Interview with a Biographer
Brendan O'Meara shares tips for researching reconstructed scenes and getting in the head of a character who’s no longer around to be interviewed
For his latest book, “The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine,” journalist Brendan O’Meara wrote his first biography, the life story of one of the most charismatic competitive runners in America. Because his main character was no longer alive, bringing him to life on the page required not only the skills of a journalist, but the skills of a historian.
I asked Brendan about his process for mining historical archives, organizing a book-length nonfiction narrative, fact-checking when sources disagreed, and developing a real-life character who you’ll never get to meet or interview. Find our Q&A below—an exclusive for paying subscribers to The Waterproof Notebook. For more tips and a detailed example of a reconstructed scene from his book, see this Nieman Storyboard Annotation. (If you’re new to the Annotation franchise, it’s like a “Director’s Cut” of a written story, with a craft Q&A right there in the text.)
What’s the difference between a reconstructed scene and an observed scene?
An observed scene is when you’re there on site. You’re witnessing everything, and you can just fill up your notebook with all the details there in real time. Maybe your recorder is going to catch some fanfare and some other bells and sirens or whatever might be going on. That’s wonderful. You don’t have to rely on anybody else’s recollections.
A reconstructed scene means you’ve got to go into the newspaper archives, and you’ve got to read everything—even if you think it’s a repeated story that’s been syndicated. There might be another detail in there that is just a little bit different. Glenn Stout [author of Young Woman and the Sea and other historical narratives] talks about it a lot. He says that if there’s a particular story beat, you read the 20 newspapers that covered it. Because in one story, maybe there was a car. The next story might mention it’s a blue car. In the next one, it’s a blue Cadillac. So now you’re just layering in all these different details.
