[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"]

Developing Your Brand As A Writer

By Jacob Krueger

[/spb_text_block] [divider type="standard" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [blank_spacer height="30px" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"]

I recently had a student ask me a pretty interesting question: “What do you do when you realize that even though you think you’re writing all these different projects, you’re really just writing the same script over and over again?”

And this made me think about a couple of different questions facing writers as they move into their professional careers.

The first is an artistic question: What do you do when you’re following the same cycle again and again and again? What do you do when all your scripts seem to be converging around the same idea or the same themes?

The second is a question about branding: How do you brand yourself as a writer? How do you figure out what box to put yourself in?  How do you figure out whether you should write a script that’s very different from the ones you’ve written before, or whether you should build a brand around scripts that are similar?

So I want to talk about what happens when you realize you are ripping yourself off. When you realize you are writing the same movie again, and again, and again.

There are a couple of possibilities as to why this happens. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad.

Sometimes, there are themes that we just have not finished dealing with, themes that we still have to get out of ourselves. And sometimes those themes actually occupy more than one screenplay worth of writing.

All writing is really just looking inside and wrestling with the stuff that we have going on inside. And, if we're doing it right, we're wrestling with the stuff we don't totally understand yet, or we wouldn't need to wrestle with it in the first place.

Sometimes, when the same stuff comes up again, and again, and again, it's really just a sign that you haven't totally figured it out yet: that there is something still a little broken in there, still a little confusing. Just some old stuff that you're still cycling through and trying to figure out.

There are many, many examples of truly great writers who do this. And not just screenwriters.

Take the great novelist Haruki Murakami. It seems like in nearly every novel he writes, there's a well, and a moon, and a cat, and the cat runs away, and then his girlfriend disappears, and he ends up at the bottom of a well or looking at the moon. This happens again, and again, and again in his novels. There is also moon imagery in everything that he writes. It’s the same symbols, used in different ways.

And as you're reading his novels, the truth of the matter is you don't care at all! Every time you see a cat, you know the cat is going to run away, and his girlfriend is going to leave him. And the reason you don't care, is that Murakami finds a way to push a little deeper on those symbols each time. He's giving you the same symbols, he's wrestling with the same symbols. But never in exactly the same way.

There was obviously a time in Murakami’s life when an animal left him and his girlfriend left him at the same time, or when something that felt like that happened to him. And there is obviously something for him about wells as a symbol of change and coming out a different person than when you went in. These are obviously things that mean something to him. The moon means something to Murakami. And like the moon, sometimes there are just phases that we go through as writers.

Another great example is Darren Aronofsky. Nearly every movie he has ever directed, has ended with some version of a death or a suicide that is also a moment of salvation. Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler,