Let's be honest. Most of us are curious about the lives of others. Okay, some of us - writers in particular - are downright nosy.
I know that young readers share that curiosity, and it's part of what makes writing biographies for them so rewarding. But I'll admit a bias: A biography written for young readers should not only educate but also inspire. (I won't be writing about Charles Manson anytime soon.) I choose my subjects carefully, for that inspirational angle.
Right now I'm researching the lives of four native-born Coloradans, all of whom have achieved admirable accomplishments, here in Colorado, in Washington, D.C., and all the way into outer space.
A second bias pushes me to look for elements that shape a person's life story into a graceful arc, the old beginning-middle-end of the fiction writer. Of course, not everyone's life fits that mold and the arc of a biography shouldn't be forced, but I'm always looking for connections that will wrap a young reader's understanding of a subject into a neat package.
One element is contrast, especially the difference between childhood circumstances and adult accomplishments. Ken Salazar grew up on a ranch in Colorado's San Luis Valley. The family home had no electricity, no telephone. (And he's younger than I am!) Today Salazar is U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
Coincidence is another intriguing element. I remember being enthralled by all those chance meetings between characters in Charles Dickens' novels. Two of the Colorado-born NASA astronauts I'm researching, Vance Brand and Jack Swigert, were born the same year, 1931, Brand in Longmont; Swigert in Denver. During high school they both played football and may have been opponents in one important game. During Brand's senior year, according to his school's yearbook, Longmont was trounced 34-0 by a "big bunch of boys" from Denver East, Swigert's school. Both went on to make history exploring the outer reaches.
Scott Carpenter, born in Boulder, spent his childhood living in his maternal grandparents' house at the corner of Aurora Avenue and 7th Street. He named his 1962 space capsule Aurora 7. (According to Carpenter, that was pure coincidence, not intentional. He says, however, that people in Boulder still like to believe their local intersection is memorialized in NASA history.)
So now, it's back to fitting the pieces of those arcs together into inspirational - and true - stories.
