Dashiell Hammett wasn’t the world’s greatest writer. But he had something vitally important: credentials. He’d been a professional private eye for the San Francisco Pinkerton Agency for years when he began writing his ground-breaking, gritty, realistic PI mysteries set in—you guessed it—San Francisco.

Ivy Compton-Burnett was told real families don’t act the way they do in her fiction: secretive, back-stabbing, prone to multiple marriages and bare-faced lies and theft and suicide and even murder by neglect. “Oh, but they do,” she said. She was herself one of the eldest of an enormous mixed family full of malice and intrigue. Her twin youngest sisters committed double-suicide in their locked bedroom on Christmas Day, while the rest of the family was home, and are now suspected of having been lovers.

Stephen King uses a medical expert.

What does this tell us?

KNOW YOUR SUBJECT. If at all possible, have professional experience in it. Failing that, find an expert who does. Interview (that’s right—even for fiction). Do the research. Read the books, watch the documentaries, study the reference material.

When an agent reads an author bio that says, “I don’t have any experience in this field, but I can picture it,” I’m afraid that’s a donation to the circular file right there. However, when they read one that says, “I’m a retiring homicide detective with the Chicago PD,” for a mystery about an unsolved series of murders in Chicago’s notorious Englewood neighborhood or, “I’ve been the head of ER at the Las Vegas Valley Hospital for eight years,” for a novel about a recovering gambler turned doctor who gets embroiled in a local casino scam that implicates the head of a fictional Las Vegas ER or, “I spent two years interviewing young streetwalkers in the red-light districts of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and LA,” for a white slavery horror novel set in the underworld of West Coast prostitution. . .then they’re going to sit up and take notice.

Even Compton-Burnett, who wrote literary novels entirely based on inner-familial warfare, could have said, “After sixty years as the matriarchal eldest sister of a mixed Victorian family of twelve, four of whom died young and all of whom bear intense hostility toward certain others, I have accumulated a certain knowledge of human nature within the confines of the traditional Victorian family milieu.”

Of course, the quality of her writing also helped.

And for those who never get enough, Chuck Sambuchino has a whole post of author bio do’s and don’t’s.

Have you ever wondered why agents want to see an author bio paragraph in a query letter that is—as least ostensibly—supposed to be entirely about selling them on one particular book? They don’t want to hear about your other unpublished novels or ideas, but they do want to know whether or not you have any published books, even if they’re not the same type. They don’t want the full plot of this particular book, but they want hear what you do for a living if it matches your subject. They don’t even want to know the ending (which they’re such sticklers about with synopses), but they want to know if you’ve won a major writing award, although it obviously didn’t lead to literary representation.

Why?

Sterling Lord
New York, New York

Dear Mr. Lord:

A hopped-up madman and a psychotic angel shift the steering trannie into neutral and roll backward down Hyde Street at dawn.

America is my land, says Sam Eden as he and the saint with god in his eyes creep out Brody’s steep San Francisco driveway one morning before sunrise in 1949. They roll all the way to the pencil-thin heaven-piercing masts of the waterfront in a turgid, angel-heavy silence under the clouds, leaving Brody’s cigarette-girl wife from the alleys and red velvet backroom paradises of the International Settlement to wake to the grainy dawn between the baby in the sad sheets and the god-who-is-not in her womb. They are off to find the roads of America. Before they’re done, they’ll have met and kissed all the hobos and streetwalkers and tired seraphim turning crumpled bills into salvation on this cusp of the last mid-century before God’s throne falls with a crash to shake the ages through the blood-bellied sky.

I am seeking representation for my literary novel, BACK ON THE ROAD, completed at 70,000 words.

Unfortunately for you, who probably love this query so far, I am a belligerent drunk and an idiot. I style myself on my hero, Jack Kerouac, whom I am certain wiped his feet on women and despised his social inferiors as much as I do. I write exactly the way he did—putting a roll of paper towels in my typewriter and letting the words just breathe out onto the page in all their original genius and life force. I’ve submitted this query to I don’t know how many agents, all of them morons who couldn’t tie their shoelaces without their mommies, and gotten it bounced back in my face faster than a rubber band. You might think I’m a joker, but actually I’m a mean son-of-a-bitch who’s been convicted of assault and battery of at least three of those agents, not counting the ones who were afraid to press charges. I feel terribly sorry for myself and am only interested in an agent I can call up at all hours and insult horribly in my frequent black-outs. If you don’t believe me, ask around.

I keep submitting my stories to magazines, but they are staffed entirely by my unknown enemies who know I can write circles around them any day. I wouldn’t waste my time on contests, which are beneath me. Even you are beneath me. But what choice do I have? I hate you already.

Over-professional demeanor is not one of my glaring faults.

Sincerely,

The author who will never get representation because now the agent knows what kind of person they’d be dealing with if they took this project on