William landay author biography template
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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. On the surface, this novel reads like a first-rate thriller, but at its heart, it’s a love story. My books are the only credential that matters.
Ideally, the reader should not be distracted at all by an ATA.
She should not be called away by thoughts of an author who exists outside the book, like a ghost peeking over, watching her read, winking, saying, “I wrote that, I wrote that!”
So that is my ATA, I guess. That is one reason novel-writing appeals to me: Novelists — all storytellers — approach the world through misdirection, from oblique angles, through stories.
And so it presents, in very compressed form, a summary of the author’s credentials: the books he’s written, the prizes won, the triumphant reviews. You’ll have to look elsewhere to find out whether I have a golden retriever or was the prom king in high school. 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. I have refused to have my portrait painted by artist friends of great talent. He lives in Boston, where he is at work on his next suspense novel.
William Landay on Readers Lane
Defending Jacob
Official Website
http://www.williamlanday.com/
Stephanie Perry
Stephanie P.
is a writer, editor, and blogger. An implicit promise is made: my books will be “true” in the sense that they will be based on experience, on fact. The urge is irresistible. It’s the story of a man who adores his wife and child, but more than that, it’s a novel that describes the fine edge between love and madness, and the lies we sometimes tell ourselves.
But then, maybe this is the way a novelist’s ATA ought to read. 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.
The first is Flaubert’s: “Hide your life.” So intent was Flaubert on disappearing behind his work that he did not even permit himself to be photographed or painted. And once you have it, why not embroider a little, improve on it? Readers insist on this sort of guarantee, but it is a mistake. It’s a little short on facts.
No doubt it will fail to satisfy the demand of the internet for complete transparency. It does not reveal much about me, I realize. After all, the power of novels is more intimate, more alive than their facts. The reader inevitably will try to look behind the story, to see the writer in the act of writing.