What's Your (or my) Brand?

 

What is your ‘brand’?  I recently seized upon a piece in which a fellow writer, whose books I enjoy, asks the question, ‘What is Your Genre?’ — vital for an ‘elevator pitch’. Yet how does genre or ‘brand’ relate to what really motivates a writer? If we write from our deepest being, the seeds of our writing may’ve been sown in early childhood, lying in the earth of our lives, growing into story form as we undergo more complex and consciously comprehended experiences. Whether lighthearted, humorous, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, dystopic — all may have their roots in early experience. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, for example, we can trace a recurring theme of loss, arguably echoing his childhood. He lost his father at age three and his mother at age twelve, left the country village where he grew up, married young but left to fight in the trenches, immediately after happy studies at Oxford. Tolkien wove memory, experiences, and academic knowledge into the tapestry of his invented world. Though the shorthand for Tolkien’s genre might be ‘fantasy’, there’s a lot more going on.

Did you from a young age long to compose your own stories, inspired to follow whoever dreamed up the magical worlds, the knotty problems, and the characters you read about? Was that a portal through which you escaped from the dreary, scary, world of school, or the chaotic world of family? I can definitely say I never dreamed of writing as a child. Instead my formative influence was the strange information percolating down from the numerous adults who surrounded me. Their dining table conversation contained many mysterious words. The earliest I recall was ‘Mau-mau’: I was maybe three or four and ‘Cousin Bob’, from Kenya, was staying. I had no idea who these ‘Mau-mau’ people were, what they were doing, or why. Later, other political figures took over, in particular Colonel Nasser of Egypt being a nuisance to oil tankers in the Suez Canal, and Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, about whom Grandpa, who was half-Greek, ranted at length. All this was a very early introduction, gained by overhearing, to the outside world of political instability, so different from where we lived. We didn’t travel, but there was lively discussion and (in my grandparents’ house) an obsession with the BBC News. While we lived in grey, monotonous Britain under the benign rule of the Queen, there was much to be learnt about human sneakiness, unexplained injustice, and oppression.

This awareness of serious issues has everything to do with genre for me. Although I’d no ambition to become  a writer, I wrote some poetry as a teenager. What I wrote first were protest poems, probably inspired by the pictures and articles about famine in the weekend supplements in the newspaper. Indeed, daringly, I once took part in an open mic gig, at a venue near the Oval cricket ground. A friend and I saw it advertised on the school noticeboard. I read a protest poem which she accompanied on her clarinet.

This was not yet my ‘brand’ though. At and after University there were opportunities to submit items to Christian-based publications, largely by being the rebel among the conventional. Those early memories made me keen to argue against various conservative attitudes, suggesting a third way on the role of women, on nudity in the art-school life classes, on depression viewed without the discrimination against mental illness seen in some church groups. Then, as a mum to three under fives, I volunteered for an organisation which ran a pregnancy testing and counselling service. Between clients, I read my way through its collection of books on fertility, embryonic development, and the reasons for offering women abortions. Opposition to control of reproduction and the new Artificial Reproduction techniques had recently begun. I found an irony both in our work and in public opinion, in the heated opposition between those who have and don’t want, and those who can’t and do want… Though opinion pieces bubbled in my head, I had no time to write, and felt anyway that a non-specialist’s submission was unlikely to be published.

But I did manage to fit in a certificate in Social and Political Science, exploring the mysterious workings of societies, communities, and nations. My earlier university course had been Religious Studies, embodying a hidden urge towards sociology, but now I wanted solid academic knowledge about how the secular world was run.  In this post-colonial age, I was interested in the clash between older traditions, based on a society’s belief system (not only Christianity), and new ideas derived from (chiefly Western) secular philosophers. The rebellion of young people from Asia and Africa educated in European  or American universities formed the basis of many novels I was now reading avidly —- writers like Kamila Shamsie, Khaled Housseini, and Adhaf Sherif. They do not have inhibitions about discussing and using the religious side of their culture as a crucial element of their stories, whereas in the UK coverage of religion is discouraged and there is little serious treatment of the clash of belief with contemporary secular values. Exceptions there are, such as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, where fundamentalism has turned nasty, or Patrick Gales’s A Perfectly Good Man; but no one seems to offer a third way, where both religion and secularism can peacefully coexist, with due respect for both. This was a gap right in my area of thought: how can we hold different views, value all human beings equally,  respectfully give due weight to each other’s viewpoints, while including and upholding truth, integrity, compassion, and acceptance? Is that even possible as an idea? This is where my ‘brand’ found an outlet in writing contemporary fiction.

I wrote my first (published) novel, Baby, Baby, centred on a mystery involving the use or abuse of artificial reproduction, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In it I invite the reader to explore the opposed ideologies in which the main characters were raised.  It’s a serious book, but not without humour. There’s romance, but central to the story are these questions: how do we relate to one another in a pluralist society? We seem on the outside to be the same, but on the inside there are opposing attitudes — and to put a spin on it, we are in love!

The setting is academic life science, the mystery involves a tragedy, the ending isn’t the end of a rainbow… there's a sequel, and I'm writing the third and last in that series, plus I've just published a small book of short stories, (Life in Art and Practice) first written in the 1990s, exploring life, loss,and love back then. 

In a time of tribalism, can this brand exist?