Writing samples - feature biography / mini memoir
I offer two distinct short-form storytelling formats: Feature biographies and mini memoirs.
A feature biography provides a concise, vivid overview of a person’s full life or career - sometimes used for legacy gifts, professional profiles, or commemorative purposes.
A mini memoir focuses on a specific chapter, theme, or turning point in a person’s life, capturing emotional truth rather than a complete chronology.
Both formats can stand alone or form the basis of a future full-length memoir or autobiography.
Below is an example of a 2,000+ word feature biography followed by a 1,000-word mini memoir, both drawn from the life of Emmy- and BAFTA-nominated producer Bill Boyes.
Example feature biography: Bill Boyes
With a background in investigative journalism, TV producer Bill Boyes understands the importance of getting to the business end of a story in the quickest possible time.
“You’ve got to be able to boil a story down to two lines. The first 15 seconds of your pitch. It could be the most important quarter minute of your life,” he says.
Boyes would know. He’s pitched enough ideas in his time, and turned on enough green lights: He’s produced on both sides of the Atlantic in a career spanning 25 years and seen his shows garner Emmy and BAFTA nominations. He has worked with such luminaries as comic genius Spike Milligan, Oscar nominees Brenda Blethyn, Julie Walters, Kris Kristofferson and any number of other globally recognisable names.
His show-reel is suitably impressive: US drama miniseries Traffic, nominated for three Primetime Emmys; BAFTA-nominated dramatised TV film, Some Kind of Life; the remake of sci-fi series The Quatermass Experiment; the explosive USA episode of Wire in the Blood (Season 6)…
“I guess I’ve been lucky,” he says. “I just seemed to fall through opening doors. I feel a bit guilty when I see how tough it is for so many others who really want to get into this business but can’t seem to catch a break. Working in television didn’t even cross my mind until the first opportunity landed in my lap.”
Of course, it helped that life experience meant Boyes was already more qualified than most to meet that first challenge – consultant to a Granada Television documentary series on terrorism. He walked in with an enviable contacts book giving him direct access to crime and terror networks across the globe.
Flashback ten years, to when the 17-year-old Boyes joined the Royal Navy.
“Just like the ad says, I got to see the world. Exotic places like… the North Sea! Of course there was also the Med, where I once spent 18 months on a frigate that kept breaking down… I got to do all sorts of cool things – like learning how to ski in northern Norway with the Royal Marines; experiencing time on an anti-submarine frigate; assisting with the Fastnet rescue operation during gale force 9 winds in the English Channel…
“I also took a degree in Sociology on the Navy ticket, at Strathclyde University. That turned me on to academia and ultimately led to my decision to leave the Navy and pursue a PHD at Aberdeen University. My subject choice was Strategic Studies, specialising in Soviet foreign policy. For reasons beyond my control I had to change midstream and was offered the chance to do research on ‘the relationship between terrorism and the media’.
“My studies took me into hard-news journalism – I interviewed senior combatants of the Northern Ireland Troubles in its darkest days during the pivotal Bobby Sands affair; I got into Lebanon with the Israeli Army at a time when it was the war zone of the moment…”
That first ‘gig’ as a temporary consultant with Granada led to the offer of a job as a researcher on the acclaimed joint Granada/CBS moral and political debate series, Hypotheticals. He went on to Granada’s groundbreaking World in Action series.
“For the first time, I became involved in the mechanics of production and found I had a head for it. Next came a series on Islamic fundamentalists in Indonesia, which again boosted my international intelligence contacts.”
By 1989, Boyes was producing and directing Focal Point, a popular weekly current affairs show for BBC Scotland in Glasgow. One of the episodes featured incredible stories about severe head injuries – and gave Boyes an idea for a dramatised film.
“I had met all these extraordinary people with fascinating tales to tell – but none of them was prepared to talk on camera. It seemed the ideal concept for a dramatisation.”
Boyes’s instincts were spot on. The project was picked up by Granada Film and he left the BBC in 1992, even though the production would be another three years in the making. “I wanted to throw myself into development.”
The result was the BAFTA-nominated Some Kind of Life, starring Jane Horrocks.
“It was beautifully penned by writer Kay Mellor and I went on to work with her again on Girl’s Night, based on the remarkable life story of a friend of Kay’s. Thanks to a fantastic cast – including Brenda Blethyn and Julie Walters and despite a tight budget it helped me to grow as a producer.”
Several projects followed, including The Last Musketeer (2000), Take Me (2001), Carrie’s War (2004), Traffic (2004), Blue Orange (2005) and The Outsiders (2006)…
“I might have stumbled into this business by accident, but it hasn’t always been a walk in the park,” says Boyes. “I’ve had my fair share of disappointments – great ideas that have been successfully pitched, gone through months and years of development only to get canned at the last minute. Like the months chasing real pirates in the South China seas for the producer of the Terminator movies, Gale Anne Hurd.
“The key to success, as with any trade, is to persist – and to take the advice of those more experienced than you. Be prepared to re-write – and then to re-write again and again and again. It’s essential to understand that the script is a blueprint for a movie. It’s an evolutionary process, where a number of factors must come into play to make the story work on screen. Some of these are to do with the purely creative input, the plot, the dialogue and so on.
“Others deal with the practicalities. How many night shots can we afford within the given budget? Is there enough for another car chase? How do we portray this scene in a way that worked in the book but is just too costly or impractical to shoot on film?
“One of the most expensive lines ever written was ‘… and the Athenian fleet sailed into view…’ For newcomers especially, it’s a good idea to try to tell stories that won’t cost an arm and a leg to make. It’s called ‘showbiz’ for a reason – it’s a business. It’s not often that a tonne of money gets thrown at an unknown. Of course it happens, and one must never stop believing in the dream – but it’s more common that the route to success lies in gradual ascent. As your reputation grows, so does your budget.”
