An Excerpt, page 1
From Chapter 8, "Writing Techniques"
Now comes the time when you're going to sit and write it all down. I have good news for you. It's easy. Much easier than you think.
It's going to be easy because you're going to skip a step that can make your life miserable. This book strongly recommends that you not transcribe your interviews. In other words, I don't think you should play all your tapes back to yourself and copy down every word that your subject uttered. That's a recipe for boredom and drudgery and eventual surrender. A very good typist takes three hours to transcribe each hour of tape, and an average person will need five hours. There's an entire day down the tubes, for just one hour of conversation. What you get at the end is often ten percent interesting and ninety percent chaff. And if you want to convert the good stuff to a narrative version, you're in for even more typing. Double the work, half the fun. Forget it. There's a better way.
This book advocates a technique I used when I was a newspaper reporter. It was incredibly useful on tight deadlines and helped relieve a lot of the stress of writing. When I started writing my grandmother's life story, I slipped into it almost without thinking. It's nothing unique to me – no trademark or patented process here – and I'm sure that many of the writers and reporters down at your town's newspaper have used a version of it at some time or another. If you've written for a living, you might have used it yourself at some point. I call it "instant composition."
Here's how it works. Find your timeline and your tape recorder. Seat yourself in front of the computer and open up a blank page. At the top, write a basic sentence like this: Henrietta Jacobs was born on March 24, 1927 during a snowstorm in Marquette, Iowa. You'll have the exact date and town on your timeline. The snowstorm bit you know by heart from the interviews. It is very important that this sentence be factual and ultra-simple, because it will set the tone for everything to follow. Do not put any adjectives or anything else descriptive in there just yet. Don't be tempted to call it a "raging" snowstorm, or say it was a "quaint" town. The words may seem dull and unadorned, but you must not worry about that.
The first lines in my grandmother's bio were these: She was born Nov. 10, 1915 at the Deaconess Sister's Hospital at Van Buren Street and 3rd Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona. It was three years after Arizona had shed its territorial status and become the 48th State. These opening words were like the first turnings of the wheels of an aircraft as it speeds down the runway, gathering pressure under the wings that would eventually send it aloft.
Find the spot in your tapes where your subject talks about the circumstances of their birth. If you didn't talk about that, zip around until you find their first memories. The key is to go as far back in the life chronology as you can. Don't worry about their ancestors or their parents – that will come later. The beginning of a Homemade Biography is always the beginning of your subject's life.