Dona Munker
WRITING BIOGRAPHY
and Biographical Nonfiction

NEWSLETTER: IMAGINING A LIFE. The Craft of Biography and Biographical Nonfiction. ©

NEW on the JOURNAL Page: "Sara Views C.E.S. Wood's Library." (April, 2007). (To read the excerpt, copy and paste this link into your Web browser:
http://www.storydriven.net/events.htm#CURRENTINTRO.)

IN THIS ISSUE (No. 3, April 2007):

-- DEAR SUBSCRIBER: Send me your comments! Blog still on the horizon. "Imagining a Life" talk available online.

-- STALKING THE ELEPHANT, PART 1. You've chosen your subject. Or maybe it's chosen you. But how do you know what the *story* is? (Main Article)

-- RE: The "Never Violate Chronology Rule." I take it all back. Or at least I admit there are exceptions. (Mailbox Article)

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The NEWSLETTER SIDEBAR. (To read these, copy and paste the link after each into your Web browser.)

(1) THE VIEW FROM HERE.

-- A storyteller's definition of "Story."
http://www.storydriven.net/newsletter.htm#SIDEBAR1A.

-- Richard Holmes on choosing our subjects.
http://www.storydriven.net/newsletter.htm#SIDEBAR1B.

(2) FEAR OF FILING: SELF-HELP FOR RESEARCH JUNKIES.

-- Simple ways to inoculate your research against disaster.
http://www.storydriven.net/newsletter.htm#SIDEBAR2.

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DEAR SUBSCRIBER:

NEWSLETTER No. 3 arrives in your mailbox only two months after No. 2. I'd like to think that's because I'm getting faster, but it's probably just the coming of spring.

SEND ME YOUR COMMENTS! Michael Helquist's question below ("RE: The 'Never Violate Chronology' Rule") gives me a chance to qualify what I said about a nuts-and-bolts concern that comes up for everyone who tries to construct a biographical narrative. Since nuts and bolts can get pretty complicated (personally, I still have scars from the last time I tried to assemble a task chair), and since there's never time here to address all the ramifications of even a single topic, I really welcomed his question. So if you'd like to comment, question, or object to any sweeping generalizations in these pages, I'd be delighted to hear them. Your concerns may help someone else with theirs.

BLOG STILL ON THE HORIZON: The Authors Guild assures me that this website will be blog-ready by summer. Maybe I will be, too. When that happens, whether you're writing a biography, thinking about writing one, or just an innocent bystander, I hope to hear from you.

IMAGINING A LIFE ONLINE: On April 3, I gave a talk at the University of Southern California on "Imagining a Life in Biography." To see the video, copy and paste the following humongous link into your Web browser:

http://msbstream01.marshall.usc.edu/GeroMediaSite/Viewer/Viewer.aspx?layoutPrefix=LayoutTopRight&layoutOffset=Skins/Clean&width=800&height=631&peid=4953024c-fc7e-4d2e-892b-7356e0d6c10d&pid=b9055c88-e451-4442-873c-1ffd9ff2d0c7&pvid=555&mode=Default&shouldResize=false&playerType=WM64Lite

-- Dona Munker

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ARTICLE: STALKING THE ELEPHANT, PART 1. You've chosen your *subject,* or maybe it's chosen you. Now, how do you discover what the *story* is?

Parable: An admirer of a famous sculptor pays him a visit and finds the master carving an elephant from a huge, shapeless block of stone. "Master," cries the visitor, "What splendor! What realism! What insight! How do you do it?" "Simple," replies the sculptor. "You just cut away everything that isn't elephant."

That's my favorite saw--no pun intended--about constructing a story from someone else's life. In this Newsletter and the next, I'd like to discuss how the biographer discerns the elephant in the stone, explain why the elephant is important in the first place, and list a few questions I've found helpful when stalking it.

SO WHAT'S THE STORY?

A question biographers are often asked is, "How did you find your story?" What the questioner means, of course, is "How did you discover your subject?" Why did Justin Kaplan decide to write about Mark Twain in MR. CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN (see the next article)? How did I hear about Sara Bard Field and her relationship with Charles Erskine Scott Wood?

Writers enjoy being asked that question because the answer is simple; however, the question itself is misleading. The events and achievements of a subject's life aren't "the story," at least not in the sense that's really vital to a biographer. In biography, a "story," properly speaking, isn't the life's external manifestations: accepted facts, well-known achievements, or even the raw, unprocessed information the writer finds lying around in libraries, archives, and recorded interviews. Rather, it grows out of that detritus, from choices the biographer makes about what he wants to say.

