What are 12 things I learned by creating two biographies with AI?

A bit of context

This year I've created already 2 biographies of people in my family, including my grand mother, and I'm in the process of working on 3 additional biographies.

I'd love that my son can read selected stories from the lives of family members when he will be an adult and curious about his family history.

So writing biographies is something that I wanted to do for years, but I've had three big problems:

1. I'm more a writer of short stories. Long books are not really in my writing style and approach.

2. For some of my family members, I can't write in the language that we speak together as I never learned to write in that language

3. As anyone, I don't have months available to write one biography, especially because I don't want to just create the biography of one family member but of many.

The funny thing is that with any of these projects, when you speak about it, everyone says: Such a good idea to do this! But then, nobody has the time or the capabilities to do it. And I don't like when I'm in that group.

But this year, by using Notion AI Meeting notes, and Claude Sonnet 4.5 I was able to start this journey of creating biographies of dear ones with them, while they are still here.

Here's the process I followed, and the learnings I made.

The process

Step 1: Interview with Notion Meeting Notes

The first thing I do is, I sit down with the person about whom we will write a biography about. And I basically ask them the first question, which is, when were you born?

It's in fact that simple.

And then, from there, I ask them to go further in their life story, year after year. Obviously, some years are less important and we skip them.

As I'm recording the interviews within Notion with the Notion meeting notes feature, there is an automatic transcription that is already done. During the interview process also gather notes about what are the most important parts, and I spell right the names so that it gets then correctly transcribed in the next parts of the process.

After already three hours of conversation, you are already at a place where you have a lot of interesting pieces of a life story. So recording the interview is the first step.

Step 2: Create the first drafts with Notion AI + Claude Sonnet

The second step is then to turn the transcript into a first draft.

So the second step is then, still using Notion, to ask Notion AI to write based on the transcript and the notes I took a first draft in the I-form of the biography. It's like when writing yourself, the first draft isn't exactly in the direction that you want, so you need to prompt again and again, up until you arrive at the place where you feel the story starts to work.

Step 3: Manual Editing

The third step is the editing process. So this is the moment where I go through the first draft, remove the parts that are not necessary, fix the parts that need to be fixed, remove the parts that I've understood the person doesn't want to speak too much about or share too much about, but that she shared for me as a context.

I also try to balance the story so that there are no jealousies of people mentioned. I try to avoid that there is one person being mentioned over and over, while another important person in the life story of the person is less mentioned.

With one family member, we sat down together to edit the text together. That's basically what I did with my grandmother, who can't use a computer and therefore she can't edit it herself. And with another family member I sent the first draft, and then she corrected it by hand at her own pace and by herself. Later we met again to do the final edits together.

Step 4: Layout and Publishing

The fourth is to then layout the book and prepare it so that it can be printed and even bought.

To do the layout of these biographies, I like to use the Reedsy Studio app, which is really done for long form books which are mainly texts and don't have a complex layout. Within the app I can export a PDF that I can then import in Lulu. Lulu is the print-on-demand, more ethical alternative to Amazon KDP. There you can upload your PDF and the service takes care of printing and shipping your book. And if you want you can even make it possible for others to buy the book.

That's roughly the process I followed, but what did I learn from it?

Process learnings

1. Frame it as a prototype

Sometimes people might feel that they don't have a big story to tell, or they are not sure that they want to tell their story. And in these cases, I say:

Let's just try it. And if you're happy with the result, then we can move on. And if you're not happy, it was a lovely three-hour conversation. And it will stay there.

Which also means that it's important to frame such biographies of people who are still here as a book that really belongs to them. This means that they make the final edit. The final decision. They get to choose which parts of their stories they want to talk about. And which parts of their stories they don't want to talk about. Here, it's not an investigative journalism approach, but it's rather an exercise of personal memory and synthesis where the person chooses to tell some of the stories of their lives in the way that they want it.

2. Three hours is a good enough time

In a three-hour interview, you can get a biography between 50 to 200 pages in a pocketbook format. That's already a pretty good biography of selected life stories.

What I've noticed is that a three-hour interview is also long enough for the person who has been interviewed to have the feeling that she could share a lot of her life story and yet she is not totally exhausted by the process.

The three hour setting is also pretty nice because it makes you not write a full biography with everything in it, like a historian would do, but rather it pushes you to select key stories that are meaningful for the person that you are interviewing.

3. Remember, this is a very emotional process

Doing an interview of three hours about the life story of someone is a very emotional process. It's emotional for the person who tells her story. But for you, who are interviewing the person, you will discover a lot about that person. You learn a lot about the hardships that they have had,. Having 80+ years of a life summarized in 3 hours is quite a ride for both you the interviewer and the interviewee.

So just be prepared for some very emotional moments. So know when to take a break in the process. Know when the conversation is too traumatic and when you have to shift gears. And know that after these three hours, you'll have a bit of an emotional overload.

4. How long does it take to do one of those biographies?

In a very long day of work, you are able to do:

• 3 hours of interviews

• 2-3 hours of prompting and AI based editing for the first drafts

• 2-3 hours of manual editing

• 2-3 hours to lay out the book, make the book cover, set up everything on Lulu and have a first printed version.

So a good intense day of work.

