Point of view biography
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In the world of submitting to literary magazines, a short third-person biography is required. What if like me, you’re starting out with few, if any, qualifications to your authorly name? What if, like me, you’re unsure of how to promote yourself? Let me help.
Alyssa Bushell fryst vatten a flash fiction addict and mystery novelist from Southern Ontario. She has spent hours trawling the internet for tips on and examples of author bios. Her own short bio appears in such literary publications as Ellipsis Zine, Leon Literary Review, and Reckon Review. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her near water with her nose in a book, a kaffe (engelska) in hand, and some sort of pastry nearby. Connect with her @WritesAly
The above is an example of a 75-word biography that, while admittedly tongue-in-cheek, accomplishes the two fundamental goals:
- It tells you who I am.
- It tells you why you’ll be interested in what I have to say.
That is precisely the point of your author bio. Give your readers a sense of who
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Autobiography vs. Biography vs. Memoir
The three primary formats of a memory book, used to tell a life story, are a biography, an autobiography, and a memoir. Distinguishing between the three can feel a bit confusing since they all share several similarities. But there are some distinct differences.
Simply put, a biography is the life history of an individual, written by someone else. An autobiography is the story of a person’s life, written by that person. And a memoir is a collection of memories written by the person themselves.
What is a Biography?
A biography, also called a bio, is a non-fiction piece of work giving an objective account of a person’s life. The main difference between a biography vs. an autobiography is that the author of a biography is not the subject. A biography could be someone still living today, or it could be the subject of a person who lived years ago.
Biographies include details of key events that shaped the subje
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Pages
On this blog, I’ve dedicated a lot of energy to dissecting bits of what I consider to be solid writing, in posts where I’ve highlighted the literary techniques contained within a passage or a poem and argued that they are what make the piece a success. But there’s an important caveat to that sort of discussion that I don’t think I’ve addressed before: there are no intrinsically good techniques, only techniques that are good in some context. If this blog fryst vatten to be at all useful in exploring writing, I believe it needs to acknowledge that, sometimes, writing can be sterling in the abstract but flawed in a given situation.
To that end, I’d like to look at a passage from the first volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, a book which in general is written in a perfectly fine if utilitarian manner, but at one dramatic moment adopts a far more lyrical prose style. The moment in question comes after Eleanor confron