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Behind the Books
Biography:
SARA BARD FIELD
SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE (in progress) is about a search for love that turned a Baptist minister's wife into a nationally known suffragist, a California poet, and an "anarchist and free-lover."
Excerpts from the working draft are posted in the StoryDriven.Net JOURNAL. (Temporarily offline .)
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA
A timely, riveting account of the life and work of an extraordinary Iranian aristocrat and social reformer, Sattareh Farman Farmaian, DAUGHTER OF PERSIA is both memoir and historical journalism, opening a personal window on Iran and America's involvement in the six tumultuous decades that laid the foundations of the crisis facing the United States and the West today.
REVIEWERS on DAUGHTER OF PERSIA
What critics, Middle East experts, writers, and general readers have said about Daughter of Persia.
A READER'S GUIDE to DAUGHTER OF PERSIA
Article: "Finding Our Voice." Discovering the right literary "voice" for Daughter of Persia.
For Reading Groups:
A Writer's Perspective on Daughter of Persia Reading Group Questions.
Reading Recommendations. A personal selection.
Especially for biographers:
LINKS and RECOMMENDATIONS
Help me build a cache. Let me know about your favorite books on writing biography and any other websites you've found on writing biography or biographical nonfiction. Also on this page: Recommended guides for writing a biography book proposal.
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1. About the StoryDriven.Net NEWSLETTER.
The StoryDriven.Net NEWSLETTER examines the pleasures and challenges of planning, researching, and constructing biography or biographical nonfiction.
The experience others have had in writing and researching nonfiction is an important resource. In each NEWSLETTER, I try to focus on a different facet of researching, envisioning, and writing a narrative in biography, either by describing how I dealt with a specific technical or creative issue that all writers of biography and biographical nonfiction can expect to encounter, or by discussing a solution I foundor didn't find, as the case may befor a problem.
Articles usually take their cue either from the selection currently posted at StoryDriven.Net JOURNAL: Excerpts from a Life of Sara Bard Field (closed temporarily for renovation) or from one of the commentaries in the sidebar of this page.
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2. A resource for biographers, prospective biographers, and readers.
Like the JOURNAL,the NEWSLETTER is a practical resource for professional writers of nonfiction, advanced students of nonfiction writing, academic researchers, and others who may be writing or thinking of writing biographical nonfiction.
The NEWSLETTER is also for general readers interested in how biographies get written, or simply in the mental processes and work lives of writers.
All articles are available in the NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE (sidebar, this page). For an INDEX of archived articles, click here. The NEWSLETTER, which is free and appears whenever I have time to write a new article or post a new excerpt (which at the moment isn't often), can also be received automatically by e-mail. For more information, click here.
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3. Why "biographical nonfiction"?
Whether the subject is an already well-known life or a little-known life that's being explored seriously and in depth, biography always challenges the writer's craft.
The NEWSLETTER is about the issues that any writer who goes down the long, fascinating, but arduous road of writing a biography can expect to encounter along the way. In this respect, whether a biographical narrative is planned as a conventional, grandparents-to-funeral study or as something less clearly defined and rigid matters less than the fact that anyone who undertakes to construct a literary work about a life will run into most of the same problems, issues, and questions that enliven, perplex, and vex the existence of every serious biographer.
For this reason, I use the term "biographical nonfiction" as well as biography in order to cover not only what Eric Hobsbawm rather unfairly called "Victorian tomes," but also such works as (for example) Dava Sobel's LONGITUDE, which examines a life in terms of a single contribution to history; Betty Boyd Caroli's THE ROOSEVELT WOMEN, a generational chronicle of a family; or my own book, DAUGHTER OF PERSIA, which is a hybrid of memoir and historical journalism.
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 4. SUBSCRIBING to the NEWSLETTER is easy, free, and private.
NEWSLETTER articles are stored in the ARCHIVE (sidebar, this page), and you can always read them there. For an INDEX of articles, click here.
However, if you sign up to receive the free NEWSLETTER, you'll get it automatically every time I write an article, so you don't have to come back to see if a new one has appeared. You'll also know if I've posted a new JOURNAL excerpt. You don't have to register or provide any personal information, and you can unsubscribe at any time. Here's how:
Enter a working e-mail address in the subscription box at the top of the sidebar on this page. Click "Submit." When you do this, a message is sent to that address automatically.
Go to the in-box of your e-mail, open the automatic message, and click on the link it contains. This step, which is needed to activate your subscription and enable you to receive the NEWSLETTER, insures that you're the subscriber and not some low-life who's captured your e-mail address and wants to send you even more spam.
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SUBSCRIBERSPLEASE NOTE: To receive the NEWSLETTER, click on the link in the e-mail confirmation message that will arrive right after you submit your e-mail address. Please be sure to click on this link within 72 hours.
If the confirmation message doesn't appear in your in-box within a few minutes after you submit the address, the junk e-mail filter in your e-mail program probably blocked it.
If so, please go to the Tools menu of your e-mail program, open the anti-junk mail tool, and enter the domain name STORYDRIVEN.NET into the "Allowed Domains" or "Safe Domains" list. Then submit your e-mail address again from the NEWSLETTER page. The automatic message should now appear in your e-mail in-box.
