up with ideas for the story based around your character’s information.

In addition to that, having a good character bio can be helpful to reference later, especially if they are part of a long campaign. Bios help keep your characters consistent and true to their original design. Even the best writers forget things about their characters over time, so it’s a good idea to write everything down anyway. When I take notes on my characters, I usually keep the character’s bio at the top of the page and simply add to it as events unfold in the story.

How Long Should a Character Bio Be?

One of the most important things to keep in mind when writing a character bio is that it should be short . You need to keep it clear, concise, and brief. You aren’t trying to give away your character’s life story, after all. You just want to break the ice and introduce them to the other players and characters. After all, if you gave away all their secrets at the beginning, there wouldn’t be any mysteries to uncover over the course of the story.

As a general rule, you should try to keep your character bios shorter than a page (which is typically about 300-500 words). If you make it much shorter than that, you likely wouldn’t be doing your character justice. If you wrote much more than that, however, most people probably wouldn’t get around to reading the whole thing. Character bios aren’t exactly known for being riveting literature.

What to Include in a Character Bio

When you’re writing your character’s bio, you don’t need to create an entire novel about their life and exploits. You only need to include the details that are important for others to know from the beginning. Some things aren’t even important enough to share at all.

Although some people have preferences about the ways they want character bios to be formatted, this is the generally accepted formula for writing a good character bio.

The Most Basic Character Elements

The first thing you should establish in your character’s bio is the most basic elements of who they are. That includes things like their:

Species (if applicable)

You don’t need to get fancy here. This is the easy part—just give the basic information and move on to the next section.

The Character’s Physical Description

Next, you’ll want to give a basic description of what the character looks like. For this section, you’ll want to consider their:

Physical details
Clothing style

You can cover this information in bullet points, but I find that it is much more effective to write this part in paragraph format. That makes the bio feel more like an introduction to the character, and less like some kind of legal document.

If you need some pointers for designing your character, check out Tricks for Describing a Character’s Appearance (With Examples) .

Remember to keep this part brief. Physical appearance is only one small part of a character, and you don’t want to waste too much time and energy describing what they look like—especially since you don’t want their bio to be too long.

The Character’s Personality

Obviously, most of the character’s personality should come out as you are playing them, but it’s still a good idea to give your RP partners or TTRPG players an indication of their personality before the game or RP begins.

As with the other sections, this part should be kept brief. You just want to cover the most important aspects of their personality. You know, the traits and behaviors that define who they are. That could be anything from “grumpy” or “hot-headed” to “innocent” or “creepy.” Just give a few adjectives to describe them, and describe some of their dominant behaviors. This section shouldn’t be any longer than a few sentences.

The Character’s Backstory

This section is the tricky part. You want to explain enough of your character’s backstory to explain how they got where they are in the present day, but you don’t want to give away too much and make your character a completely open book. Not only that, you want to make sure the information you are providing is meaningful to the story, and not just useless facts.

When summarizing the character’s backstory for their bio, you should cut out everything except for the bare bones. The details aren’t important now (and you can reveal more over the course of the story anyway). Instead, draw attention to a few milestones in the character’s life, whether that relates to family, education, tragedy, or something else.

What happened in their past to turn them into the person they are at the beginning of the story? Focus on those points, and leave out all the rest.

If your character doesn’t have much of a backstory yet, you might want to check out this article before moving on: How to Create Compelling Character Backstories .

What Motivates the Character

When you’re creating a bio for a character, you’ll want to consider their motivations and goals. A character without a direction is boring, so make sure you have some idea of what your character wants before the story begins. Do they want to start their own business? Hunt ghosts for a living? Avenge their dead brother? What is going to motivate your character to actually do something ?

This part of the bio is often labeled as “present day,” or it’s lumped in with the backstory section. Regardless of how you choose to format it, the point is worth drawing attention to by itself. This part is particularly important for RPs and TTRPGs because it gives partners and fellow players the context they need to understand how this character operates.

The Character’s Quirks and Flaws

I cannot stress this enough: every character needs to have flaws.

All characters need flaws. No one is perfect, so none of your characters should be either. Even if your character is perfect in one regard, they need to be flawed in some other way. The best sharpshooter in the world might be afraid of snakes. The world’s most mesmerizing dancer might have self-confidence issues.

Quirks are also important! They operate a lot like flaws, though they don’t interfere with the character’s ability to live their life normally. Having a weird sense of humor or a tendency to fidget isn’t necessarily flawed behavior, but it is worth mentioning in this section as well.

Flaws and quirks are indispensable when it comes to creating interesting characters. They create conflict, and make characters more realistic and sympathetic. Without those details, your characters just won’t resonate with other players. Or worse—you’ll get accused of creating a Mary Sue .

If you want more information on creating flaws for characters (and why they’re so important for stories), check out How to Create Complex Flaws for Characters .

Miscellaneous Traits and Abilities

Finally, you’ll probably want to include a miscellaneous category at the end of the bio. Depending on your personal preference and the genre of story you’re creating, this part could also go closer to the top. You could also use a different term, or include this category as part of the character’s basic info.

This is the section in which you include anything important that wasn’t covered in the other sections. This could include things such as the character’s:

Magical Abilities
Special Skills
Languages known

Basically, this section is meant to cover anything else that your RP partners or TTRPG players need to know about your character.

What NOT to include in a Character Bio

That “miscellaneous” category probably has you scratching your head. If that’s supposed to cover the other important parts of your character, how do you know where to stop?

There are many things that you should never include in a character bio, but there are two distinct reasons why things should be left out: either the point is boring and doesn’t matter, or it is much more fun to reveal that particular piece of information over the course of the story instead.

Here are some things that should be left out of character bios because they are uninteresting :

Their Zodiac sign
Every single detail of their appearance or personality
Their entire life story
Their birthday
Their entire family tree
Their favorite food/color/etc

Here are the things that should be left out because they would make good plot points later :

Their secrets
Their relationships with other characters
Their strengths and weaknesses
Their past trauma or struggles

Character Bio Examples

Character bios don’t have to show off your best writing skills. The point isn’t to impress the pants off the other players, and it’s definitely not to prove you’re a better writer than anyone else. You aren’t showing off, you’re just providing a resource on your character that is necessary for the game or RP.

With that said, here are some examples of character bios to give you a better idea of how to apply all this information.

Sample Character Bio 1

Name: Rory Bannon

Sex/Gender: Male

Species: Human (Superhero)

Superpower: He can float.

Power Drawbacks: He’s not very good at controlling his ability, and it is dependent on his mood. Sometimes, he will begin to float when he gets excited.

Appearance: Rory is tall and lanky, and his limbs almost look too long for his body. He has brown hair with a stripe of orange in the front. He has a goofy smile, and he holds a lot of childish optimism in his sunny green eyes. He always wears a suit no matter where he goes, believing that dressing for success is the first step to achieving it.

Personality: He’s chipper and optimistic, and all his friends agree that he’s a bit of a hopeless romantic. He’s a dreamer, and his head is often stuck in the clouds.

Backstory: Rory is an only child from a loving home. He decided to attend a school for young heroes to learn how to control his powers, with the full support of his doting parents.

Goals: He wants to learn how to control his powers and use them to help others.

Quirks: He’s gotten pretty good at floating up—just not at coming back down again.

