6 Effective Tips For Writing A Biography

Writing a biography is a responsible job. It is much harder than writing a simple essay and sometimes it is harder than writing a research paper, because writing a biography involves your personal moral responsibility to write things right about someone’s life. Your reputation is at stake here. Of course, if it is a college project stakes are not THAT high, but still. When composing this article we hesitated — should we write for writers or should we write just for students? Should we give more information or just information that will help students get a good score for the biography writing assignments? 

We’ve decided that it is better to give more information, as if only those who write actual biographies will read us. Because, if you are a student in need of some hints, you will definitely benefit from this information and just ignore points that are not relevant to your situation right now. These tips are offered by professional essay writers from SmartWritingService.com – writing company that works with the most complicated writing assignments, both business and academic. Here you can ask for writing assistance with challenging and urgent essays, research papers, biographies, and more. Today, we rely on their expertise on everything related to writing quality biographies. So, let’s start! 

Don’t procrastinate! Start right away!

The biggest mistake you can make at this point is to procrastinate because the task seems too difficult and overwhelming. You will be surprised maybe, but it is a very common problem. There is no other way to solve it than just to start writing right away. You need to create at least some content – introduction, outline, questions, research table with some critical dates in it, you need to have something to kill the fear of the blank page before it makes your procrastination too strong.

Check on how the best and the brightest do it

There are many talented biography writers, and we would need a whole separate article to list them. We don’t offer you to read like 10-20 books before starting to write, but we strongly recommend to read tips given by those biographers and read at least two books about people that are most interesting to you. When reading, pay attention not only to the facts and the stories, but first of all to how those facts and stories are structured and presented. Style may differ, but the idea will remain the same. 

Ask many questions (including the stupid ones)

If you have the luxury to interview those about whom you will be writing — it is a huge privilege but also a big responsibility. Prepare lots of questions and make sure that questions themselves are structured within the list and make a story. Because later, when you receive answers it will be much easier to deal with the text you receive. Don’t be afraid to ask “stupid” question. There are no stupid questions because if you thought about such things, millions of people would be interested in the same thing. Also, such questions often are the most original ones and answers to them make the biography you are writing shine. Of course, there is a chance that you won’t be able to ask all of your questions during the interview. Then you will have to choose. But it is much better than to improvise when you don’t have enough questions and later suffer from lacking materials. 

Ask for personal records, if allowed and available

If you can get your hands on personal records — audio, video, correspondence, previous interviews that for some reasons were not used — you are blessed! This is the kind of material that makes the story shine. Still, don’t be upset and discouraged if you don’t receive such information. There are thousands of biographies written based on research only, and some of  them are incredible.

Google carefully, and bulletproof the evidence

It needs to be said. Not everything you read online is true, we are sure you know it. However, when writing a biography you may be tempted to believe more scandalous facts and events, because they make your story better. Please, make sure to check such facts and bulletproof them. Even if the person will never see the biography you write, it is your moral and professional responsibility to include only proven facts or speculations that have a strong background to them.

Organize your notes chronologically and link the events

Create a table, put dates there and link them to each other when you find some linked events. This way no matter what you are writing, you will always be able to give more information to the context. Such a table will help you to cover all the most important events of a person’s life. Using it will also help you to find all the facts fast and easy. It may seem like a waste of time at first, but you will be amazed how effective it is when you need to link several events and cannot understand where the end is and where the beginning is.

Here is the last piece of advice we need to give you before we let you go. These tips will only work if you care to apply them. We understand that a list of ten may not look plausible to apply and you may feel like if you cannot apply to all of them, there is no use in applying to some of them. It is not a good strategy. Start with several, practice, and you will see how helpful such tips are when they are actually used. Don’t forget that you can always ask for help, look for assistance, and it is ok. We cannot be good at everything that we do, and if we try, we just burn out. Also, it is better to ask for assistance than later to miss the deadline or let your client/professor down. Be productive and be efficient in solving this assignment. Good luck!