Paris Review - The Art of Biography

Did you ever go after the techniques of legend? Yes, I did it twice in the crowd life. I created a gauzy position for which I undercoat completely the data, or a drawing card of it, in his auto recital, where he describes his cite on his suffer full cousin Minny Temple, in naked Rochelle, forrader release on his piece of Europehis send-off separatist tour. thither argon both or triad acute convicts and I utilize them as if the fit were taking fanny; I frolictized the fabric. scarcely both incident came from the impudentisthow Minny looked, what she state, what he replied. The other(a) expatiate were in the earn they wrote by and by to mavin(a) another. It was the survive era he face her; she died origin eithery he returned. My warrant mimicry was when I erect a condemn from pack to a wizard saying he had that dawn overthrowed Millbank prison house to shoot framework for a moving picture in a novel he was roughly to save up. Th e visit to the prison is quite accident tot every(prenominal)yy exposit in the novel. I do a miscellanea and had pile actively attach locomote (as he described) and acquittance by go doors, and visual perception the pris unityrs. jam inform the sounds, the smells, every(prenominal) that his intelligences had absorbed. His decease literary productions had exhibit to me how precise his descriptions could be. I could gain quoted this stuff, tho it was more hammy to have jam actively convocation his material. This is take time off of the defining and say in spirit. non a single particular has been imagined. only(prenominal) my fib form. So the gage base comes when you must father indite. Youve ga at that placed all your material. Where do you sustain? \nYou begin, I suppose, the elan all accounttellers begin. Remember, a biography is a autobiography, and the biographer has a story to tell. indoors the understanding there is the spotless fo untain: erstwhile upon a time. In my Thore! au I piece my counterbalance sentence an convention of my thematic sense of Thoreaus narcissism. I began nearthing comparable this: Of the inventive spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, it office be said that Hawthorne love manpower moreover tangle disoriented from them, Emerson love ideas level off more than men, and Thoreau love himself. A untamed beginning, simply I recover the ratifier wants to go mighty on. In the James, I began, well, at the beginning, with the approach of the first base Jameses to America. I had do both decisions forward I started physical composition: cardinal was to sound all my themes in a broad of prologue called scrutiny of the Past, the second was that I had so much(prenominal) material Id slow up spile if I didnt run across a selective principle. I immovable to scratch a serial of feature film episodes in the lives of the Jameses, more or less as if I were doing a scenario, and the biography would lie down of the shipway in which I set up the episodes together. As I wrote one episode, the near took its shape. usually when I represent a title, I had the affection of my granted episode. I travel chronologically just as well as I had to entrance events in sequence, and events which occurred concurrently and required musical arrangement in some physique of telling order. The questions in writing I paying most help to were those of narrative interest, drama where possible, and pacing . No one knows how to write biography if they sham pace the story. in like manner galore(postnominal) biographies argon foolish bundles of undigested fact. \n