How to Write a Biography

Video Transcript

"Hi, everybody, I'm John Graden. I'm a professional speaker, writer, and trainer. How do you write a biography? Is there somebody that's really compelling you? That interests you enough that you want to actually take the time to write their story. There's certainly plenty of people out there. If you're going to write a biography, you want to make sure that the subject has appeal. If there's been a lot of biographies already written on this person, of course read them all, research it--that obviously makes sense--but what are you going to bring to the table that's going to be a little bit different? How are you going to be able to present this to an agent or to a publisher, that's going to show there's something different here? What's the whole point of this person's life? What lessons can be learned? What inspiration or mistakes can we learn from that this person's unique life presents to us? What's your theme? Is it going to be a chronological--I'm a speaker--chronological time frame. In other words, are you going to take it from his childhood or her childhood all the way up to the present. Or are you going to build it around a career, an event, or series of events. Those are decisions you have to make. As you continue to research this person, you would seek out cooperation from the subject of the biography. That's not always going to happen. Sometimes you're not going to get that cooperation, and then you have to be very careful about how you proceed. You're going to want to make sure that you have errors and omissions professional liability insurance. You want to make sure you have the support of your publishing house as you move forward in this thing. Once you've done your research--and here's the thing about research. You can get caught up in research, and confuse it with book writing. It's very easy, especially in today's Internet world, to get caught up in analysis paralysis. You've got to put a deadline to your research, make a list of the people you want to interview, get those interviews done, no why you're doing the interviews, and then sit down and begin to write. I suggest you write the back cover of the book first. I thought about the back cover because when people go in the bookstore and they pull it off the shelf, they pull it over and they typically read the back cover--that's my sales pitch. So I want to convince people with that back cover to buy this book. So it helps keep me on track. Second, I'm going to go to the table of contents. I'm going to outline my table of contents--I can always change them--then I'm going to start writing. My rule is to write a thousand words a day. Very simple. Some days it's going to be difficult. Some days you're going to write ten thousand, it's just going to flow. Fact check everything in the book. Make sure you're covered. And take your time with something as important as a biography. I'm John Graden. I hope that helps you to write your biography successfully. Thanks."