Biographies

I like to read biographies from time to time. Most of those that I have read have been on musicians, particularly Janis Joplin. But that doesn't actually have anything to do with what I want to say.

My biggest problem with biographies is that you always have to wade through at least one chapter, usually lengthy, on the person's family history.

Dude.

BORING!!!!

I don't want to read about Alfred Hitchcock's great grandparents. I don't care!!!

I know that it was a shaping force in his psyche, but it doesn't make it interesting in the least. Its just like long info dumps in fiction, especially fantasy, unless done artfully and without the reader realizing that they've just been treated to an extensive history of this non-existent world. (And believe me it's hard to work it into the story.) But at least fiction writers try to work it into the story. Biographers usually just dump it at the beginning and bore the hell out of you.

I understand the desire to want to keep the story linear (although most biographies start with a single interesting chapter which relates some pivotal happening later in the subject's life, because other wise we'd never get past the first paragraph), but really...try to make it interesting. Play with time a little bit. Start with the person's most famous years and then jump back and forth weaving a more interesting story which really reveals their driving forces. Because I'm not going to remember in chapter 2 how his/her mother always gave them liverwurst giving him/her a life long fear of owls in chapter 38 when they go on a drug binge because the tour bus hit an owl. Weave it together. Make it a story.

Don't worry Janis, I'm a gunna do you justice someday.