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 inv...