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# When will we see a great biographical game?
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-will-we-see-a-great-biographical-game/
- Published: 2012-02-27T21:28:00.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T15:09:51.000Z
- Description: Writing biography is hard. Basically, you have to learn about every single part of a person’s life and then filter out the boring stuff, which must be maddening. In a recent interview with The Millions, Scott Donaldson, who’s written biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway and Winfield
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: News, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

Writing biography is hard. Basically, you have to learn about every single part of a person’s life and then filter out the boring stuff, which must be maddening. In a recent interview with *The Millions*, Scott Donaldson, who’s written biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway and Winfield Scott, among others, discussed the idea of writing about guys who sit in a room typing all day:

> TM: I love that story you tell in your new book, about Charlie Fenton and Peter Matthiessen getting drunk and going spelunking in the New Haven sewer system. Stories like that – and the drama of Fenton’s war service, going AWOL – those are great stories. But they reminded me of what I’ve got to believe is an obstacle when writing about writers. With a few notable exceptions, they’re basically people who sit in a room all day by themselves. Is it difficult to generate drama when writing about writers?  
>  
> SD: It’s certainly true that they spend a lot of time away from other people. They have to lock themselves in a room and do their work. But they come out of that room (laughs) and they have fairly vivid, not always comfortable, lives. You can think of alcoholism as a practically universal disease among twentieth-century American writers, male and female. The fact that they must do their work alone makes them different, I suppose, from someone who goes to an office. There’s some kind of small satanic kink – this is Melville – that seems to affect most writers. It seems to me they have something that makes them slightly unaccommodated to existence. I suppose there are happy writers.

This makes us wonder if there will ever be more biographical games that allow you to run through someone’s life as they lived it. *[The Cat and the Coup](http://killscreendaily.com/articles/reviews/review-cat-and-coup?ref=killscreen.com)* is one, sure. But being able to, say, send Charlie Fenton and Peter Matthiessen into the New Haven sewers yourself might represent a whole new dimension to biography: how else can you *really* get inside somebody’s head than to be playing out their actions for yourself?

\[via The Millions\]

*\-Drew Millard*