Writing Biographies, Part One: Why the Truth Should Hurt

When a too-cautious writer of nonfiction sits down to begin writing a memoir, pitfalls are looming on the horizon. The largest and most engulfing pitfall occurs when a memoirist, or even a biographer, fails to address the embarrassing truth of the life covered. It could be your own life, and you might come across as ignorant of your own tragic moments. This is usually done to avoid hurt feelings. I guess some autobiographers are afraid to hurt their own feelings. Somebody is unwilling to get their little cat feet wet in the rain puddle of human spillage. Maybe they are afraid they will drown in it. But good biographies all have one sure quality: they are fearless.

Caution happens when one is writing about the life of another. When a lack of curiosity, a lack of investigative grit and appreciation for the darker truths of nature is not present in the writer, the story flails in the shallows, as it dies a slow, fishy death.

In a book of nonfiction about people, or human relationships, there literally is no end to the list of human flaws to pick from! To simply ignore that any serious flaws exist in a real life character is literally Pollyanna. Who wants to read a Pollyanna version of anybody's life? Readers don't! They will drop those books like hot rocks.

To make any story live up to the life that is lived, you have to wrestle with the demons that are part of every human personality. One failed biography was the life story of the famous, beloved children's author, Marjorie Kennan Rawlings, who is best known for The Yearling. There was something really tragic in her life. She was grossly under appreciated by the powers that decided what kind of writing career she would have.

In the end, this incredibly gifted and insightful woman was reduced to scripting saccharin Lassie scripts. She drank herself into oblivion. But does the writer of the bio really get down and roll up the pants legs and wade barefoot in the Rawlings muck to find out what actually went wrong?

No. It is left to the reader, who will have to read between the lines, to decipher what the problem with Rawlings probably was. This example of biographical writing is incredibly weak. The human dilemma is reduced to milquetoast, when it was a whole lot nastier and more vicious than that. In short, the truth was not told-- it was delicately avoided with kid gloves.

Avoided why? Oh, probably in the name of "good taste." Forget about that!

Your primary concern should be handling the ugly truths in the best style possible.