The Author’s Backgrounding as a Critical Factor in Reader’s Positioning

Ladies and Gentlemen my name is Mike Richards. Welcome to my master class on how to write a persuasive biography with a hidden motif. Now a little bit about myself: I started my working life as a journalist with the Age then in the 90s I became its assistant publisher and deputy CEO. At the moment I am living in Melbourne with my wife and two children. However, it has been a pleasure to have been invited to such a wonderful school here in Brisbane.

In order to give examples of the different techniques I shall be teaching you I will be using one of my own tome published in 2002 which I believe you are all familiar with. Now a little bit of background behind the novel: in 1967, as acting secretary of the students anti-hanging campaign, I was involved in efforts to secure a reprieve for Ryan. The reason a few other students and I were a part of this campaign was our revulsion for the death penalty however most of us believed Ryan to be guilty. And while we felt deeply for the innocent victims and their families, how could a society, we reasoned, assert the sanctity of human life in response to a homicide by itself sanctioning legalised killing through judicial execution. This is a philosophical position from which I have never parted. The fact that Ryan was put to death in the name of the people obliges us to ask questions about him. What kind of an upbringing did he have? How did he live his life? Was he a good father to his children? What sort of man was he? Did he have redeeming qualities? Did he deserve to die on the gallows? So naturally I spent 35 years writing the story of Ryan’s life as I never knew it in 1967.

Using a range of literary devices, I was able to write a persuasive biography, inviting a particular reader and giving the reader all the material, they need to form their own opinion about Ryan. And yes, although I wanted to influence the reader I also gave them the facts. I designed my work in a certain way that would position the reader in a way that would force them to sympathize with Ryan and understand how unjust his fate really was. And just how because of his childhood, the life of crime was inevitable. To demonstrate to people that hanging is wrong I used this biography to make it personal.

Now if you are writing a biography and you want to invoke the reader and influence them with your own agenda there are a number of ways you can achieve this. I will be taking you through the different techniques I employed in my novel to help young writers like you to write your own persuasive biography.

Let us start off with the design of your book. The Hanged Man starts with Ryan’s devastating childhood before progressing onto Ronald’s life of crime. This was my way of demonstrating to the reader that Ryan’s poor decisions in adulthood were entirely influenced by his upbringing, the hardships he had to endure and the lack of support from others. Implying that his fate was not his fault but rather that it was inevitable. Thus, lifting the blame off Ryan revealing to the reader how unjust and harsh his final punishment really was; an excellent way of positioning the reader, making them read what you want them to.

Using specific diction is and always has been one of the most powerful however overlooked literary device, for it hides in plane site. While I delved into the traumatic, horrific, devastating, neglectful upbringing of Walker I used specific diction as I just demonstrated to evoke certain feelings in the reader (read quotes from PowerPoint). Instead of just introducing Walker as just Walker, and although his past had no link or effect on Ryan, which the book was about, I chose to take the most traumatising moments in Walkers past and using despairing diction to stimulate in the audience commiseration and sympathy for him I raised the question ‘Can your past define your future?’. And there you have it, you have cornered the reader putting them in a position they can’t escape. Subsequently this moves very well into our next literary device, authorial voice.