You're a Detective
Your job as a biographer involves several critical responsibilities but the first and foremost is to gather information that is accurate and interesting to readers. In order to do this, you need not be an expert in any specified field, but you will have to draw on the skills you acquired in Chapter 5 in addition to using certain methods especially useful to researching biographies.
Reliable Research Tools
Much depends on whether your subject is alive or dead and if deceased for how long. Should the person you are writing about be living, you will want to try and interview him. You'll also want to interview family and people that know him or knew him if recently deceased. Bear in mind how important it is to prepare for the interview and be familiar with the methods for interviewing in Chapter 5.
If your subject has been deceased for many years it may be necessary to forgo interviews and rely upon other standard sources for information such as books and articles by or about your subject as well as official records and documents. In addition to the usual sources of information, there are research tools that work particularly well in writing biographies.
Supplementary Resources
The longer your subject has been dead and the better known your subject, the more likely it is there have been biographies previously written. Examining these books can make for a good starting place to commence your research, although you must keep in mind what you learned in Chapter 5 about plagiarism. You'll also have to make sure that your biography brings new information to light or offers a different perspective on the subject.
Since the advent of the telephone, people have relied less on writing letters to communicate. Formal correspondence has become even more infrequent with the Internet and communication making use of e-mails, most of which are not transferred to hard copies and are eventually purged. Hence correspondence, an important source of material for biographers, is less and less available.
A second source relied upon by many biographers is correspondence. Naturally, if there are diaries or journals maintained by the subject and you can access this material, you will have the pleasure of learning about your subject from her own words. But correspondence can also give you this insight, and you can gain access either from your subject directly, from the estate or family if the subject is deceased, from the correspondents who may possess these letters, or from an institution where the letters are held.
Be Creative
Think of writing a biography as an adventure while preparing to explore the life of your subject. It should be challenging, informative, and a great amount of fun. Do not feel constrained to limit yourself to a specific research tool; use anything that can bring results. For example, in writing The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Alison Weir relied on earlier biographies, letters, memoirs, account books, and diplomatic reports to produce great scholarship and an accessible book bringing these women to life.
