When Robert D. Richardson studies an individual, he reads all the books they read in the sequence they read them to trace their intellectual development.

When writing a biography, he uses the “100 chapters of 5 pages each” method taught to him by his teacher Walter Jackson Bate. The idea behind this method is to write short chapters instead of long ones to help readers feel that they are achieving something no matter how small the time they invest in reading.

A modification of this advice is to write 100 pieces of 1–2K words on parts of someone’s life you care about the most without thinking about chronology.

References

Kleon, A. (2021, May 24). First we read, then we write. Austin Kleon. https://austinkleon.com/2021/05/24/thoreau-emerson-james/