The Basics and Encouragement of Writing a Memoir or Biography

Writing a memoir or biography of some great person in society is a huge task that should be considered carefully. The first thing to consider is that you should check your motives to find out from your inner core what are the reasons or rationale for wanting to write about the life of this person. A memoir or biography should be written only if you were affected profoundly by the person's life. This is the primary motivation for wanting to write the biography or memoir. In this case even if you are not a professional or experienced writer you can still go ahead to produce the book. You should not be just a source to a professional writer who you will be interviewed about the life of that someone you know.

The world needs people who are just themselves as human beings not some professional. The world needs books written by people who are genuine - people who are writing from the heart instead of a professional writer who will, instead of concentrating on the truth, is concerned with language structure, syntax and morphology of words. A biography or memoir is more about thorough acquaintance with the person being written about than language dynamics.

You must be at absolute sympathy with the subject, and enthusiastically be devoted the project, that is the writing process itself. As no one can interpret a poet without poetic feeling and taste, or a philosopher without speculative talent, so no one can rightly comprehend and exhibit the life of another person without being in sympathy with that person.

So instead of just being a source for information to experienced biographer or memoir writer considers yourself to be up to the task of writing a memoir or biography of that person who you know closely and you know those characteristics that made him or her to be on top of human society.

Your highest and only aim should be, like a witness, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and, like a judge, to do full justice to every person and event which comes under your consideration. Your job is to bring out reality that you know from experience and contact with the person you are writing.

But by all means it comes to planning the project in advance. If you are affected by the life of your subject you will indeed have passion to go through the complex process of planning and outlining the book. Once you have an outline you have the book, because the facts are there around you and from the people who you know can contribute to your book - providing you with their views about your subject.

The Responsibilities and Guidelines When Writing a Biography Or Memoir

The duty of a biographer is to provide perspectives on a life that was in most instances had salt - was valuable. In this context the biographer will seek to reveal those key issues which in the ultimate end will assist in human development in general and help us to know those individuals amongst us who rose to great heights in their service to humanity.

To this regard the biographer should have clear perspectives about the life being investigated. The biographer must get around the nooks and crannies of the life he or she is writing about. The biographer must have sources that he or she must thoroughly and impartially examine to determine their genuineness and integrity, and the credibility and the capacity of the people the biographer is interviewing.

In many instances the sources might be many and it might be impossible to assimilate and digest them all. Take, perhaps the life of Princess Diana - if you will set yourself to write about her you will e confronted with scores of sources and people who has something to say. In this context as the biographer you should be guided by reliability and readability - utmost condensation of sources should be studied by a judicious selection of salient points in the history of a life being studied. The reader of a biography it is true should not get miniature pictures of history, but full comprehensive portraits. Yet much space may be gained by omitting the processes and unessential details and condense facts into a concise coherent system.

It was upon these guidelines that we set out to do a biography of Eugen Weber, the most reverent former chair of History Department at the University of California. Eugen Weber was familiar, charming presence to Americans who saw his acclaimed 52-part lecture series, "The Western Tradition," produced by the Annenberg Foundation for PBS in 1989.

We were confronted with a lot of sources. There were past students of Eugen Weber to talk to in structured interviews, there were his peers and there was this vast reservoir - the internet full of reviews of the books Eugen Weber published. One thing was clear in our minds that we were not going to buckle down under peer pressure and resemble those biographers who write thick books about their subjects as if it is a testimony of the mighty things the subject did. We thought biographies can be effective and be read better if they are condense and made readable. There is no use writing thick books unless they are going to be read in their entirety not only parts. I am a big consumer of biographies but in most of them - especially the thick once I find myself satisfied with reading only a quarter of the whole book.