The bloody blog biog

Another reason for procrastinating on publishing my eternally embryonic WordPress blog is finessing the peripheral pages explaining who I am and what I think I'm doing there. I enjoy working on the site's substance, but the attendant pages are a chore.

Their centrepiece is the inevitable About page, featuring a brief biography. The blog biog is a hubristic minefield, where you tread the fine line between genuine achievement and affected hyperbole.

You're tempted towards a pretentious precipice by the common notion that these potted profiles must be written in the third person. This authorial angle gives the impression that the self-portrait is composed by someone other than the subject.

If nobody's fooling anyone about the originator of this evident autobiography, the third-person perspective keeps the audience at a pompous arm's length.

So, I'm going to address my audience (if there is one) with the courtesy of the friendlier first person. But where to start?

Who, what, and where all have potential. I'm a writer from Bristol, UK. I include the UK caveat to distinguish my city from its many namesakes worldwide — mine is the original.^[1] I've also named my blog after myself, which covers the who, so stating the activity and location makes for a comprehensive introduction.

You don't get to bandy words like 'writer' around without further justification, so next I trundle out my qualifications: an MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University.

Well, that's me — I need detain you no longer…

Except, again, if you're going to plant your flag on writerly terra firma, you'll need to offer examples of work from your glittering career.

I've written and produced several stage plays, one of which won a national award, so I can use the hyphenated 'award-winning' with 'writer'.

But all the above achievements have receded alarmingly into the past. I have little more recent to boast about — that's where spending eight years on an embryonic blog gets you.

The biography amounts to a covering letter for a whole heap of my writing, though, so why not emphasise that?

While I was doing my MA, I submitted a short story to a literary magazine, adding in my covering letter that my postgraduate classmates had enjoyed the story. The editor returned my manuscript along with a rejection letter, remarking spitefully:

'Just because your friends like your writing, it doesn't mean that anyone else will.'

The esteemed editor clearly missed my astonishment that my fellow students approved of anything I wrote.

I learned from this that it was best not to provide a convenient stick with which to be beaten in a covering letter. Just let your writing speak for itself.

Maybe the same applies to the bloody blog biog? Who, what, and where — and let the writing take it from there.