Turbocharging the bio section of your query letters: Our top tips (Part Two)
Hiding hot messes from gatekeepers; advice for harried parents and aligning disparate day jobs into a united front. Plus another "before and after" bio overhaul!
Hello writer friends, and happy Wednesday.
First of all, I want to thank new subscribers for the lovely notes sent in with your upgrades. I really cherish these and wish Substack made it easier for me to thank each of you individually for sharing why you’ve joined our community. Until Substack creates a way for me to reply to those nice notes, please know that I receive them, I read each of them, and they never fail to put some gas back in my tank. Thank you!
Let’s pivot now to bios—a part of author promotion that is more complex, meaningful, and impactful than many people think! After providing individual feedback on a multitude of bios, last week I shared Part I of best practices for bio-writing in query letters and artist statements. Today’s letter is a continuation of last week’s post. In case you missed it, last week we covered:
What POV your biographical statement should be in
Formatting + citations protocol
What to do if you don’t have an MFA or any publications (it’s called “The Aspirational Pivot” and I’m glad to learn it helped many of you to think differently—and more confidently—about your relationship to writing.)
How to celebrate your day job and use your professional experience to better support the creative project you are pitching (with an assist from subscriber
who let me overhaul his bio. Thanks Larry!)
Today, we’re going to further explore best practices for bio-writing, especially when it comes to presenting as professional and organized when, in fact, your life and your relationship to writing is kind of a hot mess. This week I got on the phone with subscriber Emma Schumann, an American based in Paris, to rework a biographical statement that had a bit too much “quirk” because of disparate jobs that didn’t meaningfully contribute to the premise of her novel. You’ll learn what we discussed to make that happen and watch the revision unfold in real time.
As always, if you want to join us for live workshops and writing makeovers (possibly of your own material!) please upgrade to paid.
Without further ado, let’s get into best practice #8 (continuing off the first seven points that we shared last week.)
#8: How to present as organized an efficient instead of a hot mess and what to do in bios if you are a parent worried that you’re losing your identity as “writer.”
I’d venture to guess there isn’t a single one of us reading this who doesn’t have an active fire burning down some sector of our lives. All of us have friction somewhere—be it in our financial lives, personal lives, creative lives, our mental health, our physical health, or all of the above. While we can certainly come off as human and fallible in our query letters and artist statements and can allude to mental health struggles, we don’t want to present as “unhinged” when we’re writing for a gatekeeper. Whether you’re applying for a competitive writing workshop, a major grant, or sending a query letter, you are basically asking someone to accept you as a colleague. Most people do not want to work with stress cases whose personal life is a perennial five-alarm fire, right? Generally, we want colleagues who are capable, efficient, intelligent and relatively calm most of the time. (The rest of the time they can be quirky, funny, a blast to be around, a little irreverent, whatever, but they should be professional more often than not.)
On this note, if you are a harried parent or single parent, be cautious about how you frame your harried parenting life. I’ve seen applications to residencies where people write something like the following:
“As the mother of three and a mother to a husband who’s also basically a child, I literally can not wait to get away and have some peace and quiet to myself.”
While that sentiment might be both accurate and urgent, it’s not an appropriate truth to share with a gatekeeper. Published authors are asked to write under all kinds of stressful conditions and remain graceful while doing so, thus a line like the following would be a more appropriate spin on the above: