Notes from BIO Craft Lab

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My membership in Biographers International Organization, or BIO, has educated, inspired, and humbled me since I joined in 2015. Okay, and occasionally depressed me when I fall into one of those “measure-myself-against-others” spirals. All those emotions came into play during a Craft Lab held via Zoom on January 21.

About BIO

Through BIO’s conferences and newsletters, I’ve learned from prize-winning, best-selling, and/or really smart people about aspects of biography writing large and small, sweeping and mundane. How they choose their subjects. How they organize their research. How they decide how to structure a manuscript. How they acquire agents, publishers, and publicity. And on and on. I also belong to a wonderful writing/accountability/support group that evolved from a BIO conference.

This gets me to the Craft Lab. Its format sprang from the pandemic, specifically those mass Zoom sessions that, when done right, bring far-flung people together. Like other organizations, BIO held its annual conferences in this fashion from 2020 through 2022. (An in-person, three-day conference is scheduled for May.) The board of directors used this format for BIO’s first-ever, one-day workshop.

I’ll share a few highlights here, but each speaker had much more to share. Further down, I’ve inserted links to their websites and another shout-out to BIO.

A Biographer’s Choices

Dame Hermione Lee has written biographies of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Tom Stoppard, and other British and U.S. writers. In a plenary session pre-recorded in her book-filled, very English-looking study, she spoke about “a biographer’s choices.” Acknowledging fate, luck, and chance, she added, “the rest is up to us.” And so—

  • Fear never goes away: Each project she has tackled has a different element of fear, whether to write about a U.S. author (Cather, Wharton) as an Englishwoman or to write about a living subject (Stoppard). It’s a question of what to do with that fear. Heck, if she can acknowledge (and overcome) fear, can’t we?

  • Gaps, blank holes, and inconsistencies are good: Nonfiction writers must deal with the unknown. Papers are missing or do not explain a certain event. Even if they do, they might not reveal a person’s motivations. Her attitude? Of course this happens! And maybe (to paraphrase)—bring it on! To Lee, a biography should leave unanswered questions.

Curating Context: How to Angle for a Subject’s Unwritten Voice through Various Sources

Eric K. Washington’s biography Boss of the Grips is about James H. Williams, who was prominent in early 20th century as the organizer of New York Grand Central Station’s Red Caps. Washington shared insights on writing about a subject without the benefit of personal letters, diaries, and the like.

  • “Truffling”: Washington described his searches through old newspapers, vital records (census, birth, marriage, death), records of Williams’s contemporaries, and other sources. He does not just read the high-level information, he really reads them. Example: The church where Williams was married, semi-buried on his marriage certificate, led Washington to a key discovery about Williams’s private life (which I will not spoil here).

  • The untold and the telling: When all is not told explicitly, look for telling details in photos, maps, the lives of secondary characters, etc. Washington is a fan of event rosters, guest lists, and other lists of names that show, in the case of James H. Williams, the “company he kept.”

It’s a Personal Matter: Characters and Their Uses

T.J. Stiles focused his lab session on writing choices, drawing from his biographies of Jesse James, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and George Custer. I’ve heard Stiles speak before; although I admit I not a fan of his subjects, I read his books with awe.

  • Investigation and story: Narrative nonfiction has two strands—investigation (researching, interpreting is found) and the story. Stiles draws on tools of fiction to create suspense, tell a narrative, and build characters.

  • Protagonists, antagonists, and secondary characters: These are the large groups of characters that interact with the main subject in some way. Specifically related to secondary characters, who to include and who to exclude? A steady stream of folks marching in and out of a story is confusing, but obviously some are needed to move things along, so Stiles urged thinking about this carefully.

Filling in the Blanks: How to Deploy History in All Kinds of Biographies

Caroline Fraser’s biography, Prairie Fires, won the nation’s top awards in 2018. No doubt one reason is that, as she noted in her talk, she covered much more than the life of children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder. She wove in the historical events that affected Wilder, such as white settlers’ relations with Native Americans, the environmental impacts of Homestead-era farming, and the effect of the Depression on Wilder’s and millions of families.

  • Take a wide shot: To Fraser, this movie technique to establish the big picture is a useful construct for biography (and other nonfiction) writing. As she said, a movie cannot just be an unremitting series of close-ups.

  • Historical context to fill in the gaps: What is happening in the world also serves as a way to explain aspects of your subject when you don’t have other documentation. As an example, Fraser figured out why only Laura Wilder’s name appeared on the deed for the house she shared with his husband (again, I’ll leave her to tell you why).

Learn More from These Authors and from BIO

I am hoping that I inspired you to read these authors’ works to see how they apply what they talked about. I am going back into several of the books to re-read them and have added others to my list.

Also:

Website for Hermione Lee: http://www.hermionelee.com

Website for Eric K. Washington: https://www.ekwashington.com

Website for T.J. Stiles: https://www.tjstiles.net

Website for Caroline Fraser: https://www.carolinefraser.net/index.htm

Last but not least, again, the website for BIO: https://biographersinternational.org