An author’s resume!
One of the things that has been standard in publishing for years is the author’s resume. Sure, we call it the author’s biography, but so frequently it turns into a list of every random job the author has ever worked. Safecracker! Chicken sexer! Hypnotist! Roller Skate Dancer! Gondolier! Lion Tamer! The weirder the better seems to be the goal when you’re writing copy for the back flap of your book.
When I first had to write an author bio, on the release of my first novel, Last Will, I was stumped. People offered the usual advice: all those weird jobs I had. Sex educator! Topless waitress (for a night)! Receptionist at a nuclear power plant! Architectural slide archivist! Nobody suggested that I should trumpet to the world my two stints as a custodian. (Once at a church. Once at a daycare.) Nor my time toiling in the salt mines of university adjunct teaching or the clerical fields.
My solution was to just skip over the random jobs portion of my bio and fill up space with such witty gems as “Bryn Greenwood lives in Kansas, which is as flat as you imagine but slightly more charming.” I’m a novelist, okay, not a biographer.
When my second novel, Lie Lay Lain, was published, it suddenly mattered that I had worked as a church secretary for three years. It gave me pew cred, so to speak, to be writing a book about a church secretary. Rarely, though, do I see authors celebrating the completely normal, menial jobs that they did before they became somebody who had a bio on the back of a book. That makes me a little sad, especially after what I witnessed this morning.
As I was arriving on campus for my quotidienne office manager job, I saw a young woman using a weedwhacker to trim around a faculty parking lot. She paused at one point and pulled a piece of paper and a pencil out of her pocket. With the weedwhacker still running, she furtively scribbled on her paper. Every few seconds her head bobbed up and she scanned the horizon to be sure her boss on the grounds crew didn’t catch her. As I passed, the paper and pencil went back into the pocket, and she returned to whacking weeds.
I imagined her as a poet, capturing some passing observation on spring, but she might just as likely have been a prose writer or, like my custodian friend who scribbles on the job, a screenwriter. Either way, it made me sad to think of young writers reading authors’ bios and finding them devoid of those boring, plain old jobs. Writers don’t only spring forth from the lucrative careers of lion taming or burlesque dancing or mortuary aesthetics. They also spring forth from secretarial work, child care, burger flipping, and unemployment.
In other news, my publisher is running a sale. The Kindle editions of both my novels are only 99¢ until May 10th! Click on the pic to go buy.
Bryn Greenwood 
Yours is great now. I got a kick out of the description of all 4 of the girls.
HA! Yes, my beasts must be included.
It would be nice if there was a national grant for everyone who worked on a novel or poem, but most of us have to pay the rent and put food on the table with a day job. I tend to respect those who put in time in non-writing jobs before entering the literary profession, not because I think people need to “pay their dues” before establishing their careers: but because they really know what it takes to get up in the morning and go to an office or garage or shop for an hourly wage. The guy who gets up before dawn to work on his novel, then rides his bicycle to a college campus to teach at an MFA program—well, I envy him in some respects, but what is he going to write about when his imagination fails him?
I’ve always been curious about what a church secretary does during a regular day. I’ve seen them typing the programs for Easter or Christmas Eve service and writing out the receipts from the Sunday offering, but I’ve always suspected there’s a lot of drama behind the scenes. Or no?
P.S. Finally bought Lie Lay Lain for my Kindle. Thank you for the link!
Yes, I do wonder about people who end up going direct from an MFA into teaching creative writing, but nowadays, they are fewer and further between. After all, creative writing teaching jobs don’t grow on trees the way they did in the early 90s. Still, I know a few people who teach in MFA programs. Some seem to have processed it well, while for others, it seems to have sapped their productivity. Or maybe that’s just tenure …
There was certainly a lot of drama behind the scenes at the church where I worked. Consider that I’ve been gone from that job 9 years, and they are on “new me” #16 or something, according to my friend who still works there. So they basically can’t keep anyone in my job, plus they’ve lost multiple parishioners and employees to criminal complaints …
Thanks for buying! I hope you enjoy it.
Seconding HG’s thoughts re generic MFA writing.
I get really annoyed when it becomes clear that the author didn’t know diddly about how the world works.
I remember a post-apocalypse novel where the surviving guy was pulling salad out of his freezer.
Don’t go reminding me that an author is writing all this, let alone show me the author is an idiot.
My mother-in-law had a recipe for cranberry freezer salad. It was mostly Jell-O, Dream Whip, and jelled cranberry sauce, and obviously meant for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. If the survivor of an apocalypse was hoping to avert scurvy from eating such a salad, well, no. 😉
LOL at freezer salad. It’s quite odd, but I often find that TV and movies are more full of heinous misapprehensions about the world. I can’t believe the sheer number of things I’ve watched where I said, “Does NO ONE in Hollywood understand how college/farming/meth production/child rearing/whatever works?”
Classical musician/conductor bios are always pretty boring. It’s the same old list of what orchestras they’ve worked with, etc. Writers, I’d venture, can be more creative but mostly I still read where they teach and what prize they won and what research they’re doing. As a lay person, I don’t really care about that stuff. Sometimes it’s nice to think that the book I just read leaped out of the aether and no actual person was involved.
HA! Oh, don’t tell us that. So much of publishing already seems designed to render the author of a book invisible. I think bios are odd, though, because as you say, readers don’t care. Heck, I almost never look at the writer’s bio, even of a book I love.