Sample Character Bio 2

Name: Alice Howard

Nicknames: Red, Little Red, Pumpkin (by her father)

Sex/Gender: Female

Appearance: Alice is the preppy, pretty girl at school, with a figure that makes boys drool. Her long hair is a gorgeous shade of reddish-brown, and delicate freckles dot her petite, pale features. She is careful to keep her makeup perfect, and she is always pushing the limits of what her school’s dress code allows.

Personality: Despite her looks, Alice is remarkably insecure. She thrives off compliments and bases her entire self-worth on what others think of her. One bad pimple is enough to get her to skip school, and she takes even the smallest insults to heart. Despite how she feels about beauty and her own self-image, she always tries to be uplifting and encouraging to other girls, and would never say anything nasty about the way someone looks.

Backstory: Alice lives with her grandparents since both of her parents are deployed Marines. Her grandparents are getting quite old, and they often require her help more often than she needs them. She does her best to be responsible, but she often regrets that she can’t get out as much as other girls her age.

Goals: Alice has a history of bad relationships. All she wants is a good boyfriend and real friends.

Quirks: She has a tendency to be clingy and physically affectionate with her friends.

Misc: Alice’s one true love is food, specifically greasy, tex-mex food.

Sample Character Bio 3

Name: Samson Anders

Nickname: Sams

Species: Half-human, half-demon

Height: 6’2”

Hair: Long, Brown

Eye Color: Hazel

Skin Color: Medium-light

Physical Details: He has a large scar over the left side of his neck and collarbone, and multiple smaller scars all over.

Personality: Harsh, cold, and unapproachable. He has a softer side for those he cares about.

Past: He isn’t one to talk about his past. Most of his friends know that he had a rough childhood, but no one knows the details.

Present: He is living with a friend in a one-bedroom apartment, and the duo are professional ghost hunters.

Goals: Secretly, he hopes to learn more about his demonic side.

Quirks/Flaws: He tends to grow out his facial hair when he is feeling down, simply because he can’t be bothered to shave.

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Education and Communications

How to Write a Biography

Last Updated: May 28, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Stephanie Wong Ken, MFA . Stephanie Wong Ken is a writer based in Canada. Stephanie's writing has appeared in Joyland, Catapult, Pithead Chapel, Cosmonaut's Avenue, and other publications. She holds an MFA in Fiction and Creative Writing from Portland State University. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 1,874,206 times.

Writing a biography can be a fun challenge, where you are sharing the story of someone’s life with readers. You may need to write a biography for a class or decide to write one as a personal project. Once you have identified the subject of the biography, do your research so you know as much about them as possible. Then, dive into the writing of the biography and revising it until it is at its finest.

Researching Your Subject

Step 1 Ask the subject for permission to write the biography.

If the subject does not give you permission to write the biography, you may want to choose a different subject. If you decide to publish the biography without the subject’s permission, you may be susceptible to legal action by the subject.
If the subject is no longer alive, you obviously do not need to ask permission to write about them.

Step 2 Look for primary sources about the subject.

You may create research questions to help focus your research of the subject, such as, What do I find interesting about the subject? Why is this subject important to readers? What can I say that is new about the subject? What would I like to learn more about?

Step 3 Conduct interviews with the subject and those close to them.

For in person interviews, record them with a tape recorder or a voice recorder on your computer or phone.
You may need to interview the subject and others several times to get the material you need.

Step 4 Visit locations that are important to the subject.

You may also want to visit areas where the subject made a major decision or breakthrough in their life. Being physically in the area can give you a sense of how the subject might have felt and help you write their experiences more effectively.

Step 5 Study the time and place of the subject’s life.

When researching the time period ask yourself: What were the social norms of that time? What was going on economically and politically? How did the social and political climate affect the subject?

You may also include historical events or moments that affected the subject on the timeline. For example, maybe there was a conflict or civil war that happened during the person’s life that affected their life.

Writing the Biography

Step 1 Go for a chronological structure.

You may end up focusing on particular areas of the person’s life. If you do this, work through a particular period in the person’s life chronologically.

Step 2 Create a thesis for the biography.

For example, you may have a thesis statement about focusing on how the person impacted the civil rights movement in America in the 1970s. You can then make sure all your content relates back to this thesis.

Flashbacks should feel as detailed and real as present day scenes. Use your research notes and interviews with the subject to get a good sense of their past for the flashbacks.
For example, you may jump from the person’s death in the present to a flashback to their favorite childhood memory.

Step 4 Focus on major events and milestones.

For example, you may focus on the person’s accomplishments in the civil rights movement. You may write a whole section about their contributions and participation in major civil rights marches in their hometown.

Step 5 Identify a major theme or pattern in the person’s life.

For example, you may notice that the person’s life is patterned with moments of adversity, where the person worked hard and fought against larger forces. You can then use the theme of overcoming adversity in the biography.

Step 6 Include your own opinions and thoughts about the person.

For example, you may note how you see parallels in the person’s life during the civil rights movement with your own interests in social justice. You may also commend the person for their hard work and positive impact on society.

Polishing the Biography

Step 1 Show the biography to others for feedback.

Revise the biography based on feedback from others. Do not be afraid to cut or edit down the biography to suit the needs of your readers.

Having a biography riddled with spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors can turn off your readers and result in a poor grade if you are handing in the text for a class.

If the biography is for a class, use MLA , APA , or Chicago Style citations based on the preferences of your instructor.

Biography Help

Community Q&A

Be careful when publishing private or embarrassing information, especially if the person is not a celebrity. You may violate their "Right of Privacy" or equivalent. Thanks Helpful 31 Not Helpful 5
Have the sources to back up your statements about the subject's life. Untruthful written statements can lead to litigation. If it is your opinion, be clear that it is such and not fact (although you can support your opinion with facts). Thanks Helpful 16 Not Helpful 15

↑ https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/writing/how-to-write-a-biography.html
↑ https://au.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/how-to-write-a-bio
↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/3-tips-for-writing-successful-flashbacks
↑ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/how-to-write-bio/
↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/editing-and-proofreading/
↑ https://www.plagiarism.org/article/how-do-i-cite-sources

About This Article

Before you write a biography, gather as much information about the subject that you can from sources like newspaper articles, interviews, photos, existing biographies, and anything else you can find. Write the story of that person’s life, including as much supporting detail as you can, including information about the place and time where the person lived. Focus on major events and milestones in their life, including historical events, marriage, children, and events which would shape their path later in life. For tips from our reviewer on proofreading the biography and citing your sources, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Write a Biography

Biographies are big business. Whether in book form or Hollywood biopics, the lives of the famous and sometimes not-so-famous fascinate us.

While it’s true that most biographies are about people who are in the public eye, sometimes the subject is less well-known. Primarily, though, famous or not, the person who is written about has led an incredible life.

In this article, we will explain biography writing in detail for teachers and students so they can create their own.

While your students will most likely have a basic understanding of a biography, it’s worth taking a little time before they put pen to paper to tease out a crystal-clear definition of one.

What Is a Biography?

how to write a biography | how to start an autobiography | How to Write a Biography | literacyideas.com

A biography is an account of someone’s life written by someone else . While there is a genre known as a fictional biography, for the most part, biographies are, by definition, nonfiction.

