Craft Seminar: Writing Real Lives: The Mechanics of Biography and Profile with Ruth Franklin
Craft Seminar: Writing Real Lives: The Mechanics of Biography and Profile with Ruth Franklin
1 Session: Sunday, February 7
11:00-1:00pm ET
Ruth Franklin
Ruth Franklin is the award-winning author of two biographies, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and The Many Lives of Anne Frank. She has taught in MFA programs for 15 years.
How do you construct a real human being on the page? How do you capture the psychological complexity, contradictions, and interior life of a person—whether it’s a legendary figure for a full-length biography or a fascinating subject for a 3,000-word magazine profile?
In this two-hour craft seminar, biographer Ruth Franklin takes you under the hood of biographical narrative. We’ll explore how to choose a subject, when to use a chronological timeline and when (and how) to break free from it, how to build vivid narrative scenes out of historical records, and how to responsibly speculate without crossing the line into fiction. We’ll also examine how to balance individual lives against the backdrop of the larger cultural moment. Geared to biographers, profile writers, memoirists, and anyone writing about real people.
Highlights:
Learn how to assess whether a person’s life has the narrative arc, cultural resonance, and archival depth needed to sustain a full-length biography or profile
Liberate your narrative from a flat birth-to-death timeline
Use novelistic techniques responsibly for scene-making and speculation
This class has 2 full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, January 29.
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her most recent book is The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press, 2025), which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called “an essential look at the diarist’s legacy.” Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography about and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. In The Washington Post, Elaine Showalter called it “a sympathetic and masterful biography that both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist.”
Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
