Write a Life Without Losing Track of It

The first structural decision is chronological or thematic. A chronological biography follows the life from birth to death and gives the reader the pleasure of watching a person become who they were. A thematic one takes the work, the marriage, the illness or the politics one at a time. Most biographies mix the two: a chronological spine with chapters that pause on a theme, or a prologue that opens at a turning point and then goes back to the beginning.

Under either structure the book rests on sources: letters, diaries, interviews, public records, newspapers, earlier biographies. Readers and reviewers of the genre expect to be able to tell what is documented, what is remembered by a witness and what is the biographer's inference, and the notes at the back are where that trust is earned. Quoting unpublished letters can require permission from whoever holds the rights, and an authorised biography comes with a relationship to the family or estate that an unauthorised one does not.

The practical difficulty is volume. A life involves hundreds of people and thousands of dates, and the chapter you are drafting today depends on a fact you noted two years ago.

1. Create the book as Non-fiction with Memoir / Biography as the main genre.
2. Add each significant person to Characters: name, nickname, age at key points, background, and how they relate to your subject. Put the source for each fact in the free note.
3. Build the Timeline. Each event gets "What happens", a "When" label such as "Spring 1962", and a linked chapter. Use one lane for the public life and another for the private one; the order is set by where you place events on the grid.
4. File research in Free Notes and Chapter Notes: interview summaries, archive references, questions still open.
5. Draft chronologically first. Save a version when the draft is complete.
6. Ask Robin every chapter where a person appears before you revise their story. Robin searches the whole manuscript and names the chapters.
7. If the thematic structure tempts you, drag chapters into the new order and read it through. Compare Versions shows the two structures side by side; Restore This Version brings back the other.
8. On Premium, run the Proofing Pass with the Canon filter, which flags a name spelled differently from its Story Hub entry. Then export a Word document for your editor.

• No footnotes, endnotes or citation manager. Keep sources in a Notes chapter or in Story Hub free notes and format them at the editing stage.
• The Timeline's "When" is a label, not a date. Events are ordered by where you place them, so put them in order yourself.
• The Story Hub is labelled for fiction: roles such as Protagonist and Mentor, and a Kind field. It holds real people well, but the vocabulary was not written for them.
• There is no fact-checking feature; checking is the biographer's job. On Premium and Pro, Robin can search the web from the editor chat and lists its sources.
• No scanned documents or photographs inside the manuscript or on character entries yet.