William landay author bio examples
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Book-shoppers examine the ATA like border guards inspecting a passport. It’s a little short on facts. And once you have it, why not embroider a little, improve on it? His previous novels are Mission Flats, which won the Dagger Award as best debut crime novel of 2003, and The Strangler, which was an L.A. He lives in Boston, where he is at work on his next novel of suspense.
Publishers call this the ATA, for “About the Author.” Should I tell you more about myself here?
The trouble is that the ATA influences the reader’s experience of a novel.
If he has none of these things, it offers other credentials that seem to guarantee the book will be “authentic”: the jobs or education that qualify him to write about cops or cowboys or pop stars or whatever. The reader should not have to look outside the book cover for proof that it is convincing, moving, and authentic. A more direct, forthright sort of person would be writing essays or memoirs or some other form that addresses the world head-on.
More important, I believe each novel has to stand on its own.
But I don’t think an author ought to reveal too much of his biography, as I explain below.
I wrote the following little evasion in 2003, when I first launched a web site to support my novel Mission Flats, and I updated it superficially in 2007, when my second book came out. That is one reason novel-writing appeals to me: Novelists — all storytellers — approach the world through misdirection, from oblique angles, through stories.
Nothing will make me yield.” (Check out Frederick Brown’s amazing recent biography, Flaubert.)
The other approach is Hemingway’s, in which the author’s life is a self-conscious, purposeful extension of his fiction.
Readers insist on this sort of guarantee, but it is a mistake. Here is how it appears on the dust jacket of my new book, The Strangler:
William Landay is the author of the highly acclaimed Mission Flats, which was awarded the John Creasey Dagger as the best debut crime novel of 2003. Some of our best crime novelists have no law-enforcement credentials (Elmore Leonard, for example); some of our worst are true-blue cops and lawyers.
So, how should an author write his ATA?
How much to leave in, how much to leave out?
There seem to be two approaches. Anything goes.
Personally, I prefer the Flaubert approach. But then, maybe this is the way a novelist’s ATA ought to read. So I apologize for the lack of a proper tell-all author bio in this space. A former assistant district attorney, he lives in Boston.
The thumbnail bio above is the one I’ve been using lately.
It is not that experience does not matter; it is just that experience does not guarantee anything. Hemingway’s greatest creation was Hemingway, and it is impossible to read The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms without inserting the author himself into the story.