Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
This would all be lost on me. My only requirement for a bio is accurate facts. Presentation is irrelevant.
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We read for different reasons, then. No worries; everyone does.
Still, "presentation" implies that writing a bio is a matter of draping style and narrative skill over preexisting events like a decoration, whereas conjuring an actual person and their voice takes a lot more than that.
In the late 90s, I corresponded with true crime writer, Jack Olsen, and told him I thought he was better at capturing voices than other such writers I'd read -- not only those of the killers, but also the people around them. Jack wrote back with exuberance and exclamation points. He said he was grateful someone had noticed, because he made his subjects tell their stories three times at a minimum, which he recorded into a tape recorder and listened to until their voices were in his head. He not only used his recorder for exact transcriptions but to learn people's thought processes and the language they might use to say something that
hadn't been recorded.
That's one of the reasons Olsen's killers are disturbing people with disturbing voices and those of most other true crime writers are gruesome collections of facts.
It's also the reason that the telling isn't something you can simply strip away from a book like
Charmer. The telling isn't a presentation decoratively laid over the facts, it shapes their interpretation by virtue of the tellers' flaws and level of apparent reliability being reproduced in relation to the facts. Read that book and you'll never want to visit a bar in George Russell's section of Mercer Island -- not because of some air of malevolence, but because the sterility of the culture that begat the killer's alienation and narcissism is horrifying in itself.