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If you have no interest in writing a better bio and actually came to this page just to read mine for some strange reason, skip the article and go straight to my bio. Otherwise, read on.
In an attempt to be cute, I made up an acronym for how to write a good bio: FINE. Brilliant, huh? Whatever. If it works...fine. (Bad pun. No apologies.) What makes a FINE bio?
Focused
Informative
Natural
Engaging
1) FOCUS on the intended audience and purpose. This means you may need several different bios for various uses. My purpose for this bio is to be used on a website where readers and other writers are my primary audience. It will look much different than the one on the back cover of my book or in the publisher’s catalog.
Staying focused means you will avoid a rambling bio with lots of extraneous information. A back cover bio may only be 1-2 sentences long. In general bios should only be one or two brief paragraphs. Most of us can’t pull off anything longer than that and keep it interesting. If you want a great example of an author who did manage to write a long—yet entertaining—bio, read Randy Ingermanson’s bio. (But keep in mind that not all of us can aspire to such genius.)
To discover my focus, I asked myself the following questions:
- Where is my bio being used? (On a website, which means I need to use shorter sentences and be mindful of length.)
- Who is my audience? (Mostly readers and other writers. This means I can be more casual and chatty than if I was using my bio as part of a book proposal for an editor. The goal is to give them a peek into my life and help them feel a connection to me as a real person, and not some Strange Eccentric Author.)
- What are their interests? (Correct me if I’m wrong, but you are probably here because you are interested in writing. Or maybe you were checking out my articles or my books. This means you probably are not very interested in hearing about my two Siberian Huskies or my doll collection. If you did happen to wander by looking for either of those two topics, email me, and I’ll see about putting something up on the site about them.)
- Why are they reading my bio? (For a book cover, the answer might be to see if I have the credentials to write about my topic. For a book proposal, you want to capture the interest of an editor. But for a website, I am assuming it’s because you’ve already read some of my writing and are curious to see what sort of crazy person I am.)
- When will they be reading it? (I can update a website pretty easily, so if I say I’ve been married 8 years, I can change that when it becomes 9. But for a book cover, two years later when the book comes out—or even 20 years later—it will still say I’ve been married 8 years. So I might want to consider writing something more general that won’t become outdated.)
2) Make it INFORMATIVE. Okay, so you don’t all have to make your bio an article on how to write a bio. Please don’t! I’m trying to be inventive here! But this is where you keep in mind your audience and their interests and their purpose for reading your bio. Try to slant your bio in that direction.
For me, this means I’m going to put details in my bio that pertain to my books or articles and might give you more insight about my writing. Here’s a tentative list:
•My experience as a SAHM (stay-at-home mom)
•Our adoption experience
•My faith
•How I became a writer
•Where I get my inspiration
•The themes that find their way into my writing
•What I’ve learned through these experiences
3) Be NATURAL. Use your own voice instead of some formal, executive-sounding tone. For a web site, you can use first-person (I) or third-person (she). Most print bios should be in third-person. I chose first-person for my website because I want to convey that I’m a friendly, approachable person who is interested in getting acquainted with my readers and other writers. I also want to match the tone of my bio to the tone of my books. At this point, that means a lighter, humorous tone. This idea makes me nervous because I’m certain that you’ll all discover I’m really not a very funny person after all.
4) ENGAGE the reader. “Dearest Reader, you’d make me the happiest author alive if you’d give me your hand in...” Oops, not that kind of “engage!” Capture their interest! Go beyond the normal “SO-and-SO Author has written 8 books and is a mother of 3 and lives in Kentucky with her husband and 42 cats, blah, blah, blah.” Somebody wake me when it’s over! (Okay, the 42 cats might be entertaining.)
Trust me, I struggle with this, too. A lot of my bios have been real snoozers. I just don’t see my life as being all that scintillating. This is why I write fiction. But if you keep in mind the Focus, have Informative facts, and use a Natural voice, you’re more than half-way there. Here are some engaging tidbits I could put in my bio:
- I wrote my first story when I was 7, about a flower, a bee, and a hollow tree. Then I thought I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up.
