This is how I did it

Two recent comments have motivated me to get back to blogging. Thank you, my small but somewhat interested audience, for keeping me from doing work that might actually provide income or advance my career.

I'm going to violate a rule that was given to me by Richard Locke, when I taught a master class in nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University. Don't use your own work as an example, he said. If I remember his words correctly, he pointed out that it's self-congratulatory, and makes it seem as if the students solve problems simply by imitating the instructor—do it just so, and you're set.

Good advice. However, I have ten minutes until I have to run downstairs and get dinner ready, so I'm going with a convenient example—my example. Let's review the problem, and one solution.

The problem is ambition. I mean this in a technical sense. Many biographies are not "ambitious," but are deliberately limited to fairly narrow confines, and still turn out to be excellent works. Sometimes they'll even find big audiences, if their subjects are well known. But I find myself drawn to writing biographies of the "Big Book" variety. I try to connect my subjects to the times, to say something about the inner person and his or her world, to draw out the larger significance of often private events. 

Sometimes the choice of subject does this for you. Writing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt? It's a bigger challenge to limit the scope of your book than to broaden it. In my case, I've written biographies of two iconic figures, but I tried to show how they were significant in different ways than those for which they are remembered. Jesse James stands in memory as a folk hero of the downtrodden against banks and railroads; Cornelius Vanderbilt looms as a grasping (or heroically creative, depending on your politics) businessman. But I argued that Jesse James's impact was tied to the Civil War and its legacy in the border states; and I focused on Vanderbilt's role not only in business, but in shaping American culture and remaking political debates over the economy.

When this works (and your arguments have to have the force of true conviction for it to work), it adds weight to a book, in the best sense. It turns the story of "one damn thing after another," as history is sometimes called, into a purposeful narrative, which is more fun to read.

But the contextual approach requires that you provide blocks of information that threaten to drag the storytelling to a halt. My suggestion is that, as you begin these sections of exposition, you prepare the reader. Make clear that you are not just relating stuff you found, but that you are laying out the stakes. Something big is about to happen, you say; here's why a lot was riding on what comes next in the story. Then discipline yourself in providing that information, so that you don't get carried away with your research, but focus on what the reader truly needs to know.

Here's an example from The First Tycoon. It's the opening of Chapter Two, preparing the reader for a block of background information (which begins on the bottom of the right-hand page). In this passage, I focus on the meeting of two people—my subject, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and his first and only employer, Thomas Gibbons. They would do great things together, I write; they would help shake American society and culture out of the eighteenth century. That naturally begs the question of what eighteenth-century society and culture was. In answering it, I again try to stress the individuals in the story, so that it does not seem like an encyclopedia entry, but what screenwriters call "back story." 

If you can't read this image, hmmm... buy the book.

Image from T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), used by permission of the author. No reproduction without permission.