Creativity in Biographical Writing as the Necessary Fictions of Nonfiction.

Biographical writing is highly imaginative writing and always has been. The task of the biographer is to weave a riveting story from the fabric of the subject's life. For example, a single pivotal incident in the lives of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English poet, and Mary Godwin, author of "Frankenstein", at the grave of Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, is given wildly disparate portrayals by both contemporary and current biographers. It is the use of fictional techniques that makes a biographical subject come alive in the mind of the reader. Biographical and autobiographical writing assignments can be designed to help students discover for themselves the subjectivity involved in writing for any particular audience and writing from any particular point of view. The teacher should encourage students to use the material of their own lives to discover how the telling of any good story, however factual, requires fictional techniques. For example, students are asked to write an account of their first date for three different audiences--their best friend, their mother, and their minister, scout leader or school principal. Or they may be asked to take out their checkbooks and imagine that in some future age they are their own biographers with only the factual information on the check stubs from which they must puzzle out and construct a life. Writing activities such as these help students better understand not only the impact of point of view and audience on writing but, where the story of a life is concerned, how much fiction is involved in both the living and the telling. (RAE)