I Wish More Author Bios Were Character-Based

Last month, I published a piece on Slate I’d titled “Putting ‘No Republicans’ in my Grindr Profile Has Been Eye-Opening.” (Title changes are a part of the editing process.) I was excited the piece got published because A) its bones have been bouncing around in my head for some time now, and B) I’m a big fan of Slate's content. 

I was even more excited when the editor I’d worked with said that the piece had done reasonably well, highly engaging commenters and social media users. As a bonus, I got to do my first radio interview for a piece I’ve authored with The Julie Mason Show on Sirius XM’s POTUS station.  I was thrilled with how the interview turned out (i.e., I don’t sound like a complete moron), but the one thing that tripped me up was the bio they used, taken directly from my Slate author profile, which is…a mouthful. 

Pat Brothwell is a writer, marketer, Pennsylvania expat, University of Scranton alum, and former high school teacher living in Asheville, North Carolina. He writes about work, technology, politics, identity, and, ideally, how they all intersect.

I don’t hate that as a bio, and I knew exactly what I was doing when it made it so…verbose…but if someone asks for my bio with the intent of reading it aloud several times in the future, I’ll make sure it’s more succinct. I’ll probably just do the following: 

“Pat Brothwell is a writer from Asheville, North Carolina. He writes about work, technology, politics, identity, and ideally, how they all intersect” because, in my mind, that at least gives the audience a little bit of what I’m interested in, which in turn, tells them a little bit about me, which I think is essential in an author bio. They should tell an audience something about a person, not just read like a resume. 

It’s my professional opinion that too many writer bios are accolade-based versus character-based. 

“John Smith is a writer living in Washington, DC. He holds a BS from Oberlin and went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. John has been awarded 16 different awards from obscure literary magazines and has held seven different writing fellowships. He lives with his dog and wife.” 

Sure, the dog and wife are personal…but do they tell you anything? What makes this writer tick? How will their history or origins inform or slant what they write? In my aforementioned, long-winded bio, I chose to include my marketing 9-5 because it shows that I understand how things are slanted and can have fun with that (or offer insights into it). I chose the PA ex-pat because that’s where I’m from, the University of Scranton alum because that school had an impact on me at a very formative time in my life, and the fact that I taught high school because that’s a unique experience that colors my views on a variety of topics. I chose to include where I lived because that will also color the ways I think and what I know. 

Once upon a time, you probably could’ve said that I shied away from accolade-based bios because…mine was lacking in that department. It’s easy to say accolades are silly when you have very few on your resume. And…there’s probably a little bit of truth in there.

Still. 

I also don’t think having 14 MFAs and attending all these writing fellowships inherently makes someone an interesting writer (competent and connected? Sure. Interesting? Not automatically). I don’t think just because you have bylines in 7 magazines (and honestly, I’m proud of my now byline which could simply read, “he’s written for GQ, Fast Company, Slate, and others) means you have interesting things to say. Now, you could, but you could also be good at pitches. Or…be a Kennedy.

Showcasing where you’ve been published certainly helps give readers an idea of what you like writing about, but I still want some flavor with that (for those who would argue that an author bio is also an audition for work, sure, I hear that, but the author bio I use when I pitch stories to editors is not the same one I display alongside pieces for readers.) 

I know this is probably a very niche, first-world gripe, but this is my blog on my website and precisely the place for this sort of…rant? Long story short, I was all but delighted recently to find the author bio of novelist Bryn Greenwood, whose story All the Ugly and Wonderful Things I read this past spring, which has stayed with me for quite some time. 

A friend recommended All the Ugly and Wonderful Things. “You’ll like this, I think,” he said, “but keep an open mind. I didn’t get it to the end.” That’s a great way to describe the book. It’s…uncomfortable…especially if you don’t take the time to, as my friend suggested, dive in with an open mind and finish it. It deals with the grey spaces in life and a kind of lifestyle I’m privileged enough to have never even bumped up against. There was an interview with Green at the end of the version I read, which helped color in even more lines. That interview intrigued me and impressed me, so I looked up her website. 

Her quick bio—similar to the one of I shared earlier—reads 

Bryn Greenwood is a fourth-generation Kansan, one of seven sisters, and the daughter of a mostly reformed drug dealer. She earned a MA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Reckless Oath We Made, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Last Will, and Lie Lay Lain. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

I love this bio for a few reasons. First, it’s from a successful, published novelist who leads with character, not accolades. Secondly, it helps inform her work. Learning more about Green, as I initially did with the interview, which some may do through her bio, helps you better understand how her experience colors her POV. Journalists must remain objective (though…I have thoughts on that I might share at some point), while writers, despite what we tell ourselves, are subjective. Call it what you want: inherent bias, human nature. What we write is informed by our experiences and opinions. It should be, anyway, in my opinion. Green put it very succinctly in an interview she did with Midwest Gothic in 2017. “I think writers are like boxes of baking soda that you put in the ice box to absorb odors. We soak up everything around us, sometimes without even realizing it.” 

I love that Green’s bio opens with, “Bryn Greenwood is a fourth-generation Kansan, one of seven sisters, and the daughter of a mostly reformed drug dealer.” That tells me so much more about her than her MA does. 

Maybe it is because on my website, I chose to write a rather lengthy bio of where I came from and what made me tick, but I love that Green has done the same. And while I’m half joking about liking Green’s bio because I’m self-centered, I did make a conscious effort to write about my personal and professional journey—the things that had to do with writing and the things that didn’t—because that’s what I want to see in others writers’ bios! 

Again, I was delighted to see Green really flesh herself out for readers: 

I grew up on the mean streets of Hugoton, Kansas, where the only traffic light in town went to flashing red at dusk. Alright, the streets weren’t mean. They were gravel and named after presidents. Not even all the presidents, because Hugoton at the time was only ten blocks by ten blocks,

When I was little, my family often accused me of being a storyteller, which is a polite way in Kansas of calling someone a liar. Later I found out it really doesn’t matter whether something’s true, as long as it’s a good story. The first story I ever wrote in pre-school was a thinly veiled autobiography about a family of aliens. In the story’s illustrations my older sister looks suspiciously like the Great Gazoo from The Flintstones.

My mother was a teetotaler and my father was into a variety of recreational chemicals, so their marriage was probably doomed from the start. Over the years, we picked up my stepdad, my stepmom, and four more sisters, bringing the grand total of daughters to seven.

At fifteen, I didn’t so much drop out of high school to go to college as I ran away to escape the torments of prom and church youth groups.

Somewhere in there, I got a BA in French Literature, a BA in English, and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Faced with the terrifying prospect of a PhD or reality, I chose reality.

At any rate, I chose to take a teaching job in Japan. I lived in Niigata Prefecture, where we got 45 feet of snow my first winter. After that I came home and wasted what were probably the prime years of my life demonstrating the correct way to put on a condom to high school students and a variety of social services audiences.

Since then I’ve been working in academia, both teaching and pushing papers. I got married, had kittens, got divorced, bought a project house, and rescued a pair of boxers. (The dogs, not the undergarments.)

In the last twenty years, I’ve written somewhere around a million words, and my thinly veiled autobiography would still be about aliens.

It’s a long excerpt, but it’s a long bio…and I think that’s very cool. I think more authors should be letting people in like this. I know some are possibly just trying to protect themselves…but the older and more cynical I become, the more I think many just aren’t sharing more than accolades because while they are proficient writers who’ve been able to master the art of getting published when it comes to having original viewpoints…there’s no there, there.