Join me in this live two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about telling someone else’s story – in ways that both preserve and pay tribute to their personal history.

When I was writing the biography Lou Reed: The King of New York,  what struck me was not how remarkable Reed’s story was — though he was among his generation’s greatest and wildest musicians — but how similar it was to most of our lives: Growing up with familiar struggles, family matters included; moving from city to suburbs (and back again); attending school, being reckless, finding passions, finding love, looking for meaning, confronting and adapting to old age.

I’ve been writing stories about people for a really long time — for Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, SPIN and now on my Substack, “Will Hermes: New Music + Old Music.” (You may have heard me on NPR, as well.) My first book, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, sketches multiple life stories in miniature. I’ve learned things from this kind of storytelling I think are worth sharing  — because they seem universal to anyone interested in writing about humans, in whatever kind of writing you prefer.

My first class on the Five Things platform focused primarily on writing about music. This class is more general, geared towards writing about a person’s life. Any person — an artist you admire, or your grandmother (who may or may not be an artist). The process, and the tools, are pretty much the same.

Here’s five things I’ve learned about writing someone’s life:

  • #1 Start at the beginning – Seems obvious, but a surprisingly useful strategy. People are shaped by their experiences over time, after all. Sure, a lot of storytelling involves shuffling chronology — my Lou Reed biography begins with his final days of life. But my research started, literally, at the hospital in Brooklyn where he was born. For Love Goes To Buildings On Fire, the narrative threads follow a strict chronology, 1973 to 1977 — beginning 1/1/73, ending 12/31/77. The simple rule was completely freeing, and the single best organizing principal I could have used, even if (I confess) it felt like a stopgap decision at the time.
  • #2 Find out who the person has loved, and who has loved them – You can tell plenty about a person from who their husband is (or husbands); who their wives, lovers, and good friends are. To be clear, this is not about focusing on who the person “hooks up” with, as the kids say, although that might very well be a part of the picture.
  • #3 What they’ve done is key – The saying goes that “you are what you eat.” And yes, there is biological truth there. But by most modern measures, for better or worse, we are in large part what we do. Digging into what a person has done in their life — what they’ve made, literally or figuratively, over time — is key to telling their story.
  • #4 Find stories in their cherished objects – When I was researching my Lou Reed book, I spent months going through his archives at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where his wife Laurie Anderson wisely deposited them following his death. Most people don’t have an archive in a public library. But perhaps we can track down letters and emails they’ve written, their record collections, their cookbook libraries, the contents of their clothes closet, their chachkas, fishing lures, jewelry, baseball cards. There are stories in these objects waiting to be told, and they can be surprising.
  • #5 Your story will be one version of many possible and equally-true stories – There is no such thing as a definitive life story, because a life can never be fully contained in a story. This isn’t a bad thing to consider. In fact, it can be liberating: to accept the subjective truth of your story. It doesn’t have to be the whole story, because it truly can’t be. What it must be, however, is your own story. 

This class is intended for inexperienced writers as well as published ones, because writing, as I’ve said, is about maintaining a practice. Like exercise, painting, meditation, yoga, playing an instrument. Writing can be fun, even if it’s frustrating at times, and exhilarating when it’s going well. It’s about getting into the process. And telling the story of a person’s life is not just a way to pay tribute and preserve their history. It’s also a way to learn more about your own life story — which may be one you’ll want to tell, too.

I hope you’ll join me.

– Will