Branding

As I tried to establish myself as a writer in the early 2010s, one of the traps that I fell into was that of branding. Unfortunately, it exacerbated some OCD tendencies I have.

While I do not have OCD (a fact which I have to remind my partner of every time she jokingly nudges something askew), I do have some tendencies, such as a sometimes stifling adherence to order and rules. Most of the time, these are rules that I’ve made for myself that, taken to extreme, cease to make sense and, rather than calm me, serve as a source of anxiety and inaction.

One example is my usual bike route, 15 miles which takes me about an hour to ride. If I don’t have an hour to dedicate to being on my bike, I feel like I don’t have time to ride my bike at all. But that’s just silly and I know that. Some of my favorite rides have been shorter rides when I have prioritized just getting out on my bike rather than some arbitrary rule.

The same thing happened to me after I’d published Clean Freak and was considering what I wanted to work on next. I had made a conscious decision that I wanted to be a horror writer after reading Thinner by Stephen King, but my first attempt at a novel when I was a teenager was a fantasy story inspired by my love of the Dragonlance stories and “Magic: the Gathering.” My second attempt was a cyberpunk story inspired by the movie Hackers and the game “Netrunner.” Though I was transitioning styles to become a fiction writer, I’d written more lyrical poetry than anything else, most of it dealing with my depression or anger in response to social injustices.

But I had published a horror story and was starting a blog and the common advice to build your brand was to focus on that brand and exclude all else. I wasn’t able to reconcile this with what I wanted to do and write. The story ideas I had after publishing Clean Freak seemed to skew more dark fantasy than horror. This didn’t feel “on brand” to me, so I rejected the ideas and tried to force myself into the box of coming up with a horror idea. Unfortunately, nothing came to me. Cue the depression and self-criticism.

Even after deciding to relaunch in 2023, I worried about the “brand” I was building here. I’d written a couple posts about cycling, which I decided to leave up for the same reason I’ve left up the old posts from my first go ’round: they represented where I was at the time and were part of my journey. I came up with a schedule of topics for myself to try to make it easier, including writing about writing. What I mostly wrote about was depression. But I was depressed about writing, so I guess it counts.

All of this is to say that branding can have a role to play in an artist’s life and career. It’s why some writers have different pseudonyms for the different genres they write in. But for me, branding has only ever seemed to get in my way of just writing stories that I find meaningful about characters that I find interesting.

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Have you ever had a story idea that you decided not to write because it was outside your preferred genre?