The first question in the exercise is, “Who are you?” and while it’s only three words, the question is a really big one. As I get older, the answer gets clearer, but it’s always evolving.
There’s a great scene in Moana when she has given up on her mission and on herself and her grandmother’s spirit comes to her and says, “Do you know who you are?”
Is this not the greatest pursuit in storytelling? A protagonist discovering her passion, her proclivities, her personality are all part of the gift she is to the world around her.
In this week’s episode of our radio show, Rex Hurst and I are discussing Author Branding. The idea came out of the Jane Friedman book, The Business of Being a Writer, which I’m using as the course text for my fall class at the University of South Carolina’s Honors College: “The Business of Writing.”
I love the exercise: Who are you? How did you get here? What do you care about and why?
Friedman suggests we answer these questions to look for our deeper purpose as writers, to understand why we write and what we have to offer through our work. She says our branding is emergent in our work; if we pay attention, we’ll see patterns and themes that point us toward the gift we are offering.
My bio reads, “At her core is fantasy romance and not quite getting over the nineties,” and “fantasy romance” isn’t a genre, it’s the imagined relationships I bring out of my past and reanimate in my work. I write GenX fiction. My work has echoes of the 90s, a reluctance to forget the decade that shaped me. It’s about freedom and not being constrained by archaic rules. It’s about loss and forgiveness and love.
Of my debut novel After December, Jonathan Haupt said the book, “questions just how far the bonds of platonic and romantic love can be stretched before breaking beyond any hope of mending. The answer is both redemptive and well worth discovering.”
The exercise works for my characters, too. Who is Brian? How did he get here? What does he care about and why? Answering these questions for each of the people populating my imaginary worlds helps me to deliver authentically motivated characters.
Moana sings that she is a girl who loves her island, and a girl who loves the sea. She does not think these things are mutually exclusive. Her dichotomy is what makes her a compelling character and her journey of discovery is the entire premise for the film.
I want to write more of those stories: characters discovering who they are through a journey in pursuit of what they really care about for reasons that are clear to my readers. As I continue to write those GenXer experiences, not-quite-historical and sometimes mid-life-crisis-y, I remain true to my brand: Unapologetically X.
What is your author brand?
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