Biography & Memoir

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.