Generally speaking, biographies provide an account of the subject’s life from the earliest days of childhood to the present day or, if the subject is deceased, their death.

The job of a biography is more than just to outline the bare facts of a person’s life.

Rather than just listing the basic details of their upbringing, hobbies, education, work, relationships, and death, a well-written biography should also paint a picture of the subject’s personality and experience of life.

how to write a biography | Biography Autobiography 2022 | How to Write a Biography | literacyideas.com

Full Biographies

Teaching unit.

Teach your students everything they need to know about writing an AUTOBIOGRAPHY and a BIOGRAPHY.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ( 26 reviews )

Features of a Biography

Before students begin writing a biography, they’ll need to have a firm grasp of the main features of a Biography. An excellent way to determine how well they understand these essential elements is to ask them to compile a checklist like the one-blow

Their checklists should contain the items below at a minimum. Be sure to help them fill in any gaps before moving on to the writing process.

The purpose of a biography is to provide an account of someone’s life.

Biography structure.

ORIENTATION (BEGINNING) Open your biography with a strong hook to grab the reader’s attention

SEQUENCING: In most cases, biographies are written in chronological order unless you are a very competent writer consciously trying to break from this trend.

COVER: childhood, upbringing, education, influences, accomplishments, relationships, etc. – everything that helps the reader to understand the person.

CONCLUSION: Wrap your biography up with some details about what the subject is doing now if they are still alive. If they have passed away, make mention of what impact they have made and what their legacy is or will be.

BIOGRAPHY FEATURES

LANGUAGE Use descriptive and figurative language that will paint images inside your audience’s minds as they read. Use time connectives to link events.

PERSPECTIVE Biographies are written from the third person’s perspective.

DETAILS: Give specific details about people, places, events, times, dates, etc. Reflect on how events shaped the subject. You might want to include some relevant photographs with captions. A timeline may also be of use depending upon your subject and what you are trying to convey to your audience.

TENSE Written in the past tense (though ending may shift to the present/future tense)

THE PROCESS OF WRITING A BIOGRAPHY

Like any form of writing, you will find it simple if you have a plan and follow it through. These steps will ensure you cover the essential bases of writing a biography essay.

Firstly, select a subject that inspires you. Someone whose life story resonates with you and whose contribution to society intrigues you. The next step is to conduct thorough research. Engage in extensive reading, explore various sources, watch documentaries, and glean all available information to provide a comprehensive account of the person’s life.

Creating an outline is essential to organize your thoughts and information. The outline should include the person’s early life, education, career, achievements, and any other significant events or contributions. It serves as a map for the writing process, ensuring that all vital information is included.

Your biography should have an engaging introduction that captivates the reader’s attention and provides background information on the person you’re writing about. It should include a thesis statement summarising the biography’s main points.

Writing a biography in chronological order is crucial . You should begin with the person’s early life and move through their career and achievements. This approach clarifies how the person’s life unfolded and how they accomplished their goals.

A biography should be written in a narrative style , capturing the essence of the person’s life through vivid descriptions, anecdotes, and quotes. Avoid dry, factual writing and focus on creating a compelling narrative that engages the reader.

Adding personal insights and opinions can enhance the biography’s overall impact, providing a unique perspective on the person’s achievements, legacy, and impact on society.

Editing and proofreading are vital elements of the writing process. Thoroughly reviewing your biography ensures that the writing is clear, concise, and error-free. You can even request feedback from someone else to ensure that it is engaging and well-written.

Finally, including a bibliography at the end of your biography is essential. It gives credit to the sources that were used during research, such as books, articles, interviews, and websites.

Tips for Writing a Brilliant Biography

Biography writing tip #1: choose your subject wisely.

There are several points for students to reflect on when deciding on a subject for their biography. Let’s take a look at the most essential points to consider when deciding on the subject for a biography:

Interest: To produce a biography will require sustained writing from the student. That’s why students must choose their subject well. After all, a biography is an account of someone’s entire life to date. Students must ensure they choose a subject that will sustain their interest throughout the research, writing, and editing processes.

Merit: Closely related to the previous point, students must consider whether the subject merits the reader’s interest. Aside from pure labors of love, writing should be undertaken with the reader in mind. While producing a biography demands sustained writing from the author, it also demands sustained reading from the reader.

Therefore, students should ask themselves if their chosen subject has had a life worthy of the reader’s interest and the time they’d need to invest in reading their biography.

Information: Is there enough information available on the subject to fuel the writing of an entire biography? While it might be a tempting idea to write about a great-great-grandfather’s experience in the war. There would be enough interest there to sustain the author’s and the reader’s interest, but do you have enough access to information about their early childhood to do the subject justice in the form of a biography?

Biography Writing Tip #2: R esearch ! Research! Research!

While the chances are good that the student already knows quite a bit about the subject they’ve chosen. Chances are 100% that they’ll still need to undertake considerable research to write their biography.

As with many types of writing , research is an essential part of the planning process that shouldn’t be overlooked. If students wish to give as complete an account of their subject’s life as possible, they’ll need to put in the time at the research stage.

An effective way to approach the research process is to:

1. Compile a chronological timeline of the central facts, dates, and events of the subject’s life

2. Compile detailed descriptions of the following personal traits:

Physical looks
Character traits
Values and beliefs

3. Compile some research questions based on different topics to provide a focus for the research:

Childhood : Where and when were they born? Who were their parents? Who were the other family members? What education did they receive?
Obstacles: What challenges did they have to overcome? How did these challenges shape them as individuals?
Legacy: What impact did this person have on the world and/or the people around them?
Dialogue & Quotes: Dialogue and quotations by and about the subject are a great way to bring color and life to a biography. Students should keep an eagle eye out for the gems that hide amid their sources.

As the student gets deeper into their research, new questions will arise that can further fuel the research process and help to shape the direction the biography will ultimately go in.

Likewise, during the research, themes will often begin to suggest themselves. Exploring these themes is essential to bring depth to biography, but we’ll discuss this later in this article.

Research Skills:

Researching for biography writing is an excellent way for students to hone their research skills in general. Developing good research skills is essential for future academic success. Students will have opportunities to learn how to:

Gather relevant information
Evaluate different information sources
Select suitable information
Organize information into a text.

Students will have access to print and online information sources, and, in some cases, they may also have access to people who knew or know the subject (e.g. biography of a family member).

These days, much of the research will likely take place online. It’s crucial, therefore, to provide your students with guidance on how to use the internet safely and evaluate online sources for reliability. This is the era of ‘ fake news ’ and misinformation after all!

COMPLETE TEACHING UNIT ON INTERNET RESEARCH SKILLS USING GOOGLE SEARCH

how to write a biography | research skills 1 | How to Write a Biography | literacyideas.com

Teach your students ESSENTIAL SKILLS OF THE INFORMATION ERA to become expert DIGITAL RESEARCHERS.

⭐How to correctly ask questions to search engines on all devices.

⭐ How to filter and refine your results to find exactly what you want every time.

⭐ Essential Research and critical thinking skills for students.

⭐ Plagiarism, Citing and acknowledging other people’s work.

⭐ How to query, synthesize and record your findings logically.

