On Monday I posted a photo and talked briefly about portraits. Today I'm thinking about word portraits—author bios.
Two days before Christmas, an interviewer used my rather cavalier (lively? light-hearted?) website bio to introduce a lengthy and serious conversation about prose style and the nature of literary creativity—not light or careless in any way. The dissonance between the bio and the essay/interview was jarring. This isn't the interviewer's fault—I sent him the link; it's my fault for assuming he would pick out the factual nuggets to build his own, more suitable bio. And, well, you know what they say about assumptions—this isn't the first time it's happened. The difference was, this time I realised I was tired of it. I unpublished my About page. Then realised it was the day before Christmas Eve, an author website should never not have an About page—it's sort of the point of the thing—and I had just forty minutes before cocktail hour, after which I was closing up shop until after the holidays. Despite the time constraint I tried to imagine what a reasonably serious, factual, unembellished but not diffident bio might look like, wrote 900 words, posted it, and went to have a drink. Today I'm finally reading what I've written and thinking, Hmmm. (Also fixing a couple of typos.)
Nobody really talks about about Author Bios. Consequently, when I was first asked to write one (in the late 80s, for Interzone, or maybe Iron Women) I hadn't a clue where to begin. If I'd thought about them at all I probably assumed somebody else wrote them. After all, as my English, trained-to-not-blow-my-own-horn inner voice reminded me, If you have to tell people you're important/interesting, you're not. Looking back, I'm glad I was clueless about this kind of self-promotion. I might never have begun this writing thing if I'd had any idea how much being a working novelist depends on blasting out your own brassy fanfares all the time, about everything: not just social media but essays, interviews, panels, readings, think pieces, puff pieces, listicles, blog posts, podcasts... It's a very large part of the job. And all those things rest on the bio—usually between 500 and 1,000 words for your own website (the Inside Bio), and anything from 25 to 200 words elsewhere (the Outside Bio)1
Those Outside bios are remarkably easy to get wrong. By 'wrong' I don't mean grammer, spelling, or facts but tone: sending the editor of, say, a short fiction anthology an earnest paragraph about your artistic intentions and your writing mentors only to find out on publication that all the other contributors are declaring their fealty to cheese or making quips about birbs and doggos. Or the other way around.
I'm being a bit disingenuous here. This has never actually happened to me but I've seen it happen to others, and it makes my toes curl in sympathy. It's a question of understanding the zeitgeist feeling the vibe. This can be hard for newcomers, whether new to the profession or to a particular genre or category. A bio for the NYT is quite different to that for a small community press, or for an academic journal versus a picture book. No one tells you this. More accurately: no one ever mentioned it to me, and I, in turn, have never thought to mention it to anyone else until today. Why? Well, speaking purely for myself, when I first began I was so arrogant I just assumed that whatever I said would be perfect and if it wasn't like other people's bios then, hey, other people were wrong. A while later, swimming in the full professional tide, I just never thought about it. And now I've been doing it so long that even when I do pause for thought I don't think anything of that—it's just part of the job, as usual as the sun rising in the east.
Today, though, I'm going to say the quiet part out loud: If you're sometimes not sure what to put in your Inside or Outside Bio, you're not the only one. Of course you, reading this now, probably don't need any advice, but perhaps one of your friends might find it useful to know how I approach it. If not, no worries: I find it helpful to work out my own thinking.
