Writing a Biography, Part Two: Do You Know Your Subject?

Intellectual stamina is the most valuable brain-skill that you, as a writer of nonfiction, as a memoirist, biographer, or essayist, will ever develop. What does it mean, exactly?

It means arguing with your opponent with fluidity and self-assuredness, for hours, even if you lose the argument. You will have done your research and it will be at your fingertips. You will not give in to political opposition but stand toe-to-toe with people shouting in your face. You will not cave into base emotions or lose your temper. That is intellectual stamina. Some American Presidents had it. Like Harry Truman.

It also can be witnessed in the case of Truman Capote, as he wrote In Cold Blood. He kept returning, returning to the prison to interview Perry, gently pressuring and persuading (can't you just hear Truman purring to get the whole messy enchilada?) his subject. More than anything on earth, Capote needed Perry to tell him exactly what happened that night in the Kansas farmhouse. Capote had to perform in the inquisitive mode for several years. But finally, he was able to convince his subject to spill the awful beans.

Actually, Capote sort of led his subject to believe that telling the truth would somehow work to get the killers a re-trial. That required remarkable intellectual stamina, several years worth.

And in the meantime, he got a genuine bonus: he got to truly know Perry, the heart and guts of the guy. Wow. And this was all part of Truman's "research."

But if you don't have the intellectual drive to get to know your subject inside out, you are going to have a pretty lame story to tell. Yeah, Capote was writing about cold-blooded killers. He was sort of addicted to murder as a subject matter, and it would not be the last time he would write about murder.

But that isn't really the reason his book is so excellent. Capote found himself becoming emotionally attached to a killer, and it triggered a whole 'nother can of worms that influenced the tone of the book! You could say it deepened the book to cavernous subterranean depths of empathy. In Cold Blood is the most mysterious of nonfiction masterpieces.

The writer allowed himself to care about the people he was writing about. If a biographer cannot do that, then the book is just a piddly little flat stack of cold pancakes of fact that has no intellectual stamina. And that is the sole fault of the writer for not finding a way to care about the subject.

If you can't dig deeper than the social level, your study of another human being is going to be missing something absolutely crucial: your own personal feeling for the subject, which leads to greater, more sensitive analysis, which leads to a more fascinating read. Which leads to a paperback deal, etc. Go figure!

Back in the late 1980's, some guy wrote an autobiography (okay, it was called Historical Fiction) of General Robert E. Lee's beloved horse. It was clever and engaging, the mind of that horse! The heart of the devoted beast! Somebody cared and knew the burden, the love, and the horsey elation! It was by far more accomplished than many biographies and autobiographies written by humans about humans.

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