Date: Course begins Wednesday 30th September 2015
Course fee: £4,000
From the brief lives of antiquity to Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets to monumental nineteenth century lives and letters, biography is a form that has shown a wonderful capacity for invention and reinvention. This is certainly true of work that has been published recently. Biography has embraced a new style which blends the narrative inventions of fiction with the historical authority of the traditional profile. This zest for the discovery of new ways of telling has gone along with the exploration of many different kinds of subject: the relation between hawk life and human life in Helen Macdonald's prize-winning book, H is for Hawk; the lives of the anonymous as well as those who were famous in their own lifetimes; and the life span of a human invention, exemplified by Richard Holmes's recent book, Falling Upwards, about balloons in the nineteenth century. Biography has become a form of enquiry into what we mean by a life, as well as a uniquely inventive way of telling stories.
Led by Jon Cook, author of Hazlitt in Love, this 24-week course covers the fundamentals of writing a biography, from finding the right tone for your writing to examining different structures that will engage and sustain your reader's curiosity. One focus will be on building research skills, the linchpin of every good biography. This is how you discover the tiny, telling details about your subject's life, work and age that will transform your readers' understanding of them - and likely your own too. These discoveries, in turn, will help you decide whether to narrow the focus of your narrative to deal with a specific event, or broaden it to explore the culture, history and people of your subject's era.
Throughout the course the development of your capacities as a writer of biography will be helped by an exploration of the genre itself. By learning more about how others have written biography, you will be able to discover the best method for writing about your chosen subject. You will also have the opportunity to meet with some of the leading biographers at work today, including Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, and Kathryn Hughes and find out more about how they approach the work of writing biography.
By the end of the course, you'll have found your personal style, explored the different perspectives that make up your subject, and developed research techniques that will help you discover the life that you want to write.
If you're interested in signing up for How to Write the New Biography and would like more information please email masterclasses.support@theguardian.com or contact us on +44 (0) 20 3353 3099 between 9.30am and 5.30pm, Monday to Friday. If you'd like us to contact you, please click here and tell us what time works best for you.
Course programme
This course outline is provisional. It is intended to give an outline of what we will do and why we will do it. Over the six months that the course meets we may need to adapt or change it in response to emerging questions and priorities.
The course will be guided by two main objectives: one is to explore the genre of biography in many of its different manifestations. This will involve reading excerpts from a range of biographies and a few complete texts. This reading will in turn form the basis for discus-sion and short writing exercises that will enable you to text out how a biography is made. The second objective is to develop your own biographical project. The classes will provide opportunities for you to learn about the techniques of writing biography, to apply those techniques to your own work, and to get feedback on what you're doing from your tutor and fellow writers. Both these objectives will feed into each other, enriching your own practice by thinking about the work of others and developing a greater understanding of the potentials of biography as a genre through your work as a biographer.
As the course develops the focus will be increasingly on your own writing, but we will continue to explore the genre by further reading and by discussing biography with some of the leading practitioners in the field, including Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, and Kathryn Hughes.
We will ensure that readings for specific sessions are circulated before hand whenever copyright law allows. Participants on the course will be asked to purchase a small number of texts, including Richard Holmes's Footsteps and Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage.
Week 1 - Wednesday 30 September
Introductory: apart from introducing ourselves to each other, we will discuss the course objectives and agree on the methods we want to use to achieve them. We will also have an initial round of discussion about our own likes and dislikes in the genre and think quite closely about the opening pages of two recently published biographies.
Week 2 - Wednesday 7 October
Exploring the genre: brief lives. Here we will discuss some examples of short biographies with examples drawn from the past. Are there important things we can learn about our cur-rent assumptions about biography by looking at examples from the past?
In the second half of the session we will focus on some short writing exercises, connected either to pictures or objects, intended to help you develop your own work in biography.
Week 3 - Wednesday 14 October
Exploring the genre: brief lives. We will take a section from Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, and discuss both Strachey's method and the impact of his work.
In the second half of the session we will share and discuss the basic chronology that will inform your biography. This crucial first step will raise important questions about how we understand a biographical subject and how we make a story out of a chronology. One of Hazlitt's biographers, Stanley Jones, developed a card index which gave information on every day of his subject's life where he could find it. We will discuss the usefulness and relevance of this method to your own work.
Week 4 - Wednesday 21 October
Exploring the genre: brief lives. We will read and discuss one of the chapters of Richard Holmes's Footsteps. This will provide a useful basis for thinking further about the crucial relation between the biographer and his or her subject. How far should this relationship be part of what the biography is about?
In the second half of the session we will explore the question of voice and voices in biography through written exercises that will draw on letters, diaries, memoirs and interviews.
Week 5 - Wednesday 28 October
Exploring the Genre: experiments. One of the hallmarks of contemporary biography is the way it moves between genres of history and fiction, biography and memoir. In this session we will analyse and discuss one recent example of this kind of experiment: Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. This book is a kind of biography about D H Lawrence, but it also a book about not being able to write a book about its subject. Is Dyer's work an example of biography or isn't it? If it isn't, what does it tell us about where biography begins and ends.
