Discover the value of research and research methods.
Discover the many research methods, how to begin gathering data, and how to integrate the elements of fiction into the craft of writing a biography. You will create a 2000–4000 word biography for the final course, and our academic experts will provide you with personalised criticism.
A person’s entire life can be included in a biography, or it might be written on a smaller scale and simply focus on a little time frame, such as a week or a few years. Sometimes the entire issue is the focus. Other times, it’s their work or life as it relates to a certain concept or accomplishment.
A biography is not a journal or a diary. There is more to it than a list of “she did this” and “he did that.” The best way to think of biographies is as a collection of writings about occurrences in life, despite the fact that they are books about life. What major events occurred? How do these relate to a main idea or objective?
Lesson Structure
There are 8 lessons in this course:
- Scope and Nature of Biographical Writing
- The difference between a biography and autobiography
- Unauthorised biographies
- Using ghost writers in biographies
- Choosing your subject
- Biography vs. Memoir
- Researching a Biography
- Types of Evidence
- Using Evidence
- Fair Use
- Where to find evidence
- Conducting an Interview
- How to deal with conflicting sources and information
- Citations and Referencing
- Developing Context
- Determining Your Theme
- Developing the theme
- Themes and Structure
- Using Context
- Short Biographies
- Principles of the Short Biography
- Distilling Information
- Preparing to write from life experience
- Comprehensive Biographies
- What makes a comprehensive biography comprehensive?
- Writing a Great Biography
- Voice in Writing
- Planning a Biography
- The Short Outline
- The Detail-Heavy Outline
- Outlining the biography
- Defining a theme, writing to a central theme
- Word Budget
- Organising Chapter Content
- Editing and Marketing a Biography
- Editing
- Writing a Sales Package
- The Publishing Process
- Publishing Processes for Ebooks
- Self-Publishing Your Work
- Distributing and Selling your Work
- Grants for Writing
- Project – Writing a Biographical Story
- In this final lesson, you will bring together everything that you have been learning to undertake research and construct a first draft of a biographical piece of between 2,000 and 4,000 words.
Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school’s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.
Aims
- Find out how, when, why, and where biographies are written.
- Choose reliable information sources before gathering pertinent data for a biography.
- Depending on facts from research, choose the type of biography and the setting in which it should be written.
- To achieve various goals, write several short bios.
- Determine the format, tone, and content of a thorough biography that could be turned into a small book, large book, or screenplay by analysing a life.
- Decide on a biography type.
- As soon as the author has finished writing a biographical manuscript, decide how to handle it to create and promote a final product.
- Using the knowledge and abilities you’ve gained throughout the course to do research for and write a brief biographical story.
How You Plan to Act
- Examine how topics are included into biographies and how they enhance or detract from the writing.
- Make a timeline of your life.
- Find a biography, either in print or online, and evaluate the citation style.
- Choose one or more themes from a biographical book, then consider how certain occurrences relate to the theme.
- Find out about local libel and copyright laws.
- Research letters asking data from specialists or other sources, as well as interviews with them.
- Choose two pieces of primary evidence for your chosen topic, followed by two pieces of secondary evidence. Make notes about where you found your evidence, what makes it primary or secondary, and how you found it.
- Look up brief biographies of “regular” persons.
- Examine the life of the subject you want to write about. Consider this assignment from the standpoint of selecting the content you would include and the ideal format and style to employ for this specific subject.
The following are some examples of biographical writing:
- a chronicle of someone’s life in history, like that of explorer Douglas Mawson
- a description of a person’s philosophy in relation to their life, sometimes in general and sometimes for inspiration.
- interviews about a person’s life collected together
- A feature article based on factual study or anecdotal research that only covers one or two areas of the subject’s life (interviews with the subject, people who know the subject etc.)
- The screenplays or teleplays for a biopic, or a film depicting a person’s life, are examples of biographical writing.
- a play based on the life or time period of the subject.
A biography can be brief or lengthy, in the form of a book or short tale, a promotional feature, or an obituary honouring the life of the subject.
With this course, you will learn how to write, edit, and produce a well-constructed work with the help of our tutors.
