Read Susan Wider’s Interview in “The Biographer’s Craft”
“Biographers for Young Readers Nurture Adult Readers of Biographies”: The Art and Craft of Young Adult and Middle Grade Biographies
Editor’s note: There is a proliferation of interest in writing biographies for young readers and many who write biographies for adults likely have some desire to understand the space better. The BIO membership now includes many fine practitioners of this subgenre, and I sought the expertise of several of them to form the basis of this article.
When researching and writing her biography for young readers, Susan Wider was most surprised by the assumptions she heard from those outside the subgenre that such a book “needed less care and research” than an adult biography. “For me it’s the other way around,” she explained. “Young readers need just as much rigor on the page as do adults.” Wider spent seven years researching It’s My Whole Life: Charlotte Salomon: An Artist in Hiding During World War II, her middle grade biography published by Norton Young Readers, in August 2022 (which just won the Jewish Book Council’s Young Adult Literature Award). “Being squeaky clean with the facts goes without saying, but delivering those facts in a relatable way is important for a younger audience,” Wider said.
Once she began writing the book in 2015, Wider’s critique partners, she said, “were often critical of my sentence structure, worried that longer sentences and ‘overly adult’ vocabulary were too complex for a middle grade audience. But children often like to ‘read up.’ I also remembered that when I was a young reader, I picked up whatever looked interesting in the library, or on my parents’ bookshelves at home. I didn’t care about categories.”
A technique that Wider employed constantly was to read out loud “even while drafting—to be certain I was using a voice to create relatability so that readers might get inside Charlotte’s head and heart.” She elaborated, “Once I signed with Norton, my editor weighed in with his suggestions of biographies for young readers that he felt I should study. When he was comfortable with the voice I was using, I charged ahead.” Ultimately, Wider says, the book has been selling well “with lots of crossover into YA and adult markets, especially as an art book.”