BIOGRAPHY WRITING Tip #3: Find Your Themes In Biography Writing

Though predominantly a nonfiction genre, the story still plays a significant role in good biography writing. The skills of characterization and plot structuring are transferable here. And, just like in fiction, exploring themes in a biographical work helps connect the personal to the universal. Of course, these shouldn’t be forced; this will make the work seem contrived, and the reader may lose faith in the truthfulness of the account. A biographer needs to gain and maintain the trust of the reader.

Fortunately, themes shouldn’t need to be forced. A life well-lived is full of meaning, and the themes the student writer is looking for will emerge effortlessly from the actions and events of the subject’s life. It’s just a case of learning how to spot them.

One way to identify the themes in a life is to look for recurring events or situations in a person’s life. These should be apparent from the research completed previously. The students should seek to identify these patterns that emerge in the subject’s life. For example, perhaps they’ve had to overcome various obstacles throughout different periods of their life. In that case, the theme of overcoming adversity is present and has been identified.

Usually, a biography has several themes running throughout, so be sure your students work to identify more than one theme in their subject’s life.

BIOGRAPHY WRITING Tip: #4 Put Something of Yourself into the Writing

While the defining feature of a biography is that it gives an account of a person’s life, students must understand that this is not all a biography does. Relating the facts and details of a subject’s life is not enough. The student biographer should not be afraid to share their thoughts and feelings with the reader throughout their account of their subject’s life.

The student can weave some of their personality into the fabric of the text by providing commentary and opinion as they relate the events of the person’s life and the wider social context at the time. Unlike the detached and objective approach we’d expect to find in a history textbook, in a biography, student-writers should communicate their enthusiasm for their subject in their writing.

This makes for a more intimate experience for the reader, as they get a sense of getting to know the author and the subject they are writing about.

Biography Examples For Students

Year 5 Example
Year 7 Example
Year 9 Example

“The Rock ‘n’ Roll King: Elvis Presley”

Elvis Aaron Presley, born on January 8, 1935, was an amazing singer and actor known as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Even though he’s been dead for nearly 50 years, I can’t help but be fascinated by his incredible life!

Elvis grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, in a tiny house with his parents and twin brother. His family didn’t have much money, but they shared a love for music. Little did they know Elvis would become a music legend!

When he was only 11 years old, Elvis got his first guitar. He taught himself to play and loved singing gospel songs. As he got older, he started combining different music styles like country, blues, and gospel to create a whole new sound – that’s Rock ‘n’ Roll!

In 1954, at the age of 19, Elvis recorded his first song, “That’s All Right.” People couldn’t believe how unique and exciting his music was. His famous hip-swinging dance moves also made him a sensation!

Elvis didn’t just rock the music scene; he also starred in movies like “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock.” But fame came with challenges. Despite facing ups and downs, Elvis kept spreading happiness through his music.

how to write a biography | A4H32CWFYQ72GPUNCIRTS5Y7P4 | How to Write a Biography | literacyideas.com

Tragically, Elvis passed away in 1977, but his music and charisma live on. Even today, people worldwide still enjoy his songs like “Hound Dog” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Elvis Presley’s legacy as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll will live forever.

Long Live the King: I wish I’d seen him.

Elvis Presley, the Rock ‘n’ Roll legend born on January 8, 1935, is a captivating figure that even a modern-day teen like me can’t help but admire. As I delve into his life, I wish I could have experienced the magic of his live performances.

Growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis faced challenges but found solace in music. At 11, he got his first guitar, a symbol of his journey into the world of sound. His fusion of gospel, country, and blues into Rock ‘n’ Roll became a cultural phenomenon.

The thought of being in the audience during his early performances, especially when he recorded “That’s All Right” at 19, sends shivers down my spine. Imagining the crowd’s uproar and feeling the revolutionary energy of that moment is a dream I wish I could have lived.

Elvis wasn’t just a musical prodigy; he was a dynamic performer. His dance moves, the embodiment of rebellion, and his roles in films like “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock” made him a true icon.

After watching him on YouTube, I can’t help but feel a little sad that I’ll never witness the King’s live performances. The idea of swaying to “Hound Dog” or being enchanted by “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in person is a missed opportunity. Elvis may have left us in 1977, but he was the king of rock n’ roll. Long live the King!

Elvis Presley: A Teen’s Take on the Rock ‘n’ Roll Icon”

Elvis Presley, born January 8, 1935, was a revolutionary force in the music world, earning his title as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Exploring his life, even as a 16-year-old today, I’m captivated by the impact he made.

Hailing from Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis grew up in humble beginnings, surrounded by the love of his parents and twin brother. It’s inspiring to think that, despite financial challenges, this young man would redefine the music scene.

At 11, Elvis got his first guitar, sparking a self-taught journey into music. His early gospel influences evolved into a unique fusion of country, blues, and gospel, creating the electrifying genre of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In 1954, at only 19, he recorded “That’s All Right,” marking the birth of a musical legend.

Elvis wasn’t just a musical innovator; he was a cultural phenomenon. His rebellious dance moves and magnetic stage presence challenged the norms. He transitioned seamlessly into acting, starring in iconic films like “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock.”

how to write a biography | Elvis Presley promoting Jailhouse Rock | How to Write a Biography | literacyideas.com

However, fame came at a cost, and Elvis faced personal struggles. Despite the challenges, his music continued to resonate. Even now, classics like “Hound Dog” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” transcend generations.

Elvis Presley’s impact on music and culture is undeniable. He was known for his unique voice, charismatic persona, and electrifying performances. He sold over one billion records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling solo artists in history. He received numerous awards throughout his career, including three Grammy Awards and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Elvis’s influence can still be seen in today’s music. Many contemporary artists, such as Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and Justin Timberlake, have cited Elvis as an inspiration. His music continues to be featured in movies, TV shows, and commercials.

Elvis left us in 1977, but his legacy lives on. I appreciate his breaking barriers and fearlessly embracing his artistic vision. Elvis Presley’s impact on music and culture is timeless, a testament to the enduring power of his artistry. His music has inspired generations and will continue to do so for many years to come.

how to write a biography | LITERACY IDEAS FRONT PAGE 1 | How to Write a Biography | literacyideas.com

Teaching Resources

Use our resources and tools to improve your student’s writing skills through proven teaching strategies.

BIOGRAPHY WRITING TEACHING IDEAS AND LESSONS

We have compiled a sequence of biography-related lessons or teaching ideas that you can follow as you please. They are straightforward enough for most students to follow without further instruction.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 1:

This session aims to give students a broader understanding of what makes a good biography.

Once your students have compiled a comprehensive checklist of the main features of a biography, allow them to use it to assess some biographies from your school library or on the internet using the feature checklist.

When students have assessed a selection of biographies, take some time as a class to discuss them. You can base the discussion around the following prompts:

Which biographies covered all the criteria from their checklist?
Which biographies didn’t?
Which biography was the most readable in terms of structure?
Which biography do you think was the least well-structured? How would you improve this?

Looking at how other writers have interpreted the form will help students internalize the necessary criteria before attempting to produce a biography. Once students have a clear understanding of the main features of the biography, they’re ready to begin work on writing a biography.

When the time does come to put pen to paper, be sure they’re armed with the following top tips to help ensure they’re as well prepared as possible.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 2:

This session aims to guide students through the process of selecting the perfect biography subject.

