The Neglected Giant: Writing about Agnes Meyer Driscoll

You don't have to read too far into the biography I wrote of codebreaking pioneer Agnes Driscoll (nee Meyer) to realize it's got its scholarly side; the footnotes are a pretty good indicator of that.  If you go all the way through to the seven appendices, you'll have an even better idea.

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But, although getting the scholarly side right was critical, the aspect of writing about Driscoll that concerned me most was making it readable.  I did my darnedest to make it a page-turner, even literary.

The page-turner part, as far as I could make it so, came about through three elements.  The least of the three was throwing in a little foreshadowing here and there.  More useful was pacing: Many of the narrative sections are followed by reflective ones.  The major element was through the section and chapter transitions.  I put a lot of figurative sweat into those.

See, any time a written work has a portion that's clearly ending, that's an opportunity for readers to stop turning pages and do something else.  So making not just a smooth transition to the next part, but an engaging one, is crucial.

Here's an example:

...She might have been seething with resentment, fuming with frustration, or burning with ambition, but the evidence is inadequate for us to be sure.

"We Didn't See Anything Burning": 1938-1941

The "heat" imagery of the last sentence of the one section, and the word "burning" (a repeat, as well) in the following section heading didn't happen by accident.

Whether the biography has any literary merit or not is for others to say, but I did strive to use what techniques I could.  For example, since the theme of the work is what a giant she was, I used wording throughout to reinforce that image.  If you want to know what I mean, go back and look at the fifth paragraph of the previous entry, starting with (italics added), "She raised herself..."

The biography was a lot of work, but it was also incredibly gratifying.  If you get half the satisfaction from reading it that I had in writing it, you're in for a treat.

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