HOW TO WRITE A BETTER BIO
In NPR editorial meetings, the producers talk about whether a given story has “driveway moment potential.” What’s that? Well, have you ever been so enraptured in a radio story that when you got home, you kept the engine running and stayed buckled until the segment was over? That’s the driveway moment journalists are looking for. So ask yourself: does your current bio have driveway moment potential?
If not, ditch it and let’s write a new one. First, some rules.
0. BE LEGIBLE.
Start here, because everything else is in service of it.
I'm a booking agent. Artist bios land in my inbox by the dozen, and in a few seconds I either understand who's in front of me or I don't. When I don't, it's rarely because the artist isn't good. It's that they're hard to read.
A talent buyer with two hundred emails decides faster than I do. A journalist faster still. Your bio's first job is to make a stranger understand you, quickly.
1. BE SUCCINCT.
Mark Doty has a poem called “Picnic, Lightning.” With only two words you can imagine the whole thing, right? Ernest Hemingway was famously challenged to write a short story in six words. What did he jot down on his napkin? “For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.” A Shakespearean tragedy with total economy.
Here’s the opening line to a bio I wrote for a singer-songwriter: “Kate Prascher doesn’t want you to look at her. She wants you to see what she sees.” Eleven words, and you know who she is and what she stands for. Less is more.
2. BE SPECIFIC.
Grammy-winning band Ranky Tanky plays “Gullah music of the Carolina coast.” Notice they don’t call it southern gospel. That’s generic. By being specific they’ve created a niche all their own and left you curious to know more about their sound and their story. Specificity isn’t a limitation. It’s the thing that makes someone want the rest of the story.
3. LOCATE YOUR WORK IN TIME AND SPACE.
What can you do to locate your work in a certain country, century, or climate? Evoke a hemisphere, conjure a culture, summon a bygone era. Think of Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, or The Buena Vista Social Club — you know where you are before a note is played. Describes the music by describing something else entirely, something a reader can already picture:
“The Transylvanian fiddle sounds like the countryside looks — wild, raw and earthy.” Nobody who reads that needs to have heard a Transylvanian fiddle.
4. NAME THE TENSION.
Most artists worth writing about are two things at once. Naming both poles is more precise than picking whichever genre is nearest. “Katie Boeck’s voice is earthy and cosmic. Her muses, modern and ancient. Her power, higher and worldly.” Three pairs, three tensions, and a whole artist. Don’t resolve the contradiction — highlight it.
5. DEVELOP A METAPHOR.
For example: “Folklife treats old field recordings not as time capsules, but as heirloom seeds passed down from a bygone generation. Planting these sturdy seeds in modern soil, this versatile gathering of musicians has cultivated vibrant Sea Island spirituals, Creole calypsos, and stomp-down Appalachian dance tunes for contemporary listeners.”
Notice all the words drawn from farming — heirloom, seeds, planting, soil, cultivated. Pick a world and stay inside it. And remember: don’t let a good metaphor go to seed.
6. START IN A SCENE.
Most bios open with a summary. The strongest ones open somewhere you can stand.
“There’s a hillside in Trinidad where, past coconut, breadfruit, and banana trees, you’ll find a winding dirt road lined with gravestones that leads to the panyard — an open space where local steel bands practice. It’s award-winning artist and composer Josanne Francis’ favorite place on earth.”
“It was in the backseat of a New Orleans taxi, hearing Arabic music for the first time, that Brian Prunka felt strangely at home. He started to frequent his local Lebanese grocery store where — past the shelves of dates, za’atar and halaweh — he would scan the covers of cassette tapes for pictures of the oud: the pear-shaped, fretless Middle Eastern lute he had heard on that fateful cab ride.”
In both, you’re somewhere physical before you know who the artist is or what they play. That’s the driveway moment: a reader who has been put somewhere will stay to find out why.
So find your opening scene. The room, the road, the moment something turned. Then take the reader there before you introduce yourself.
7. PUT THE CREDITS AFTER THE STORY.
Festivals, press quotes, notable collaborators — none of these are the problem. Leading with them is. When a bio opens with a résumé, it asks a stranger to work out who you are from a list of places you’ve been. When it opens with the story, the credits land differently: they confirm something the reader already understands about you.
And be choosy. Three prominent festivals read bigger than twelve. Also, strip away the dates and your history becomes timeless. Here's a PDF if you'd like to print it
These are some of the tools I use. Try rewriting your bio with them in mind. If you’re still stuck finding your story, there’s probably a reason. I’ll hazard a guess: you hate talking about yourself. You don’t know what to include and what to leave out. You can’t see the constellations, just the stars.
This is where I come in. Research, a long interview, a first draft, a round of revisions and final bio that hits. $399, two weeks from the interview.