Biographical Essays

A couple of posts ago, my friend, Barb, commented that she likes to write autobiographical and biographical pieces. These are usually essays, but might be written somewhat like a short story with description and dialogue and so forth. I looked through my writing links and didn't find anything that particularly addressed this type of writing, although sites about essay writing should be helpful.

I did a search on "writing biographical essays" and came up with California Writing Project, which is geared to teachers of junior high and high school students, but still provides some information and how-to's on writing what one might call character sketches. It's a 23-page pdf file, so you could save it to your computer with Adobe if you like it.

This paper has quite a bit of information and some fill-in-the-blank forms to help you gather information. It even talks about how to write an autobiographical or biographical poem, which would be an interesting project. There are a number of books and websites listed at the end that would be helpful, too.

I hope that Barb and the rest of you will find it useful and helpful. Sometimes even just one or two bits of new information can spark ideas in your mind to use in your writing.