But if you don't do it all in one day because you want to give the person who did the biography with you more time for the editing, then obviously there is a bit more time in between the process where then the person reviews the book. It all depends on how the person wants to work: having it all done in one day. Or over weeks. For the person you interview, it's much less intense, even if done in one day: it's 2-3 hours of talking together in the morning. And then after lunch 2-3 hours of reading and editing together. It's a pretty lovely process.

5. Do the synthesis in the middle and at the end

I think the writing properly said of the biography happens during in the interview.

As a workshop facilitator, for me, it's pretty usual to do summaries and synthesis on the spot. You're giving back to the person the links that you see in their life story, you're showing them, that there could be a thread here that goes across these different events. You can reveal the interesting tensions that exist.

And you, as the interviewer, making a synthesis, a summary, or offering a new way to see how the events connect together is then also something that the AI will use to write the story. So, I feel that the synthesis part is where the writing happens.

And to make this work, you have to do some synthesis moments throughout the interview process.

After the person has told you a few events, you rephrase what you have heard, you show the links, the tensions, and the person that is interviewed will either confirm or correct you in your reading of the situation, and you do that several times.

Then, at the end of the interview process for the biography, you do the same, where you might say:

These are the big themes that I've heard you talk about.

Here again the person will correct, add elements or downplay other elements.

6. Ask for sensory details

A storytelling trick that I'm stealing from my good friend, Romain Pittet, is to add sensory information. What people heard, what were the smells, what were the colors, what were the textures, what were the sounds they heard in the text. As these elements make us go from a historical text to something that is nearer to a rich story.

And that's why now when I'm doing these interviews, I'm introducing the interview process by telling the person to share with me also the colors, the smells, the sounds.

Then during the interview process, from time to time, I ask again:

Hmm, can you tell me some how it felt at hat moment? What were the colors, the smalls?

This comes very handy when, then, in the prompt that I'm giving to Notion AI, I tell it to use the sensory information to then enrich the story.

7. Use gratitude and lessons as final chapters

I personally find that it's a nice conclusion at the end, to make the person reflect on who or what they are thankful for after having told their life story.

Also it's beautiful to ask them to formulate, based on their life stories, what are life lessons that they want to share with the readers, with their grandchildren, that in some years will read that book.

Why do I find that these two chapters are so important to have at the end of the interview process and of the book?

First, for the interview process, it gives a sense of closure to the person telling their story. Usually, in a life story, there are very good moments, but also very bad moments. And having a positive, final, happy end kind of closes the interview process on a high note. You've opened a lot of stories. You made them reopen a few wounds, but by closing with the gratitude and the life lessons you're basically reclosing these wounds too.

It's also a good closure moment for the reader, where it synthesizes and it helps the reader finish on a high note. Even if the person you interviewed at that moment of their life might be in very big physical pain because of their age.

8. Quotes

For long biographies, there is a small hack that I kind of like: at the start of each big chapter add a quote from an author. If the person you interview is someone who reads a lot of Italian literature, then I would go looking for quotes from Italian authors. And you can ask AI to provide some that you then have to double check that they really exist. And if the person is very religious, then you can look for religious texts that could serve as a good context at the start of each chapter.

Technical learnings

1. It works, with the right model

The first thing is that it works. Creating a book, a full book, a full biography based on an interview and then prompting AI to write it based on the transcription. It works today.

Obviously a little bit different with every model, but I found out that with Claude Sonnet, the texts are really good and really fit what was shared in the interview. I've tried similar things that go sideways and not respect the transcript.

2. Check your internet

Basic stuff like checking that your computer is plugged in, making sure that you have a proper internet connection for the transcription to happen are really important pieces too. I

n one of the biography recordings that I made in the middle we had a bit of an issue with internet and it nearly broke the process.

So take a moment before starting to just check that every device that you need is charged. And if you don't have internet in that home, but you're using your phone for having internet, make sure that this phone is also plugged in so that the battery doesn't die and kills the internet.

3. Break it into multiple documents

When I'm creating the first draft with Notion AI of the the biography, I then get quite a long text. I then have to add some specific chapters that it missed, go a little bit deeper by adding more details about the sensory elements and so on. This means that it you end up with a quite a long document.

Once you have a quite long document that you're pretty happy with, then comes some finer editing. And that's the moment where I would recommend that you break your Notion page into sub-pages. Have one per chapter.

In that way, when you want make additional edits with AI, the AI will not break because there is just too much text to work with. And you can then launch a prompt in each of the chapters in another window.

Where if you would do it for one document at once, the context information will be way too big for the AI to handle, and often then it bugs and you don't know where it has reworked the document and where not, which is then a mess. It happened to me a few times, and I learned my lesson.

4. It's possible to write a biography in a language that isn't truly yours

For the biography of my grandmother, we did the interview in Italian, which I speak, but I've never learned to write in Italian.

Nevertheless, I was able with Notion AI and Claude Sonnet to write quite a beautiful text in Italian. Some sentences were so well written that when I re-read them to my grandmother, my dad and my aunt, when we were doing the editing work, I had to ask what a specific word meant. And they then explained that it was a poetic word, meaning such and such.

So, this is one of the beauties of this process: it allows you to have a conversation in a language that you feel confident in, and then have it written in a language that you can't write yourself.

Written with AI help

This article is based on an audio note I took that was transcribed and cleaned using Notion AI. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand. The model used was Claude Sonnet 4.5 with the following prompt:

Write the blog post based on the transcript of the meeting note. Be as near as possible to the transcript.