Fictional or non-fictional, a story comes from a writer's mind. Lives don't take up residence in some Platonic cave of the past and sit around waiting, fully formed, for us to come along and turn them into narratives, and the implications of this are basic but critical to what the biographer has to do. "The story" in a biography is the result of an ongoing process of growth that involves asking questions, looking for answers, and constructing a narrative from the answers; then asking more questions, doing more research, and revising what is already written, often again and again.

That's why writing a biography is comparable to cutting an elephant out of a block of shapeless stone. To envision the elephant in the stone, the writer first has to know what a story is.

"SITUATION" VERSUS "STORY."

In THE SITUATION AND THE STORY, a book about writing memoir and the personal essay--and if you're interested in personal narrative but have never read this small classic, you really should; it will take you all of one evening--Vivian Gornick makes an elegant, and eloquent, distinction between "situation" and "story." In Gornick's terminology, situation refers to external circumstances: the outward facts the narrator of the memoir or essay is contemplating. The story, by contrast, is the psychological or emotional impact, the experience, of the external facts or circumstances.

Story, then, is the storyteller's emotional experience of the situation--it's the actions and reactions the circumstances evoked, and the significant psychological consequences of experience. (To read Gornick's definition, go to http://www.storydriven.net/newsletter.htm#SIDEBAR1A.)

Gornick's definition of story also holds true in biography--except that in biography, the story doesn't arise from the narrator's psychological response to a situation but from the response of somebody else (the subject) to their circumstances, usually over a very long period of time. In biography, it's the events and relationships the subject encounters over a career or a lifetime that comprise the situation, while the story consists of the subject's psychological response to those events and relationships. "Narrative," by contrast, is the biographer's written interpretation of the story, as seen in the available information and evidence.

(Think of it this way: the "situation" is a locomotive. The "story" is the engine that powers it. The "narrative" is the track the train runs on. Hey, cut me some slack; Sara spent a lot of time on the train.)

THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

Now comes the tricky part. In personal narrative, such as memoir, the narrator reflects on how she herself experienced the events and relationships in her narrative. She's writing about a situation she either witnessed or reacted to herself; there's no intermediary. The biographer, on the other hand, is recounting not his own experience of events and relationships but someone else's, either through what the subject said, did, and wrote, or by inferring it from what others said or wrote. He doesn't just record the facts, events, and achievements of the subject's life, but selects from and interprets the information and evidence he finds.

Because the biographer writes not as someone remembering events and relationships in his own past but as a detective investigating someone else's, biography is, by definition, an interpretive form of narrative art, as opposed to the inventive (fiction) or analytical form (history). The biographer serves as the reader's guide to the situation as the subject experienced it, and, as such, speculates on the meaning and significance of events, achievements, and relationships. Naturally, the selection and interpretation on which he bases his role as guide are inherently subjective. Because this element of subjectivity is always present, no two versions of the story of a life will be identical.

INTERPRETATION OR LAUNDRY LIST?

This means that, in biography, "the story," in the sense that Gornick uses the term, is influenced by this second person's (i.e., the narrator's) interpretation. So long as the interpreting is fair and any speculation is derived from evidence, not from invention, that's not necessarily bad--on the contrary, it's often good, or at least necessary. It takes two to write a life: the subject who lived it and the writer who is imagining it. Interpretation--the biographer's engagement with someone else's situation and what the biographer believes is significant about the person's psychological responses to circumstance--is what brings both the subject and the historical background alive.

In his biography MR. CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN, for example, it was the excitement the literary biographer Justin Kaplan experienced at what he felt was a crucial insight into Sam Clemens' response to his circumstances--the creation and deployment of a literary persona Clemens called Mark Twain—that helped win Kaplan's readable and entertaining biography a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. (For more about this, see the next article.)

Conversely, a biography that, in the interests of "objectivity," makes no attempt to interpret the life will be nothing more than a laundry list. No matter how well he does his research, a biographer who avoids interpretation can't offer a story, only a lumbering, lifeless rehearsal of "situation." The biographer can also bury the story beneath a mountain of external information about circumstances, turning a book into a wearisome recounting of factual details for their own sake that overwhelms whatever story the writer may be trying to tell, in which case the biography may become a doorstop. This is an easy trap even for experienced writers to fall into: we're all inherently curious, and it's hard to resist the temptation to include that one last nugget that doesn't serve the story well but is so interesting for its own sake that we feel driven to include it. A story is in even more danger of informational overload when the writer has a need to make his book the last word on the subject.

Actually, the richer the subject, the more unlikely it is that anyone will ever have the last word: think of Shakespeare or Jane Austen, to name only two obvious examples. No matter how often great subjects are written about, good writers will always find other stories to weave from great material. A friend who is working on a book about Jane Welsh Carlyle, the fascinating wife of Thomas Carlyle and a figure who has often been written about, said to me recently, "If you try to be exhaustive, you usually risk being exhausting. But there's always another story." Fortunately, if there's a life you're eager to write about and you sense that it contains a story you want to tell (and provided enough information exists to do that, which is a separate issue that I'll save for another occasion), the chances are that you'll find what you're looking for.