- I taught for one year at a private school and quit because I was working about 70 hours a week, getting yelled at by really mean parents, and getting paid $16,500/year for my troubles. The gossip around the school was that I just “didn’t have what it took to be a good teacher.” Yeah, but now I’m a published novelist, and I have this killer idea for a story set at a school full of back-biting, workaholic teachers and psycho parents.
- I am one of the youngest people to have adopted from China. I was 24. China changed its minimum age requirements to 30 two days after we got our daughter.
- For some reason, I didn’t think that being a SAHM, homeschooling, and writing novels was keeping me busy enough. So I also added Vineyard Leadership Institute, a 2-year course that combines seminary classes with real-life experience in serving a church. I must be certifiably insane, but I’m enjoying it.
Then, it’s all about the hard work of putting everything together, cutting what won’t fit, and editing it until it’s nicely polished. But you already know how to do that because you are a talented writer, right?
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Here’s my finished product: (Okay, I failed miserably on keeping it brief, but I’m hoping the sheer brilliance of my prose will make up for it...)
For some reason, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. Despite the fact that I wrote my first “book” at age 7 and continued writing stories, poems, and novels all the way through college, I had the idea that I wasn’t “special” enough to be an author. I thought it was rather like winning the lottery or getting struck by lightening. Just not going to happen to your average Texas-born girl, living almost her whole life in Omaha, Nebraska. So I became an elementary teacher instead.
Oops. You ever had the feeling you just didn’t fit in? That was how I felt in the education world. I taught one year of middle-school English and History, and really enjoyed it overall, but I was the ugly duckling. The alien. The square peg... you get the idea. I thought I’d made a huge mistake and was wasting my college education when I resigned. But God had other ideas.
Just shortly after celebrating our first anniversary, my husband and I discovered Chinese adoption. We hadn’t planned on having children quite yet, but there was something deeply compelling about the stories of the children waiting in orphanages for a “forever family.” And because we both have immediate family who are adopted, we loved the idea of showing that adoption is not always a last resort. So at the age of 24, I became a mother, in a foreign country to a beautiful, brilliant 14 mo. old girl who was terrified of me. Yeah, I love a challenge. Especially ones with chocolate brown eyes and a trillion-watt smile.
After working for 7 months to finish paying for the adoption, I finally got my wish of staying home with our daughter. This is when I realized I would not be returning to the classroom. Thanks to a writing group on the Internet, I also began to learn that writing was a potentially viable career, even for a nobody like me. I started pursuing it in earnest.
Once we had one kid, we figured why stop there? I attended my first writer’s conference in 2000, 5 months pregnant with our second daughter, a creative darling with a terrific sense of humor. And at the conference, I discovered My Home Planet. All those writers, and I fit right in! I was a writing swan. It took years to figure it out, but God designed me to write. In fact, when I write, I feel His pleasure. Pretty cool.
So I became a “real writer.” And I’ve got some doozies of rejection letters to prove it. (Click here for my favorite from SAHM I Am.) My goal was to get a book contract before I turned 30. It took about five years, but I made it with 6 months to spare.
I’ve struggled with how to be an attentive mom and a productive writer. Housework? Gave up on it long ago. We homeschool now, and I’m a freelance fiction editor, so I figure I’m pretty much insane.
My writing tends to have themes about personal identity and becoming the person God designed you to be. A lot of times this makes my characters collide with what their culture or even their churches or other leaders say they ought to be. I like to write about women who are strong, or who learn to be strong, and men who are confident enough about their own identity to empower women to become all that God designed them to do. And yes, I discovered I can write humor. I have been declared by fellow author Randy Ingermanson to be “funnier than Erma Bombeck” which I often question, but hey, it’s a great quote. I’ll let you decided for yourselves if it’s true.
And that is how a nobody schoolteacher from Nebraska became a published author. I hope it is an encouragement to you to pursue the dreams God has placed in your heart. Nobody is really a nobody. You have gifts and talents that make you uniquely qualified for a special mission in life that no one else can do. Go for it! (Cue triumphant mood music.)
So... did you make it all the way through this without falling asleep? Woo-hoo!!!
Success is sweet!
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