When a writer wishes to tell others what their writing is all about, it can sometimes seem they are a little bit of this, and that, a smidge of something else, and a morsel of something else. That’s not a useful description to be used for ‘Branding’ yourself in regards to your writing.
While it may be true, that you do a little of many things, it isn’t something a potential agent or publisher necessarily wants to hear. They may appreciate having a writer who can speak on many subjects, but they also want someone they can easily bundle up and present to the book buying public.
They want to be able to say something like: “Here is Author X, she writes brilliant thrillers,” for instance. But you might write thrillers, but also some romance, and haiku poetry, as well as some articles about your hang gliding adventures over the Murray River. How will they wrap up that oddly shaped and bulky package?
Perhaps a better way to look at “who you are” as a writer, could be to find a common thread that goes through all of your writing. So, yes you write all of those things, but you perhaps concentrate most, on finding the essence of the community, in all of the places you are writing about.
I suspect that would be my take on this subject, if I were to label my writing. I am focused on understanding how communities fit together, to get things happening. Communities such as where I live, the things I am interested in and the groups I deal with regarding those interests.
I write often about my life circumstances, in my various blogs, and there I find more community related things happening. My chronic illness, interest in dogs, gardening, and the sadder issue of sexual abuse, all of these things have connections with the overarching idea of ‘community’.
And of course the thing that takes up much of my time, is certainly intimately connected to community, and that is being the Editor of the Mallala Crossroad Chronicle. This newsletter is all about the community of Mallala, the biggest town close to where I live. I am writing a novel based on a town very much like Mallala, but with some differences to meet with various plot requirements.
My main character in that novel-to-be, works with council, and is working hard to get the best understanding on this new community she has moved to and is working with. The mythical town of “Talloola” is a community that is taking up much of my thinking, it being the town where that novel on its way is set in. Talloola is a bit like Mallala, a bit not like Mallala, but it is an important community to me, for sure.
So I happily and truly brand myself as “A writer with a strong focus on Community”.
Carolyn Cordon - Creative 