A Response to Soham Dutta:
Why you writers write your biography in the 3rd Person?
- Because my editors, the guys who remind me the word “do” belongs in front of “you” (I’m not being critical, you may be writing in ESL so I wanted to give you the heads up—the snark is my second nature), insist on it.
- Because I don’t want some snarky reviewer (like me) to add: “The guy doesn’t even know enough to write his bio in 3rd person.” I say this because some reviewers suffer tunnel vision and can’t allow you to write outside the lines. For example, a potential reviewer declined to read my book Cigerets, Guns & Beer” because I couldn’t even bother spell check the word “cigeret.” It never dawned on him I might have a reason, like the fact that the town’s only sign painter couldn’t spell, and painted signs that read, “The Towship of Sweet Water Falls” and the sign the hero sees driving into town: “Cigerets, Guns and Beer: One Stop Shopping.”
- Because most of the people I feature in my bios are fictional characters, including: “Phillip T. Stephens’ parents found him behind a headstone while necking in a grave yard on Halloween. Turning up with an infant scandalized their Baptist families and they married within the week. The newlyweds were so poor, the infant author slept in a carved out Jack-o-lantern until his fourth birthday, drinking pumpkin milk instead of formula and eating pumpkin seeds for cereal.” I could say “My parents found me in a graveyard,” but that wouldn’t be true. My mother was abducted by aliens and when she woke up the next morning she was pregnant with me. That’s what scandalized our church. Aliens aren’t white so it was an interracial hook-up.
Sure, writing bios in first person would be easier, but I don’t expect people to read my books for the biography (or read the biography at all, for that matter).
I am the author of Cigarettes, Guns & Beer and Raising Hell, and I much prefer writing these biographies in third person.