Instruct students to draw up a shortlist of three potential subjects for the biography they’ll write.

Using the three criteria mentioned in the writing guide (Interest, Merit, and Information), students award each potential subject a mark out of 5 for each of the criteria. In this manner, students can select the most suitable subject for their biography.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 3:

This session aims to get students into the researching phase, then prioritise and organise events chronologically.

Students begin by making a timeline of their subject’s life, starting with their birth and ending with their death or the present day. If the student has yet to make a final decision on the subject of their biography, a family member will often serve well for this exercise as a practice exercise.

Students should research and gather the key events of the person’s life, covering each period of their life from when they were a baby, through childhood and adolescence, right up to adulthood and old age. They should then organize these onto a timeline. Students can include photographs with captions if they have them.

They can present these to the class when they have finished their timelines.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 4:

Instruct students to look over their timeline, notes, and other research. Challenge them to identify three patterns that repeat throughout the subject’s life and sort all the related events and incidents into specific categories.

Students should then label each category with a single word. This is the thematic concept or the broad general underlying idea. After that, students should write a sentence or two expressing what the subject’s life ‘says’ about that concept.

This is known as the thematic statement . With the thematic concepts and thematic statements identified, the student now has some substantial ideas to explore that will help bring more profound meaning and wider resonance to their biography.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 5:

Instruct students to write a short objective account of an event in their own life. They can write about anyone from their past. It needn’t be more than a couple of paragraphs, but the writing should be strictly factual, focusing only on the objective details of what happened.

Once they have completed this, it’s time to rewrite the paragraph, but they should include some opinion and personal commentary this time.

The student here aims to inject some color and personality into their writing, to transform a detached, factual account into a warm, engaging story.

A COMPLETE UNIT ON TEACHING BIOGRAPHIES

how to write a biography | biography and autobiography writing unit 1 | How to Write a Biography | literacyideas.com

Teach your students to write AMAZING BIOGRAPHIES & AUTOBIOGRAPHIES using proven RESEARCH SKILLS and WRITING STRATEGIES .

Understand the purpose of both forms of biography.
Explore the language and perspective of both.
Prompts and Challenges to engage students in writing a biography.
Dedicated lessons for both forms of biography.
Biographical Projects can expand students’ understanding of reading and writing a biography.
A COMPLETE 82-PAGE UNIT – NO PREPARATION REQUIRED.

FREE Biography Writing Graphic Organizer

Use this valuable tool in the research and writing phases to keep your students on track and engaged.

WRITING CHECKLIST & RUBRIC BUNDLE

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To Conclude

By this stage, your students should have an excellent technical overview of a biography’s essential elements.

They should be able to choose their subject in light of how interesting and worthy they are, as well as give consideration to the availability of information out there. They should be able to research effectively and identify emerging themes in their research notes. And finally, they should be able to bring some of their personality and uniqueness into their retelling of the life of another.

Remember that writing a biography is not only a great way to develop a student’s writing skills; it can be used in almost all curriculum areas. For example, to find out more about a historical figure in History, to investigate scientific contributions to Science, or to celebrate a hero from everyday life.

Biography is an excellent genre for students to develop their writing skills and to find inspiration in the lives of others in the world around them.

HOW TO WRITE A BIOGRAPHY TUTORIAL VIDEO

how to write a biography | YOUTUBE 1280 x 720 11 | How to Write a Biography | literacyideas.com

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12 Rules for Writing a Biographical Novel

Posted by Our Special Guest | Jun 4, 2018 | Genre

by Sally Koslow

Biographical novels are endlessly fascinating. They are fictional – often highly researched but still fictional – accounts of a real person’s life. The Paris Wife , about Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson. The Other Boleyn Girl , about Mary Boleyn and her sister Anne. In Cold Blood , Truman Capote’s reconstruction and retelling of the murder of the Clutter family.

They’re popular, educational, and often become terrific movies.

If you’re thinking of tackling one, here are some secrets to making yours work.

1. Pick a human subject you find genuinely fascinating

Unless they’re crazy-fast, most writers spend at least a year completing a manuscript, and once it’s sold, another year or two may pass until publication . After that, promotion continues for a good, long while.

You’ll be channeling your hero and/or heroine for what will feel like forever, so you’d best pick people who are sufficiently complex.

2. Your character doesn’t have to be wholly likable

They do need to be believable and intriguing.

3. Jump-start your research with biographies

If a biography exists of your subject, lucky you. Begin there. If you’re truly fortunate, there will be more than one biography to inhale. Next, move on to diaries, memoirs, letters, interviews, and related documents. Your goal is to feel you know your subject at least as well as your best friend. If you’d like your subject as a friend, even better. See Rule #2.

4. Beware of verbal anachronisms

I just read an otherwise terrific biographical novel set mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, where the author used the word “alas” at least ten times. I kept wondering if in the next scene I might discover that this mid-century woman wore a whalebone corset and dosed herself with laudanum. Related point: even if “alas” had been an apt word to use, it’s still oddly memorable, and strange to use so often in one book.

5. Avoid dialogue tics

We’ve all learned that conversation shouldn’t be too on the nose and speakers can overlap. In an effort to be period-friendly, however, dialogue shouldn’t mimic every sloppy annoyance of everyday speech. Really. Very. So. Well. Use words such as these sparingly. They are the cayenne pepper of your manuscript.

6. Capture your subject’s voice

Read letters and diaries, if any exist. Check for YouTubes – you may actually be able to hear the voice of your subject. It’s essential for conversation and internal dialogue to feel real or your book won’t distinguish itself.

7. Feel free to reshape your story line

Even the most interesting person does not lead his or her life in a plot. An author needs to determine not only what events to subtract and re-order in the life of her subject, but what do fictionalize and add. Perhaps your Civil War nurse visits an imaginary hospital in Atlanta, or even a real one in which you can’t that prove she ever set foot. Your story may be better for the invention .

9. Enrich your book with historical details

Consider your book to be the literary equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. Readers come to any historical novel, biographical or otherwise, partly to learn about a bygone era. Don’t stint on (accurate!) details about clothing, hairdos, food, home design, transportation, gardening, raising children….

10. Beware of rabbit holes

In preparation for writing any historical novel, it’s so much fun combing through clippings, tracking down out-of-print books, and watching vintage movies that it’s essential to assert discipline. Otherwise, you may find yourself going down rabbit holes that cause you to either procrastinate or to get so obsessed with a historical footnote that you digress in your writing. Stay on point, people.

11. Stick to your era

In a biographical novel it’s essential to color within the lines or your time period’s details. Nothing takes a reader out of story faster than a mistake. You will find yourself researching picky but essential points. Did women wear nylon stockings in 1939? In 1962, could you buy avocados in a Minnesota supermarket? How many stars did the American flag have in 1901?

12. Read well-written novels within the genre

You want to be able to identify fine writing and become infected by its virus, so read the best of the best and steer clear of biographical novels with pedestrian writing.

Set your bar high

Because why else would you do it? Are you writing a biographical novel? Or thinking about it? Need advice? Come chat with us on our Facebook page!

She also wrote the international bestseller The Late, Lamented Molly Marx ; The Widow Waltz ; With Friends Like These ; and Little Pink Slips . She is also the author of one work of nonfiction , Slouching Towa rd Adulthood: How to Let Go So Your Kids Can Grow Up.

