6 writing lessons from Pulitzer-winning biographer Stacy Schiff

Stacy Schiff writes biographies of iconic figures such as Saint-Exupery, Benjamin Franklin and Cleopatra. Her biography Vera, of novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

More than a few people I’ve talked to have described Schiff’s latest work, Cleopatra: A Life, as dense to the point of being impenetrable. “I’ve only gotten 40 pages into it despite three or four tries,” one friend says.

Nobody said reading or writing about historic figures is easy. It took my graduate school class months to get through The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s 1974 biography of  New York urban planner Robert Moses (which also won a Pulizer). But finishing it was like completing a course not only in biography but also in political power, city planning, and how the physical shape of present-day New York City came to be.

If you stick with them, the payoffs of reading biographies can be huge. Passages from Cleopatra are magic. Like this one, about the Rome that Cleopatra encountered when she moved there with Caesar:

If she spent any time in the thick of the city, Cleopatra found herself amid a gloomy welter of crooked, congested streets, with no main avenue and no central plan, among muddy pigs and soup vendors and artisans’ shops that tumbled out onto footways. By every measure a less salubrious city than Alexandria, Rome was squalid and shapeless, an oriental tangle of narrow, poorly ventilated streets and ceaseless, shutter-creaking commotion, perpetually in shadow, stiflingly hot in summer….Given the frequency with which pots propelled themselves from ledges, the smart man, warned Juvenal, went to dinner only after having made his will. Cleopatra had any number of reasons to yearn for what a Latin poet would later term her “superficially civilized country.”

Schiff talked about the book, which is just out in paperback, the trials and tribulations of writing biographies and her writing process in general at a talk in Portland recently, part of the city’s Literary Arts author lecture series.

Here are some of the highlights:

1. Pick a genre that doesn’t intimidate you. In 1990 when Schiff left a publishing job at Simon & Schuster to write a book, she says she purposely picked biography because it didn’t feel as intimidating as quitting to write a novel. There aren’t as many biographers in the world as there are novelists, so the stakes felt lower, she told the Literary Arts lecture audience.

2. Consider the source(s). Schiff jokes that the best biography subjects were born after typewriters were invented but before the advent of email. Printed materials make it easier on the writer, so you’re not stuck having to decipher impossible to fathom handwriting on original source material. But even worse, she says, is writing about someone living in the Internet age, because so much correspondence is now via email, which people don’t tend to save.

3. The Internet is OK, but original documents are better. These days it’s possible to find and read online versions of a lot of primary and secondary source materials. But Schiff still prefers to read the originals, even it it means traveling to a different city, state or country to do it. There’s something about touching documents, reading the person’s handwriting on the original and seeing the original ink that you can’t get from the microfilm or online version, she says.

4. Use an organization method that works for you. Schiff admits she’s no expert at organizing research materials. What works for her: for each book chapter, she creates what she calls an “ur document” that could run up to 100 pages long with notes collected from multiple sources. For each chapter, she refers back to the longer document as a guide.

5. Recognize when it’s time to start writing. Schiff knows it’s time to stop researching and start writing when she goes on interviews and is more familiar with details of the subject than the people she’s talking to. Another clue: when the structure of the story starts to naturally unfold in her head.

6. Branch out. Schiff’s next book deals with history but isn’t a biography. Instead, she’s writing about the Salem witch hunts, which has an enormous cast of main characters compared to her previous works, including the girls who were accused of being witches, townspeople and judges. But don’t expect to read it any time soon. In a recent CSPAN interview, Schiff told host Brian Lamb that it takes her four or five years to write a book and she’s only a couple months into the research.

Besides The Power Broker, here are some of my other favorite biographies:

• Seabiscuit, if a story about a racehorse can be called a biography, by Laura Hillenbrand. (Her latest, Unbroken, about war hero Louis Zamperini, is on my nightstand).
• The Operator, a biography of music mogul David Geffen, by Tom King.
• Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, by William D. Miller, one of my favorite professors when I was in grad school at Marquette University.

What biographies have you read recently? Please share your favorites by leaving a comment.