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5. ARCHIVE INDEX. To go to the NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE itself (right sidebar), click here.
NO. 3 (April 2007)
STALKING THE ELEPHANT, PART 1. You've chosen your subject. Or maybe it's chosen you. So what's the story? (Main article)
RE: The "Never Violate Chronology" Rule. Never say never. (Mailbox article)
NO. 2 (February 2007)
GETTING MY CLOCK FIXED. In imagining a life, timing is everything. (Article)
NO. 1 (September 2006)
A MANIFESTO, SORT OF. Why do we want to read about real lives? (Article)
OH, WHY CAN'T BIOGRAPHY BE MORE LIKE AN ART? The literary imagination in biography. (Article)
DO BIOGRAPHERS NEED MORE LITERARY IMAGINATION? Two esteemed Brits seem to think so. ("The View from Here")
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About WRITING BIOGRAPHY on StoryDriven.net:
The StoryDriven.Net NEWSLETTER: IMAGINING A LIFE AND THE CRAFT OF BIOGRAPHY. Free e-mail newsletter focusing on the pleasures, challenges, and practical problems of imagining a life and writing narrative in biographical nonfiction. It often discusses a specific problem and solution suggested by a selection on the JOURNAL page. The NEWSLETTER also announces new JOURNAL postings. Go to the NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE or SUBSCRIBE.
The StoryDriven.Net JOURNAL: Excerpts from a Life of Sara Bard Field. (Temporarily offline.) Short selections from SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE, a biography in progress about the California poet, suffragist, and "free-lover," Sara Bard Field, a Baptist minister's wife who fell in love with the married attorney and philosophical anarchist, Charles Erskine Scott Wood. I am reconstructing Sara Bard Field's story from thousands of letters, as well as from her own massive oral autobiography.
VISITORS. Send feedback about the JOURNAL entry, writing or researching biography, or anything else on this website. Or E-MAIL ME.
ALSO:
"Finding Our Voice."© The process of creating a narrative voice for the book, DAUGHTER OF PERSIA.
Dona Munker. Professional interests and activities, plus information about a workshop on WRITING A BIOGRAPHY BOOK PROPOSAL. For more information, E-MAIL DONA MUNKER.
LINKS and RECOMMENDATIONS. Websites of interest for biographers; useful books.
Site Map
Contact Me
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Picture Credit:
Center column: Photograph of Smith-Corona Electra 210 Typewriter (ca. 1965) reproduced by permission of Prof. Theodore Brown and the National Library of Medicine.
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Notice of Copyright:
All material on this website copyright © 2005-2008 by Dona Munker, except where expressly stated or contributed by others. Copying, altering, or reproducing this material in any form without written permission is prohibited by law and may be prosecuted regardless of the venue or purpose of the copying.
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ATTENTION SUBSCRIBERS!
After signing up, activate your subscription by clicking on the link in your confirmation message within 72 hours. Click here for more help.
The View
from Here
A STORYTELLER'S DEFINITION
OF "STORY"
The following explanation of what a story is (as opposed to narrative or plot), by memoirist, essayist, and teacher Vivian Gornick, is the best one I know for a writer planning to tell the story of a life.
"Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say."
Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, p. 13.
WHO CHOOSES WHOM?
"The illogical feeling that your subjects somehow choose you is common to many biographers."
Richard Holmes, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Pantheon, 2000), p. 4.
Fear of Filing.
Self-Help
for Research Junkies
Simple ways to inoculate your research against disaster.
When setting up an online filing system for your book, keep the system as simple as possible. Try to work it so that there can be only one place where a piece of research will be when you need it again. Two places is chancy and three almost guarantees that it's "lost."
Create as few files as you need to do the job, rather than as many. Think in terms of limiting rather than multiplying files.
When designing a hard copy filing system (i.e., the files in a cabinet or drawer), organize it so it reflects your online filing system as closely as possible. Use the same folder and file names in your storage cabinets as online. That way, you won't have to spend hours going through a file to figure out whether it's the file-drawer equivalent of one online or something slightly different. (Trust me on this: I've been there.)
Date everything! Date when you first make a note or an observation about something you've found. And when you revise it, and revise it again, date it again! Date every page of every printout whenever you make one. (No, you don't have to do this by hand. You can set your word processor to print the date automatically, just like the page number.) Date even the scraps of paper and envelopes you scrawl notes on in your moments of inspiration.
If you train yourself to date everything, a couple of years down the line you will not only be able to see how your ideas have evolved but which version of your thinking is the latest, and will have spared yourself untold agonies of bewilderment and confusion.
Sara Bard Field with Charles Erskine Scott Wood in 1920, after their "free union" on San Francisco's Russian Hill. SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE, a biography of Sara Bard Field is under contract to Doubleday.
Excerpts from the working draft are posted in the the StoryDriven.Net JOURNAL. (Temporarily offline.)
"Lyrical and enchanting....Beautifully written." The New York Times Book Review. |
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