Sally is the former editor-in-chief of McCall’s Magazine. She has taught at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and is on the faculty of the New York Writer’s Workshop. She has contributed essays and articles to The New York Times , O , Real Simple , and many other newspapers and magazines. She is a member of Tall Poppy Writers .

Sally lives in Manhattan, but hopes the statute of limitations never ends on mentioning that she is from Fargo, North Dakota. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she met her husband. They live in Manhattan, and are the proud parents of two sons.

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9 Tips on Writing Biographical Fiction by Gill Paul

September 7, 2021
Guest Posts , Writing Historical Fiction

Gill Paul and I connected when I was moderating a panel on fiction written about the Kennedy family. Her novel, Jackie and Maria , is a fascinating story about Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas and their relationships with Aristotle Onassis – highly recommended!

Gill specializes in relatively recent history, mostly 20 th century, and enjoys re-evaluating real historical characters and trying to get inside their heads.

Biographical fiction was a talking point at the 2021 Historical Novel Society conference, and I think it’s definitely having ‘a moment’. Of course, authors have been writing novels about real people for ages. Robert Graves and Thomas Mann were doing it back in the 1930s.

For me, Paula McLain opened new doors with The Paris Wife , her 2011 novel about Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson, by writing in first person from the point of view of a real 20 th -century woman. We don’t know for sure what Hadley was thinking and feeling during her marriage, but Paula painted a moving and emotionally plausible picture. I’ve written nine biographical novels since then, inspired by her example, and here’s what I’ve learned.

• There are innumerable ways of writing biographical fiction . Paula McLain used first person chronological, but close third or multiple povs can work, as can dual narratives, flashbacks, and even telling the story backwards. My personal preference is close third person with at least two different points of view. You can include real people in bit parts alongside fictional main characters, and a common trope is to tell the story of a famous person through the eyes of their less-famous friend. Almost any structure can work, from whodunit to ‘boy meets girl’, depending on your subject.

• It’s harder if your subject is well known . In my novel Jackie and Maria , I wrote about two iconic women, Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas, who’ve been the subjects of at least a dozen biographies apiece. Then in my next novel, The Collector’s Daughter, I imagined the life of Lady Evelyn Herbert, a woman about whom not so much is known. I enjoyed writing both but on balance I think it’s easier where less is known, because you have more wiggle room and readers don’t come to the story with pre-conceived ideas.

• Unlike non-fiction biographies, you don’t need to address a subject’s whole life . It’s easier to impose a neat narrative structure if you choose to describe one event, or a strictly limited period of time. You have to be ruthless in cutting characters and events that aren’t relative to your story arc, no matter how compelling they might be. Selection is a critical part of the process of novelization.

• Should you stick to the facts or can you fictionalize? This is an individual choice. I tend to stick to the facts where they are known, and try to shine a light into the gaps between the facts to reveal what it might have been like to be that person in those circumstances. In The Collector’s Daughter , I wondered how Lady Evelyn Herbert’s life was shaped, for better or worse, by her part in the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. I always start out with a question I want to answer, one that non-fiction biographies haven’t cleared up to my satisfaction.

• Do you need an author’s note? If I move the date of an event to fit my story arc, or invent a scene, I always ‘confess’ at the end because I don’t want to get messages from readers telling me I’ve got it wrong. I don’t think it’s essential for every author though. Where there is a big leap of fiction – like me saving the Romanov grand duchesses in The Secret Wife and The Lost Daughter – then it’s clearly not the gospel truth. In fact, none of it is strictly ‘true’: biographical novelists make up dialogue and thoughts for their subjects that no one could possibly have known.

• Is there anyone you shouldn’t write about? I haven’t yet written a novel that focuses on someone who is still alive because I’m wary of the libel laws. Curtis Sittenfeld has done it with Rodham , and her earlier novel The American Wife , which was based on Laura Bush. I’m sure the lawyers looked at both of these cases and decided the words “A Novel” on the cover protected them. You can’t libel the dead, so that’s a safer bet, but you can breach their copyright, so be careful about quoting directly from letters and other writing till they have been gone more than seventy years. Otherwise, you can write about anyone you want, from Hitler to Jesus.

• Do you have to like your subject? I would never write a novel about someone I couldn’t empathize with, but this is a personal call. It’s perfectly valid to write a critical biographical novel. Non-fiction biographies are often critical, movies and television series can be critical, so I don’t see why biographical novelists shouldn’t criticise their subjects. It’s fiction! You can say that Abraham Lincoln was a vampire – I’m sure some have. You can say that Eleanor Roosevelt smoked crack, although plausibility might be a problem.

• Should you worry what descendants might think of your portrayal? Should you contact them? Once again, this is your call. Personally, I think having the family breathing down my neck would curtail my creativity. Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s daughter Caroline is alive but I don’t flatter myself that she will have read Jackie and Maria . If by any chance she does, I hope she won’t mind my portrayal. I’m not claiming to have captured the ‘real woman’. I’ve painted a picture that to me feels genuine and sympathetic, but everyone who knew Jackie will have had a slightly different view of her. There is no absolute truth about anyone.

• Why do we read biographical novels? History has all the best stories, some of them so extraordinary that readers wouldn’t accept them if you made them up. Biographical novels can bring fresh and engaging insights for readers and they’re fun to write: it’s the only way to get inside the head of anyone who is not you. But for me, the main goal is not truth. My goal is to write an entertaining novel on a subject that people want to read about – that, and not to get sued.

Congratulations to Gill Paul whose newest novel The Collector’s Daughter was published by Morrow on September 7 th . And many thanks for sharing your insights on biographical fiction – I might just have to try my hand at this approach to historical fiction 🙂

The Collector’s Daughter by Gill Paul ~~ Lady Evelyn Herbert was the daughter of the Earl of Carnarvon, brought up in stunning Highclere Castle. Popular and pretty, she seemed destined for a prestigious marriage, but she had other ideas. Instead, she left behind the world of society balls and chaperones to travel to the Egyptian desert, where she hoped to become a lady archaeologist, working alongside her father and Howard Carter in the hunt for an undisturbed tomb.

In November 1922, their dreams came true when they discovered the burial place of Tutankhamun, packed full of gold and unimaginable riches, and she was the first person to crawl inside for three thousand years. She called it the “greatest moment” of her life—but soon afterwards everything changed, with a string of tragedies that left her world a darker, sadder place.

Newspapers claimed it was “the curse of Tutankhamun,” but Howard Carter said no rational person would entertain such nonsense. Yet fifty years later, when an Egyptian academic came asking questions about what really happened in the tomb, it unleashed a new chain of events that seemed to threaten the happiness Eve had finally found.

DON’T MISS OTHER POSTS ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION. FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel, PARIS IN RUINS, is available on Amazon US , Amazon Canada , Kobo , and Barnes&Noble . An earlier novel, TIME AND REGRET was published by Lake Union. Mary’s other novels, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon , Nook , Kobo , Google Play and iTunes . She can be contacted on Facebook , Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com .

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5 Responses

This topic is perfect timing for me! Thank you so much!

Glad to be of help!