SIGHTING THE ELEPHANT

How does a biographer discern *the* story in the shapeless block of marble--the welter of material and information that even a brief preliminary investigation into a life is likely to produce? The process is both highly individual and largely intuitive; it's also--and should be--somewhat unpredictable, and it can take either a very short time or a very long time to come to fruition. Asking the right questions, however, can help. In the next Newsletter, I'll discuss how I've approached this question in my own writing and observed it in others, and suggest a few questions I've found useful for discerning the elephant.

COPYRIGHT WARNING: Copyright © 2007 by Dona Munker. Copying, altering, or reproducing this article in any form without written permission from the author is legally prohibited and all violations will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, including monetary remedies.

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THE STORYDRIVEN.NET MAILBOX.

RE: The "Never Violate Chronology" Rule. I take it all back. Or at least I admit there are exceptions.

After fulminating in Newsletter No. 2 about the importance of never violating chronology ("GETTING MY CLOCK FIXED"), I got an e-mail from Michael J. Helquist, who's writing a biography of Marie Equi, an early 20th century physician, lesbian and radical activist, and who has reminded me that in storytelling there is no such thing as "never" (well, almost no such thing):

"Thank you for the emphasis on chronology....Have you found that it is helpful or more dramatic to get the chronology right but to place events in a different order?...I guess the shorthand would be "flashback" but that sounds and often is rather hackneyed. For my subject -- who is not widely known -- I am considering whether to begin the story with a more dramatic event that reveals her character and boldness and then make a connection to similar traits that appeared in her childhood and tell the first 20 years at that time. This is an ongoing question for me as I continue writing and researching."

And thank you, for making me eat my words. I agree that the opening should have enough drama to persuade the reader that the subject will be worth reading about, and chronology be damned.

I don't, of course, think that biographers should always rigidly observe the date and order of events; if they did, no one would ever be able to write anything that didn't start with the grandparents and end with the funeral.

Even in the case of a famous and oft-discussed subject, the biographer may prefer to open his story in medias res. I once heard Justin Kaplan say that he decided to begin his book about MR. CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN not at "the beginning" but with what he felt was the moment of truth for his subject--the point where Samuel Langhorne Clemens chose the "self" by which he would become known as a writer. Kaplan decided on this approach not only because he wanted to escape the straitjacket of the grandparents-to-funeral arrangement, but because he found it an exciting and meaningful way to explain a vital impulse behind Clemens' life and work--an impulse he felt provided especially interesting insights into the genius of Mark Twain.

There are other times, too, when "violating chronology" is not only necessary but desirable. For instance, the biographer may need to fill the reader in on past events or the life of an important secondary figure. As long as he does so clearly, with no confusion about whether the current discussion is in the story's present tense or its past (this problem is usually solved by breaking the out the history as a separate section or chapter), and so long as the reader can sense that there's a good reason for a temporary digression, departing from strict chronology shouldn't pose a problem.

That said, I do think that on the whole, it's important to tell the main story as much as possible in the order in which events actually occurred, and to stick to that order unless a departure is really unavoidable. For one thing, it's essential to avoid confusing the reader, which is always easier to do than the writer thinks. Not even the most attentive reader knows as much about the story as the writer does, so not fooling around with chronology makes confusion less likely to occur. The other reason, as I said last time, is that chronology imposes discipline on the writer. Keeping to the actual order of events helps the writer understand the circumstances better, and hence to understand the subject's experience of and reaction to those circumstances.

That's why, as a rule, I think that nonfiction writers should steer clear of flashbacks. A flashback is something different from a clearly demarcated section or chapter devoted to filling the reader in on historical background or on a character's life up to that point: it's a dramatic device for explaining past emotional experience that has had an impact on events in the narrative present. In a novel, a flashback, when used well, is perfectly legitimate, but in biography, flashbacks seem to me a lazy, pseudo-novelistic way for the writer to escape the difficult work of figuring out how to narrate a complex series of events clearly.

So while there are exceptions to my ex-boss' injunction never to "violate chronology," in general I remain convinced that it's always worthwhile to first at least try telling the story as it occurred. Adhering to the real-life timeline usually enhances the impact of a real-life story, whereas fudging it tends to obscure or detract from narrative suspense.

COPYRIGHT WARNING: Copyright © 2007 by Dona Munker. Copying, altering, or reproducing this article in any form without written permission from the author is legally prohibited and all violations will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, including monetary remedies.