Dona Munker
WRITING BIOGRAPHY
and Biographical Nonfiction

Dona Munker: BIOGRAPHY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION.

The StoryDriven.Net NEWSLETTER ©

IN THIS ISSUE:

1. DEAR SUBSCRIBER.

2. A MANIFESTO, SORT OF (Article)

3. OH, WHY CAN'T BIOGRAPHY BE MORE LIKE AN ART? (Article)

4. Sidebar: DO BIOGRAPHERS NEED MORE LITERARY IMAGINATION? Ben Pimlott and Lyndall Gordon call for fresh approaches to writing about lives.

CURRENTLY on the JOURNAL Page: "Making the Most of the Evidence" and "Clarence Darrow Comes to Portland" (September, 2006). TO READ: Copy and paste this link into your Web browser: http://www.storydriven.net/events.htm#CURRENTINTRO.

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1. DEAR SUBSCRIBER:

Thank you for signing up for the StoryDriven.Net Newsletter. I'm happy that you're on the mailing list. If you signed up a while back, my apologies that I couldn't send you anything sooner. I work on the NEWSLETTER and the JOURNAL page when my subject, Sara Bard Field, gives me time. (Erskine thought she was pretty demanding, too. :-)

I hope you'll write and tell me what you think of anything you see on the website. Knowing that readers are interested enough to comment or criticize is what makes writing worthwhile for a writer. Which reminds me to say also that the Authors Guild, the terrific writers' organization that hosts StoryDriven.Net, as I call it for short, expects to furnish members with blog software next spring. Until that's up and running, please E-MAIL ME at the above address, or copy and paste the link, http://www.storydriven.net/disc.htm, into your Web browser and send a message to the VISITORS (discussion) page.

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A MANIFESTO, SORT OF (Article).

Why Do We Read Biography?

A message on the discussion page from someone contemplating whether to tell a life story that interests her as a biography or a novel has prompted me to wonder--as I do several times a week--about the hold that real-life stories have on human beings.

Of course, we'd all like to know more about the lives and times of popular favorites or historical figures we're curious about, and biography lets us to know more while improving our knowledge of history and other important subjects. But self-improvement alone can't account for why so many of us are willing to enter into serious and often impassioned engagement with the story of someone else's life. Or why biographers themselves willingly devote years to bleary-eyed, sometimes uncompensated toil in the reading rooms of research institutions, sifting wearily through the great and small detritus of a perhaps obscure existence for possibly interesting but always unpredictable results.

I also spend a certain amount of time wondering about the comparative rewards of biography versus fiction, which I love as well. What is the value of, say, Colm Toibin's or David Lodge's fictional take on Henry James, as opposed to a biography by Lyndall Gordon or Leon Edel? And has the distinction between fiction and nonfiction become less important than it once was? To what extent do readers in the Age of Oprah really care whether a story purporting to be authentic actually is that, either in part or in whole? (If you didn't have an opinion on that, you wouldn't have read this far.)

An Invitation:

These and many other questions about the craft, the rewards, and what I believe to be the value of telling nonfiction stories about actual lives make me want to understand more about the creative process that writing biography and/or literary nonfiction about a life entails.

In the first few installments of the NEWSLETTER, I'll try to define what I understand by "literary imagination" (see the as well as such crucial terms as "story."

I hope that other book lovers who are similarly fascinated by questions of how and why writers do what they do will write in on these subjects. E-MAIL ME or post a comment at http://www.storydriven.net/disc.htm, the VISITORS' PAGE. Meanwhile, Isaac Bashevis Singer's definition of "the mission of literature," above, seemed like a good place to start. -- Dona Munker.

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OH, WHY CAN'T BIOGRAPHY BE MORE LIKE AN ART? (Article)

Some interesting ink has been spilled over the last few years in the complaint that biographies are no longer stories but "definitive accounts" that don't penetrate beneath the surface and regard the accumulation of facts as the non plus ultra of the biographer's craft. Personally, my big complaint about contemporary biography is that it's too heavy to read on the bike at the gym. Still, it's reasonable to ask--and some very good biographers, mostly British, have asked--what it would take for biography to become a literary art form.

One thing it would take would be for biographers, especially in the United States, to understand what it means to be a general reader. By and large, what most interests most human beings, and even historians, is narrative momentum and penetrating psychology, not the piling on of details for their own sake. Biographers need to use their literary imaginations. I do not, of course, mean that they should write fiction and pretend they're writing "creative nonfiction." Rather, by literary imagination I mean an ability to detect a story running through the welter of data that lives leave in their wakes, and to make the story visible and emotionally compelling to the rest of us.

Would a sudden epidemic of literary imagination reduce contemporary biography to a weight suitable for reading at the gym? Probably not. But length isn't really the issue: the issue is that there's more room for expanding biography's horizons than is evident from looking at the bestseller shelves at Borders. The writer who can tell a good life-story has the opportunity to turn a craft into an art.

Two arguments in favor of more literary imagination in biography, Lyndall Gordon's "Telling Lives" (The Guardian Review, January 29, 2005) and the late Ben Pimlott's "Brushstrokes." (See "The View from Here," above.)

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Sidebar: DO BIOGRAPHERS NEED MORE LITERARY IMAGINATION? Two highly regarded British biographers, Ben Pimlott and Lindall Gordon, call for more imaginative approaches to telling lives.

"Sometimes the popularity of a product leads to change. At other times, it has the opposite effect....One cause of irritation about biography in the hands of many earnest practitioners is that it has become a constipated form. Ever longer, ever better researched biographies are becoming scholarly monuments--to be admired and surreptitiously skimmed, rather than read in toto as cohesive works of art."

-- Ben Pimlott, "Brushstrokes." Lives for Sale: Biographers' Tales. Ed. Mark Bostridge; London, New York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 165-170. To read online, copy and paste this link into your Web browser: http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,1292334,00.html

"It's easier for the biographer to present life as a series of exploits than to penetrate, as Virginia Woolf put it, 'that inner life of thought and emotion which meanders darkly and obscurely through the hidden channels of the soul'.....We need to co-opt the narrative momentum of stories, the inward intensity of poetry, and the speed of drama, without surrendering the authenticity that is biography's distinct advantage."

-- Lyndall Gordon, "Telling Lives." The Guardian Review, Jan. 29, 2005. To read online, copy and paste this link into your Web browser: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1400981,00.html#TARGET