Thank you! Gill Paul. You’ve answered many of the questions rolling around in my head as I begin my novel based on one famous, or infamous, incident from eighty years ago. While there were several theories about it, I want to tell the story from the character around whom these theories abound. I want to have her answer the question, “what really happened” as an older woman, and the answer is basically none of the theories. My biggest question was about using the actual person in a very fictional manner. Thank you for helping me clarify that problem. I’ve read The Silent Wife and Jackie and Maria and recommend your writing to many. Good luck on the new book. I’ll look for it. Julia Faye Smith

Hi Julia, I like the sound of your concept, and I’m intrigued to know who you are writing about. Wishing you all the best with it. Gill

I will be teaching biographies later in the school year. I love that your pack includes interviewing and biography writing about a friend or classmate. Thanks for sharing amazing expertise.

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INNOVATION FESTIVAL
Capital One

08-09-2024 HOW TO BE A SUCCESS AT EVERYTHING

How I wrote a book in 15 minutes a day

Every first novel started as an unpublished writer’s wild idea. Here’s how to make yours a reality.

[Photo: Stas Knop /Pexels]

BY Julia Dahl 4 minute read

The first time I tried to write a novel I was 23. I had all the time in the world. I was a full-time graduate student. I lived alone, I had no children, and it took me three years to finish a draft.

Five years later, I tried again. I was working full-time as a reporter and I lived with my boyfriend, but we had no kids. This time, it took me five years.

All that time, my technique, if you could call it that, was the same: set up my laptop at a coffee shop or a library or at my desk at home, and “write.” But, as New York Times best-selling author Meghan O’Rourke recently tweeted : “It’s really important to have at least three hours to write every day so you can spend the first two hours squirming and checking the internet and daydreaming before getting down to it.”

Touché. I thought I needed hours with nothing to do but write. But even with all those hours, I didn’t produce much. So I started applying for retreats and residencies , thinking maybe I needed long stretches—days, weeks—to do nothing but write.

I wrote three novels that way. Fits of progress followed by long lulls of nothing. And then I had a child.

Suddenly, there were no long stretches.

I struggled. I had to figure out a way to fold my writing back into my life, but my life had changed so dramatically I wasn’t sure how. I turned in my fourth novel two years past the deadline. I had an idea for another, but no idea how I’d actually get it gone.

And then, my friend, author Laura McHugh, told me she’d started doing “writing sprints.” I don’t have all day, she told me, but I can commit to one hour.

Frankly, an hour felt impossible, but I liked the idea of a sprint. I turned off my Wi-Fi, silenced my ringer, put on some noise-canceling headphones, and for 15 minutes, I wrote. I didn’t produce a lot, but it was more than I’d done the day before. More than I’d done in a month. I did the same thing the next day, and the next. And less than two years later, I had a solid draft.

Words add up

There is nothing magic about 15 minutes—and yet there is. We all waste 15 minutes every day scrolling on our phones. Probably more, but definitely 15. And in 15 minutes, if you can write 100 words, you can have a full-length draft of a novel in two years. (One hundred words times 365 days times two years is 73,000 words, which most editors will tell you is on the shorter end of average novel length.) You’ll also probably start enjoying those 15 minutes; what you accomplished will help carry you through the day. And sometimes those 15 minutes will turn into longer sessions.

Will what you write be ready to publish? No. First drafts never are. Part of the 15 minute technique is to give yourself permission to write badly. You’ll fix it later. But here’s the key: There is no published novel without a finished first draft. What if two years ago you’d decided to write 15 minutes a day? You’d have hundreds of pages to polish into something publishable.

Training your brain

But more than the words on the page—which add up!—the genius of the 15 daily minutes is that the real secret to writing a novel, or achieving any long-term artistic goal, is time spent thinking about the thing you’re creating. You can’t write a novel without hours and hours spent considering the world you’re building, the people you’re creating, the problems they’ll encounter, and the route it will take for them to get to the end of their journey.

To do all that, you need to spend a lot of time walking around with the novel in your brain. Spending even just 15 minutes each day “with” your novel means that it will always be present in your mind. Nurture that presence when you aren’t writing. Cut down on podcasts when you’re walking or driving. Give yourself quiet. Tell yourself: I’m going to think about the next scene I need to write while I go through this car wash, or walk to the grocery store, or wait for my son’s lacrosse practice to end.

Keep a notebook with you to jot down plot ideas and snippets of dialogue. Or, use your phone to dictate messages to yourself, though your phone can be very dangerous as a distraction, so beware.

How to find your 15 minutes

It’ll be different for everyone. You can’t get me out of bed one minute before I need to be awake, so mornings are out for me. And once I’ve put my son to bed, I’m pretty wiped. It’s certainly not my most creative time. So I do my 15 minutes in the middle of the day.

I coach novelists who do their 15 minutes after their morning workout, or after they’ve dropped their kids off from school, or right before bed. I know writers who write at work on their lunch break. All that matters is the time; the where and when can change as your life does.

Give yourself permission

Let me tell you a secret: Most writers—even those with books in your favorite bookstore, reviewed by the big papers—don’t make enough money off their writing to pay all their bills. The same is true of all other artists: musicians, painters, actors, dancers. Does that make their work less legitimate? If you write, you’re a writer. Own it.

Another thing to remember is that every novel you pick up (and every song you listen to, every performance you attend) started as somebody’s wild idea. It exists only because its creator decided to spend unpaid time working on it. Little by little, the wild idea turns into something real.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julia Dahl is the author of five novels including I Dreamed of Falling , out this September from Minotaur Books. She teaches journalism at NYU and provides private coaching and creative writing classes online . More

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IMAGES

Write Biography About Myself
40 Autobiography Examples ( + Autobiographical Essay Templates)
Fictional Biography Text
Biography
Fictional Character Bio Sheet
how to write a biography novel

