The biography is the story of life a person. The word comes from a compound Greek term: bios (“life”) and graphein (“write”). Biography can be used in a symbolic sense. For example: “The biography of the president reflects that she has never been in a similar situation. ” In this case, the notion of biography refers to life history in general, without material support.
In the most common cases, however, a biography is a written narrative that summarizes the main events in a person’s life. The literary genre in which these stories are framed is also known as biography.
According to DigoPaul, biographies usually begin with the birth of the subject in question (usually a public and famous person) and can even go back to his family background (family tree, ancestors, etc.). Biographies whose protagonist has already died go up to the moment of his death, while, in the other cases, the author of the narration can choose how far to cover.
As a literary genre, biography is narrative and expository. It appears written in the third person, with the exception of the autobiographies (where the protagonist is the one who narrates the actions). Although it may include subjective opinions of the author and data on the context in which the protagonist’s life takes place, the basis of the biography is the exact and precise data, such as dates, names and places.
The basic structure of a biography includes the introduction (a presentation of the character), the development (the narration of the important events of his life) and the conclusion (this is the most subjective segment, with an assessment of the significance of the character).
Today there are many Internet pages that offer a database with various biographies, in this way anyone who wants to know information about the history of an individual can easily access it.
How to write a biography?
At first glance, writing a biography may seem like a simple task, however if you want to do a good job you need to take it extremely seriously and carefully analyze every detail that we are going to include, to avoid giving a false statement.
When deciding to write a biography, it must be clear about which person we are going to do it, and gather as much data as possible about her and her life, in order to offer a complete and homogeneous work.
It must be taken into account that the purpose of this type of text is, above all, to make known what is fundamental in the life of a certain public person; giving more importance to his professional work than to the circumstances of his private life and telling about his way of working and everything that may be relevant to understanding his work.
It is important to point out that there are some questions that can serve as props to collect the information; starting from the past of the individual to reaching his present, such as: who were his parents and what relationship did he have with them? When did you discover that you wanted to dedicate yourself to this activity and what were your first steps in the environment? and everything that can help us understand what led him to become the person we all know.
If possible, it is convenient to interview, if the protagonist is not possible, someone who has been close to him, and gather all the data that can help us to write his story; It is often very useful to record interviews and write them down.
Once you have all the information, it is advisable to organize all the content and ideas before beginning to translate them and to know how to discern from all that information which is really relevant and which can be discarded.