As for the job of producer, Boyes says he’s never been afraid to get his hands dirty.
“The producer is the fixer, the crisis manager, the counsellor, the nanny… I’ve been on the phone to an actress in LA during a break from helping to build toilets on location in the Nevada desert.
“Research is a huge part of development and a duty that takes me all over the world to meet a lot of unique characters, from the heroic to the psychotic. I’ve drunk with modern-day pirates in the Philippines, met with diamond smugglers in South Africa and been caught in a caravan full of rattlesnakes in Texas.”
Over the years, Boyes has stored up a vast reservoir of useful tricks, in everything from plot structure to character development – all the while keeping everything on budget.
“Finding ways to ensure that the money is spent wisely and where it will serve best is a given in this job,” says Boyes.
That’s where experience comes in handy: Tricks of the trade learned from countless unexpected situations during the course of a quarter century in television.
“But one of the features of my job that often gives me the most satisfaction is working with the writers. It’s always a successful partnership when the writer can accept that nothing is written in stone – and that everything is subject to change as the project develops,” says Boyes. “It can be hard graft, but also a lot of fun – and when it works, it’s a kind of magic.”
Example mini memoir - Bill Boyes
Award-winning producer Bill Boyes (Wire in the Blood, Traffic, Some Kind of Life) has worked with the best in television and film in a career so far spanning 25 years. Here he talks about carousing with modern day pirates, the highs and lows of development – and why it pays to keep on keeping on.
“It was like walking onto the famed Star Wars cantina set – except that this was a very real bar full of very real modern day pirates.
I had arrived in the Philippines that morning for a prearranged rendezvous with a friendly local cop. He was supposed to ‘make it possible’ for me to have a face-to-face with one of the most notorious seafaring scoundrels on the South China Seas. However, he had smilingly told me, the meeting was no longer possible – our pirate captain had been shot dead while trying to escape police custody the day before.
Undeterred (as one has always to be in this business), I made for the watering hole of the dead man’s crew, who turned out to be a perfectly amenable and talkative bunch of battle-scarred heavies. While a motley group answered my questions over tankards of the knock-out local brew, amid disarmingly normal humour and camaraderie, fellow pirates drifted into the bar having first checked in their arsenal of automatic weapons at the door, as one would a coat or a hat.
How did I come to be here? It all stemmed from an idea that came out of a conversation with screenwriter Ron Hutchinson (Coco Chanel, Marco Polo, The Ten Commandments, Traffic).
I had been working at Granada Television in Manchester on dramatised documentaries when I became interested in the phenomenon of ‘scuttling crews’. This was major maritime fraud involving the temporary repair of an old wreck, putting a crew on it and then scuttling it for the insurance pay out. In the mid-80s it was all the rage in Greek waters.
During the course of a half-hour phone chat with Ron, the idea morphed to one about modern day piracy… which ultimately led to a meeting at Paramount Studios in Hollywood with Gale Anne Hurd, executive producer on the Terminator Series (also Mercury, Punisher: War Zone, The Incredible Hulk, Welcome to the Jungle, Room Service, Aeon Flux).
Incredibly, it turned out that she happened to own a yacht company in the South China Seas – which gave her an immediate interest in our yarn – we had our first green light to start developing a first draft.
My opening strike at harnessing some gritty, real life material in that Manila bar turned up some real gems. This was no one-dimensional story about mindless plunder by greedy Blackbeard-wannabes. These men, fearsome as they had become, had a back-story with which you could sympathise: simple fishermen who had fallen on hard times and set about hijacking vessels passing through the Malaga Straits.
For the cost of a few drinks they opened up to me, relating how their targets had no defence but to travel through the Straits at high speed – still no match for the fast motor launches at the disposal of the pirates. They told me matter of factly how they threw their grappling hooks and boarded the target ship; easy prey as many of these passing vessels were hi-tech and as such needed only a small crew – no match for a wild-eyed gang of machine-gun and grenade-launcher wielding bandits.
It was fascinating material and Ron wrote a killer first draft. It seemed like we were on course for a winner.
Then… nothing. The project never got beyond development.
Of course, it’s not the first time this has happened to me (and I’m not the exception – every producer and scriptwriter has similar tales of dizzying hope followed by crushing disappointment. Showbiz can be a casino – sometimes what we think are our best ideas never see the light of day (or, more to the point, the dark of theatre).
As always, the trick is to learn from the experience, move on, never give up. It’s a constantly evolving game with a forever shifting focus in a world of shadows and sharp edges.
Of course there are things that you can do – that you must do – in order to maximise your chances.
Choose your subject matter intelligently, write your story then rewrite it as many times as it takes to make it work.
Get it written and then get it right. More often than not, the final draft bears little resemblance to the first draft. Know your marketplace.
Follow the advice of industry professionals – they’ve been there, done that. Read scripts like there’s no tomorrow and watch only the best.
Believe in your story and in yourself enough to take the knocks and keep getting up again. But never tell yourself that there is nothing left to improve in your story. No script is perfect. Your job is to get it as close to perfect as possible before submitting it – get it wrong and you might just have missed your golden chance.
Come up with new ideas all the time, but never be afraid to revisit that old script gathering dust in your attic. If you’ve been riding the learning curve, chances are you’ll see where you went wrong. Maybe it was just the timing – but remember there’s always room for improvement. Get a professional opinion if you can, then be prepared to start over. They’re only words and as a writer you are full of them.
I still have plans for those pirates – I haven’t given up hope of bringing their scarred faces and watchful eyes and uncharacteristic laughter to the big screen one day. Inspiration, determination and eternal optimism – the three top weapons of choice for a successful raid in the treacherous waters of movie making.”