COMMENTS

How to Write Autobiographical Fiction
1. Begin with a Noun. If you are an ABF writer who wants their novel only loosely based in truth, start with a noun. Specifically, start with a person, place, thing, or idea that is true, but leave the rest of the story up to fiction.
Writing a Novel Inspired by Your Life? The Do's and Don'ts of Writing
If you're writing fiction, you are not claiming that anything in your book is fact. Also, if you use a pseudonym, there's a good chance the not-so-loved-ones may never read your book at all. Anyway, I wouldn't worry about it at this stage. It's something you can discuss with your literary agent and editor later down the road.
Autobiographical Fiction: What It Is, Examples and How To Write It
Step 3: Set Your Pace. When we talk about what should be included in an autobiographical fiction, we often focus on concrete things: characters, locations, and so on. But the pace of your story is just as crucial and can make or break how impactful your story ends up being.
How to Write a Biography: 8 Steps for a Captivating Story
8. Send a copy to your subject. Consider sending a copy of your manuscript to the person whose life you wrote about in your book. The copy may serve as a thank-you gift, but also, if you intend to publish your work, you will need them to approve, as well as fact check, everything you put into the story.
How to Write a Biography: A 7-Step Guide [+Template]
7. Get feedback and polish the text. If you're going to publish your own biography, you'll have to polish it to professional standards. After leaving your work to rest for a while, look at it with fresh eyes and edit your own manuscript eliminating passive voice, filler words, and redundant adverbs.
How to Write a Biography: 7 Life-writing Ideas
Let's examine 7 ideas about how to write a biography: 1. Create compelling voice. You could say that voice is a crucial ingredient of any story, especially in first person (where the narrator is the character). In autobiography, in particular, you want your reader to form a clear sense of who is telling the story.
How To Write An Autobiographical Fiction Novel
1. Determine your idea. Pinpoint exactly what idea or theme you want to communicate, and don't worry if this takes some time. You may want to read the above examples of autobiographical fiction for inspiration. 2. Define your key plot points. Even if you prefer to write the story as it comes to you, for this type of fiction, you may want to ...
How to Write a Biography in 11 Easy Steps + Book Template
4. Create an outline. The next step of learning how to write a biography is to outline your story. It's critical to outline your biography before you begin writing it. Among other things, it helps ensure you cover every topic you'd like to and get the book in the correct chronological order.
How to Write an Autobiography: The Story of Your Life
4. Include plenty of detail. In case we haven't drilled down on this enough, let's reiterate once more: an autobiography should be a complete overview of your life from beginning to end. That means that as you get into properly writing it, you should include as much detail as you can remember.
Autobiography Definition, Examples, and Writing Guide
Autobiography Definition, Examples, and Writing Guide. Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Aug 26, 2022 • 6 min read. As a firsthand account of the author's own life, an autobiography offers readers an unmatched level of intimacy. Learn how to write your first autobiography with examples from MasterClass instructors.
Autobiographical Fiction: Using Your Real Life To Craft Great Fiction
On the other hand, autobiographical fiction is primarily comprised of made up events and characters that may be based on the author's own experience and self. The protagonist might be modeled after the author and do at least some of the things the author has actually done in his or her life. However, the ratio of truth to fiction will be ...
How to Write a Biography: Full Guide for Writing a Biography
The organisation of your biography greatly impacts its readability. Structure your work into logical sections or chapters, employing either a chronological or thematic arrangement. Begin with an engaging introduction that captures readers' attention and provides essential context.
How to Write a Biography: 6 Tips for Writing Biographical Texts
Using flashbacks allows the author to introduce relevant past information to the reader without bogging them down with paragraphs of background exposition. 6. Include your thoughts. A biography isn't just a transaction of facts. A biographer can share their own feelings and opinions on their subject's life.
How to Write a Biography: A Step-by-Step Guide
A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Biography. As with writing any book, writing a biography is a marathon, not a sprint. It's easier to think of it as a series of smaller steps than as one big challenge to tackle. Let's break down the process step by step. 1. Choose Your Subject. Decide who you want to write about.
How to Write a Character Bio (With Examples!)
Generally, a character bio includes basic information about the character, such as their name, appearance, and behavior, but it can also include topics such as backstory and motivations. Bios can look different depending on what they are being used for, the genre of the story, and the other players' preferences.
How to Write a Biography: 15 Steps (with Pictures)
1. Go for a chronological structure. Start chronologically from the subject's birth to their death or later life. Use the timeline of the person's life to structure the biography. Start with birth and childhood. Then, go into young adulthood and adulthood.
How to Write a Biography
A biography is an account of someone's life written by someone else.While there is a genre known as a fictional biography, for the most part, biographies are, by definition, nonfiction. Generally speaking, biographies provide an account of the subject's life from the earliest days of childhood to the present day or, if the subject is deceased, their death.
12 Rules for Writing a Biographical Novel • Career Authors
They do need to be believable and intriguing. 3. Jump-start your research with biographies. If a biography exists of your subject, lucky you. Begin there. If you're truly fortunate, there will be more than one biography to inhale. Next, move on to diaries, memoirs, letters, interviews, and related documents.
9 Tips on Writing Biographical Fiction by Gill Paul
Almost any structure can work, from whodunit to 'boy meets girl', depending on your subject. • It's harder if your subject is well known. In my novel Jackie and Maria, I wrote about two iconic women, Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas, who've been the subjects of at least a dozen biographies apiece.
How to Write Fictional Biography: Master Storytelling Skills
Writing a fictional biography can be a lot of fun, especially with the right tools. By following the steps and using Affpilot AI's Biography Writer, you can create an engaging and detailed story ...
How to Write a Biography of a Fictional Character: Expert Tips
Writing a biography of a fictional character is exciting. You can create an entire life story from your imagination. And with Affpilot AI , the process becomes even easier.
How to Write a Fictional Character Biography: Expert Tips
Creating a fictional character biography can be fun and exciting. It helps you understand your character better. You can use this information to make your stories more interesting. As a writer, I ...
How to write a novel in 15 minutes a day
The first time I tried to write a novel I was 23. I had all the time in the world. I was a full-time graduate student. I lived alone, I had no children, and it took me three years to finish a ...
How to Write a Fictional Biography: Master the Art
Here are some steps to help you write a fictional biography: Choose a character. Think about their personal details. Create their background story. Write about their education.
How to write a biography without biographical information
On the first page of Sarah Ruden's biography of Vergil, she states the problem that any biographer of the ancient poet and author of the Aeneid faces: We know almost nothing about him. "The ...

What is Autobiographical Fiction? An Introduction to the Genre

What is Autobiographical Fiction?

The Autobiographical Fiction Continuum

1. The Author Surrogate

2. The Self-Insert

3. Semi-Autobiographical Fiction

4. Fully Autobiographical Fiction

Why Write Autobiographical Fiction?

To Tell Better Stories

To Create a Bit of Distance

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Some Starting Places

1. Begin with a Noun

2. Edit a Nonfiction Piece

3. Start with What You Don’t Know

4. Start with Two Disconnected Ideas

How to Write Autobiographical Fiction: Write with Friends!

Sean Glatch

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Writing a Novel Inspired by Your Life? The Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Autobiographical Fiction

What’s the difference between writing autobiographical fiction and writing a novel “inspired by” your life?

Writing autobiographical fiction: Do’s and Don’ts

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How to write a biography: 7 life-writing ideas

7 life-writing ideas:

First: What type of biography do you want to write?

Popular types of biographical books

1. Create compelling voice

2. Think about representation

3. Decide on narrative style

Example of inventive narrative style: Roland Barthes

4. Use illustrative anecdotes

Example of illustrative anecdotes: Dorothy Parker

5. Find interest in the mundane

6. Avoid hagiography

7. Fictionalize where necessary

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How to Write a Biography: 11 Step Guide + Book Template

How to Write a Biography in 11 Simple Steps

1. Read other biographies

2. Identify your subject

3. Get permission to write about your subject

4. Create an outline

5. Select a working title (using a title generator)

Book Title Generator

6. Write a rough draft

7. Self-edit

8. Work with an editor

9. Hire a book cover designer

10. Get an ISBN

11. Create a launch plan

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How to Write an Autobiography: The Story of Your Life

About Savannah Cordova

1. Understand what an autobiography entails

Should you write a memoir or an autobiography?

2. Outline your life's main “beats”

What should you include in an autobiography?

3. Try to write in chronological order

How to start an autobiography

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb

Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca and William Novak:

4. Include plenty of detail

Examples of strong biographical detail

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

Becoming by Michelle Obama

5. Do research to fill in the gaps

Interview friends and family

Do “traditional" research if needed

6. Give your draft a discerning edit

7. Format and publish your autobiography

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