In the second half of the session, drawing on some of our own written exercises, we will explore the importance of childhood to the writing of biography. Some people argue that the key to a person's life is to be found in childhood and adolescence. Do we agree?
Week 6 - Wednesday 4 November
This session will be given over to individual tutorials. It will provide you with an opportunity to get some response from the tutor to the biography you are writing and discuss your plans for its development.
Week 7 - Wednesday 11 November
Exploring the genre: Cradle to Grave. In this session we will take up one of the basic forms of biography: the idea that it is a book that tells the story of someone's life from birth until death. But what kind of assumptions about lives and stories inform this idea of biography. We will focus our discussion by drawing on a single example of a cradle-to-grave biography that we will agree on in the first session of the course and all have read by the this session.
In the second half we will write about and think about how we establish the physical presence of our subjects. What did they look like and to whom? Does description ( height, col-our of hair and eyes, clothing) help us here? Or do we have to explore more imaginative methods of establishing physical presence to do with voice, movement, sexuality. . .
Week 8 - Wednesday 18 November
In the first half of this session we will draw on written exercises to explore another key question in the creation of biography: who are the friends, lovers, partners, parents, confidants of the subject of your biography. How do we construct this network in a biography and how in turn does it influence another crucial dimension in biography: the interplay be-tween an external view of a subject and his or her inner life?
In the second half of the session we will review our work so far and see what issues have emerged from our discussions that will need to be taken into account as the course develops.
Week 9 - Wednesday 25 November
Exploring the genre: selection. Drawing on some of the biographies we have discussed so far we will focus on a key question in the narrative construction of a biography: are there key moments in a life, turning points that give it meaning and definition? And if there are how does that influence decisions about how a biography begins: at birth, at a turning point in a life, or is meaning only given at the point of death. In addition to the work we've already discussed we will look at one or two examples of obituary writing to test these assumptions. In the second half of the session we will continue this discussion but in relation to questions raised by our own work in biography.
Week 10 - Wednesday 2 December
Exploring the genre: narration. Again, drawing on the biographies we have worked with so far in the course we will discuss the question of narrative voice in biography. Should this be objective and impartial; should it be affectionate or satirical: should it be partizan or critical? This question of voice will extend in the second half of the session to a discussion of narrative voice in our own work. How do we decide what narrative voice or voices to adopt, or is it the case that this crucial feature of biographical style will emerge in the course of writing.
Week 11 - Wednesday 9 December
This session will be given over to individual tutorials.
Christmas Break: the course will take a break after December 9th and will reconvene on January 13th 2014. From this point on our sessions we will be focussed more on a work-shop discussion of drafts produced by writers in the group, but the exploration of the genre will continue through further course visits and by drawing on some agreed examples of contemporary work in biography.
Week 12 - Wednesday 13 January
Course visitor: this session will be led by one of the leading biographers who have agreed to visit the course. They will draw on their own experience of writing biographies to discuss questions of technique, subject matter, and research.
Weeks 13-24 - Wednesday 20 January to Wednesday 6 April
From weeks 13-24 the focus will be on the development of individual projects through workshop discussion.. This is designed to help you prepare for the assessment and build serious momentum for your own writing. We will continue with discussions and readings designed to extend our exploration of the genre and there will be more class visits by leading biographers
Profile of the course tutor
Jon Cook is an author, critic and professor of literature at UEA. His recent publications include a biography, Hazlitt in Love. He has worked with Richard Holmes on the development of the MA in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction at UEA and supervised biographical writing at doctoral level. A judge on the Caine Prize, the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction and a member of the international academy for the Folio Prize, Jon has taught at universities in the US, Europe and India. He co-directs the UEA/Guardian Masterclass programme with Kelsey Padjen.
Timings and specifics
The course will have places for 12 participants who will meet for one three-hour session per week (6.30pm-9.30pm) for a period of six months at the Guardian building at Kings Place, London N1 9GU.
The deadline for sign-up is Wednesday 23rd September 2015.
Booking process
The course is non-selective and will operate on a first come, first served basis. To register, please email masterclasses.support@theguardian.com or call +44 (0) 20 3353 3099 between 10am and 5.30pm, Monday to Friday.
Assessment
Writers who successfully complete the course will receive a successful completion certificate from UEA. The course will be a pass or fail. This will be determined by ongoing assessment and a final submission of 5,000 words.
Refunds
Refunds will not be given to students who miss sessions or drop out of the course once the full fee has been paid.
More information
If you would like more information about the course or have any questions please email masterclasses.support@theguardian.com or call +44 (0) 20 3353 3099 between 10am and 5.30pm, Monday to Friday. If you'd like us to contact you, please click here and tell us what time works best for you.
