Dona Munker: Writing a Biography

May 18, 2013 12:06 PM EDT

Thank you so much for this article on following the narrative thread throughout a biography (or any story for that matter). I have published many human interest articles and am contemplating my first biography. Your reminder to stay focused on the central theme applies to my magazine article writing and causes me to think that if I can keep sight of the "red thread", I can write longer pieces (biography) too! Thank you.

- Alicea Jones

May 19, 2013 5:05 PM EDT

You're welcome--glad to help!

I was once a baby editor at Little, Brown & Co, and one of the things that struck me when I read book proposals from journalists was how good they were at writing succinctly but serially, rather than developing an overarching theme. It's hard after years of developing the essential skills needed to "write short" (which I definitely do not possess!) to make the transition to "writing long." But "writing long" really just involves identifying and fully developing what Vivian Gornick in "The Situation and the Story" calls "the thing the writer has come to say"--the overarching message--and then making every single chapter and paragraph and sentence and episode and character build toward saying it, or illustrating it.

If you attended the "Beginnings and Endings" session at the end of the BIO conference, I'm sure you were as struck as I was by what Debby Applegate and her co-panelists had to say about how fundamental that is: "The thing one has come to say" has to start in the first paragraph and (one way or another) run all the way through the book to the last paragraph.

That demands a somewhat different skill set, and sometimes developing it can be scary and frustrating, but it's not magic. It's a learned skill--and it's a big part of the fun, the discovery, the excitement of writing a biography.

I took a lot of notes at that session and in the next couple of weeks I will try hard to get around to posting them, so hopefully I'll have more for you soon (well, relatively soon) on the subject of "following through."

- Dona Munker

Sep 22, 2016 12:35 PM EDT

Thanks for the details on the red thread, I was looking it up with the hope of finding it in other languages.

- Eleanor