Let's start with an Outside Bio. First, get word count guidelines. They're usually short, some very short—from the one-line tag that goes after your review in a Sunday broadsheet, to the 100-word paragraph on the contributors' bio page of a disability anthology. The reason they're short is that, counterintuitively, they're not really about you. No one buys the NYTBR because you reviewed a book in it—but having read your review they need to know how to weigh your opinion. So if your review of, say, a middle-grade novel about a bear, spits upon that book from a great height, your take-down is less likely to be rejected out of hand if your bio says, "Nicola Griffith won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The Bear Who Ate Christmas," rather than "Nicola Griffith is the managing editor of Astrophysical Review." Both statements could be true, but only one matters in this context. For an anthology, the point becomes using your bio to reinforce what your story was about and give a potential new reader a reason to pick up some of your other work. The easiest way to demonstrate what I mean is to give your an example, so here's a paragraph I wrote five or six years ago to go with a piece for a disability-focused publication:
Nicola Griffith: English novelist (now dual UK/US citizen) living in Seattle. Author of seven novels. Winner of Nebula, World Fantasy, Tiptree, Lambda Literary, Premio Italia, and Washington State Book Awards, among others. So Lucky, out in May 2018, is her first book from a disability perspective, a story that blazes with hope and a ferocious love of self, of the life that becomes possible when we stop believing ableist lies. Founder and co-host of #CripLit, a regular Twitter chat for disabled writers. Holds a PhD from Anglia Ruskin. Married to author & screenwriter Kelley Eskridge. Currently lost in the 7th century (working on the second novel about Hild of Whitby). Emerges to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.
Here I was aiming to reinforce my crip credentials, both lived experience and academic, and my literary credentials. All while suggesting I'm at ease in different cultures and communities, that I'm queer, and have a great zest for life (an important counter to so many nondisabled people's belief that all crips live sad grey existences). It also mentions two specific books to read, along with a link to find out more.
Here, on the other hand, is the bio I wrote for Menewood. It's shorter and plainer. It has a lot less work to do because whoever's reading it has probably already invested a good chunk of change in the book itself. I'm no longer trying to persuade them to find out more—if they like the book they'll do that anyway. In a way, I'm reinforcing and congratulating the reader on their taste while at the same time suggesting that, yes, actually I do know what I'm talking about when it comes to both nature and interpersonal violence...
Nicola Griffith is a dual UK/US citizen who lives in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of award-winning novels including Spear, Hild, and Ammonite, and has written for Nature, New Scientist, The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. She is the founder and cohost of #CripLit, holds a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University, and enjoys a ferocious bout of wheelchair boxing. She is married to the novelist and screenwriter Kelley Eskridge.
There are other types of Outside bios—Artist's Statements and/or Biobibliographies required by some conferences/conventions and grant applications—but I'll skip those and get right to the heart of the matter, the Inside Bio, usually found on an author's About page. This is the foundation on which everything rests, the font from which readers, journalists, and academics draw. Over the years I've taken different approaches, ranging from the self-deprecating false modesty of Nicola Griffith writes stories to tales of zany badassery, social and legal activism, fronting a band and arm-wrestling in bars. Over the holidays I did some thinking, and I've decided that the About page's primary purpose is as a discovery tool. A beginning. An introduction. Imagine someone who knows nothing about publishing—what genres are, how they work, which which are admired—nothing about disability activism or gender bias, nothing about history or immigration, nothing about my personal background, and not one single thing about my writing. They need simple, obvious, fact-forward and easily-verifiable statements. In other words, more like a Wikipedia page with a little literary spice sprinkled on top. It's truth, nothing but the truth, but not necessarily all the truth. Lots of touchpoints, lots of taking my space and taking credit where credit is due—without boasting or false modesty—and what spin there is, is subtle.
It's not branding2 but it is a necessary step in the branding process. It's less, This toothpaste will make you feel like a powerful, good-looking, smart shopper, than Hey, look, this is one of those pastes that clean teeth. It's informational: I'm letting you know I'm here but I'm not selling you anything. It's also a bit, well, impersonal. You don't get the flavour of me. So after I'd written it I decided it needed something extra, and that turns out to be my old Writer's Manifesto—written over a dozen years ago but still saying what I mean about why I write and how I feel about my fiction. The two together work well; in a little over a thousand words I think they give a reasonably rounded portrait of who I am now and where I've been. (And then, because journalists, librarians, and other working professionals sometimes don't have much time, I wrote the grab-and-go version.) No doubt at some point—next week? in 10 years?—I think of something better, but for now, here it is.
Take a look. Let me know if you think I've left out anything essential—or if anything surprises you. And if you have any thoughts on bios in general—how you approach them, what you want from them, if you know of anyone teaching how to do them, lessons you've learnt whilke writing or reading them, how you feel about them in general—I'd love to hear them.
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