Branding is something I am very familiar with. Time was, before I was a Writing Arts student, I was a web developer/graphic designer, which means part of my job was doing a lot of branding for others. It also meant doing branding for myself, and my personal website for getting freelance work (this no longer exists, so don't go looking).

  When I started getting serious about writing, it seemed natural to apply the same principles to introducing myself as a writer. Everything down to my pen name was carefully chosen, down to the fact that for a time I used “E. J. Lorre” as a pen name due to not wanting to be obviously female. Since I write primarily horror, often being a woman in the genre is seen as a determent, after all. No longer do that, of course, since I happen to like the name Elle, although my choice to never use my last name is also calculated in the same manner. Not only do I choose to avoid it do to previous safety issues, but it's also because my last name (which is literally the ethnic slur for “German”) just doesn't sound marketable. “Lorre,” my pen name-last name, in contrast, a.) sounds better with the name, and b.) happens to be the name of an old actor who got type-cast as a villain/horror actor upon coming to America. It's a fun reference that's a little less obvious than sharing a last name with Vincent Price.

That said, social media is still something I am occasionally wary of—especially if my normal last name is attached. The fact it's listed on my resume on this website, and on the website for this class makes me nervous, even. My LinkedIn account uses my last name, and, honestly, that's probably as far as I'd go because it's an exclusively professional website. But beyond safety concerns, I also think people need to be cautious of spending too much time on social media. You can brand yourself as an author all you want, but until you sit down and write, you're never going to be one, after all.

This is originally posted on my real blog, but since it was inspired by something someone said in class, I'm throwing it here, too:


Sol Stein, who I intensely dislike in most regards related to writing, early in his book Stein on Writing states that he often finds writers write for the wrong reason--the correct reason, he says, is to "provide a reason with an experience that is superior to the experiences the reader encounters in everyday life." It's a concept I'm not sure I fully agree with, but it does speak to something that I think many writers forget when thinking about publication: that the writing cannot exist only for the writer.

Stephen King addresses this when he writes in his own memoir, On Writing, when he says that one must write with the door closed, but rewrite with the door open--that is, when you write you can write for yourself (and, perhaps, your "ideal reader," another King concept), but when you edit you have to consider your overall audience. While it's easy and quite attractive to think that writing (for an audience) is an intrinsic ability and done only for the pleasure of the writer, it really is no different from many other arts in that it is dependent upon its audience to flourish, and that it's the audience's reaction and ability to interpret a piece that makes it lasting, important, and/or popular.

Of course, therein exists a problem with Stein's concept of what the ideal reason to write is. Stein, of course, is primarily interested in writing "literature," something he stresses mostly while degrading the concept of genre (which is one the reasons I dislike the man). In his mind, great writers write because they must, and those that must never feel the need to write about zombies, spaceships, falling in love with a lusty barmaid, or uncovering the mystery of a murder. However, I feel compelled to write as I imagine many of those literature-lovers do, but never do I feel the need to write outside of horror, romance, and other things to entertain. My goal, as a writer, after all, is to entertain--both myself and the reader. It's something Stein would no-doubt frown upon, since I know my romantic retelling of traditional Celtic folktales do not and never will fall upon his views of worthy prose.

The war between genre and literature is something I will never understand, but one thing I do know is that while it's noble to seek out superior experiences for one's readers, it's also noble to simply want to entertain--and if my entertainment (or my superior experience, for that matter) is a story wherein a family is brutally killed in a haunted house, I will never see a problem in that so long as I know I wrote for more than simply myself, and the readers are enjoying themselves--even if some stodgy academic in his ivory tower of literature doesn't think so.

It have always seemed like a precarious situation to me, sharing one's writing with family and friends. As such, I've never done it. Not my parents, nor my best friends--not even my best friend who is also a published writer. In fact, it's a rare day where I even discuss writing with writers, and even while in class I tend to talk more about the business of publishing than I do the art of writing.

I like listening to people talk about writing. I like reading their tips and tricks, and occasionally sharing them on twitter (even if I'm not too fond of twitter anymore). But when it comes to talking about writing I am not confident about my ability to talk about it. I can, easily, talk one's ear off about publishing, however, and I find myself fairly lucky that I happened to pull the discussion leader job on the day we're talking about publishing. Publishing is something that makes sense to me in a way that seems to reflect why, when I was getting my graphic design degree, my favorite classes were math classes--when you spend so much time dealing with imagination, uncertainty, and self-doubt, it's nice to look into something that makes sense. Two plus two always equals four, and limits in calculus always follow the same rules. Publishing is looking at what readers want, at money and market values, and occasionally makes me wonder why I did not pick up a degree in business, which makes me reflect on why I choose to be a Writing Art major. It's a lot of cause and effect (or reflect? Excuse the pun, I just woke up).

Despite not showing friends and family my writing, a few have found it, much like when I was working as an artist I few people I knew stumbled upon my old portfolio. "I can't imagine you not working a job where you're creative," is a sentence I've heard a million times, from the time I was a child until even now, at twenty-four. Even when I was, for a few weeks when starting Rowan, a journalism major I was encouraged to switch to Writing Arts for the sake of creativity--only this time it was by a journalism professor. ("If you've written books why are you in journalism?" "Because it's practical." "Journalism isn't practical.")

Of course, sitting here, writing this, is feeding into my own self-doubt, again, somehow, about publishing and jobs and internships and millions of other things (like my tendency to overuse the word "and" while writing instead of using lists. Who does this? I do this. It's not proper English). And in a lot of ways, I think this self-doubt is uniquely a writer's thing, one in which no matter how many stories published, professors impressed, or family and friends offering encouragement, writers will always have, and no one else will understand. After all, why else, when I'm dead-set on writing, do I sometimes wonder why I didn't listen to my Freshman year calculus teacher when he said I should be a math major? It's that doubt, always that doubt.