Tagline, I'm It

The perfect tagline for a counterculture skate shop in France

Who are you?  If you had to make up a T-shirt that you wore every day to advertise your identity to everyone, what would it say besides your name?  In other words, when people think of you they would go, “Oh yeah, isn’t she the one who X?”

Richard M. Nixon was known by “Tricky Dicky.”  Taco Bell tells us to “Think Outside The Bun.”  Or there’s the guy who wears a nametag every day (even has it tattooed on his chest) -- “Hello, my name is Scott” -- and thinks we all should wear one, too.  What kind of label would you put on yourself?  What would your brand be?

Right now I’m trying to brand myself and I just can’t figure out how to sum me up in so few words.  For those who aren’t steeped in the parlance of the contemporary writer’s life, not only do we have to try to write words that might end up on some bestsellers list, we have to figure out how we’re going to market ourselves.  We have to create an “online presence” (Hello?  Friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, subscribe to the blog, and the like).

Writers need to come up with a pithy slogan that defines who we are and what we do.  I had thought I’d try something snappy like “Stephen King, mega-bestselling author,” or “Beyoncé, the most beautiful woman in the world,” but those seemed to be taken already. 

I need to come up with a “tagline” – a phrase that says something essential about who I am, what makes me special, and why the world should care.  It clues you in to my audience.  It should raise interest in me or make someone say, “Hey, that sounds like me, too!”  It’s the end of my 30-second elevator pitch.

But I’m stumped because I started writing before I started reading the billion blog sites telling me I needed a tagline.  Instead of targeting a specific topic or audience, my writing is a bit all over the place – travel, family, books, gardening, mid-life.  I’m not yet an expert selling one special set of skills to a market.  My interests range from rhetoric (yeah, I studied Greek and Aristotle for years), to country music, to American art pottery, and France, and, oh, and writing and taking pictures.  For the record, I wasn’t good at choosing a college major either.  At midlife I’m at the point of reinvention, so I’m still changing.  One suggestion offered to me was “Tomorrow it might be different.”  At the top of my blog, you’ll see the line “Traveling through the world, the second half of my life, and my own mind.”  Does that really cover all the bases?  Is it as catchy as the nametag guy?

Socrates was very forward thinking when he told us “The unexamined life was not worth living.”  He totally was predicting the internet and modern marketing when even the most lowly of us need a short bio we can spurt out at the drop of a hat and a flexible tagline that we can eventually stamp on coffee mugs and websites and spread like the “wave” at a baseball game.  So I’ve been sitting here trying to remember every detail of my life and all my credentials all the way back to grade school to figure out what to emphasize, what I’m selling (not in that crass “here’s my Etsy site” way).

Maybe I just need to become a writer of historical vampire romance novels.  I could have a killer tagline like “Julie Farrar – Are you ready to take a bite out of life?”  That certainly would give me a laser focus.

When I was a university professor it was so easy to say to people, “I’m an associate professor and director of freshman composition programs.  I do research in theories of argumentation and how we reason together about values in public discourse.”  However, life isn’t so clearly defined anymore.

Even if I didn’t have to do this in connection to my writing life, it’s a fabulous exercise.  Like the many life-improvement gurus who tell you to develop a personal mission statement, this bio and tagline exercise encourages me to make a choice where to channel my energy and attention.  There’s not enough time in a day to follow every random interest that catches my eye. I’m pulling my hair out in the process, but I like the idea of bringing more discipline to my practice and to my day instead of constantly going, “Ooo, squirrel!”

So as I move forward with this writing thing I’m asking myself:  Who am I?  What do I do?  What’s it to you, the reader?

My assignment:  I have to write a 200-word biography for my blog I can spit out in those awkward moments when someone asks, “What do you do/write?”  Then I have to tag myself.

I’m open for suggestions.  Feel free to tell me, based on your limited knowledge from reading my posts over time, what details or characteristics you think I should include in my bio.  How would you tag me (and remember that the Beyoncé one, unfortunately, is taken)?  Who do you think I am? With that done, I’ll be so ready to start promoting when the book I haven’t written yet appears on the bestseller lists and NPR and Charlie Rose call me for interviews.

And if you yourself solved your own tagline problem, please tell me how you worked it out.

If you have any ideas that I could throw into the mix I’d appreciate them all.  Even if you don’t, share in the comments box your short bio and what you think would be your own fantastic tagline that you could stamp on a coffee mug or website if the need arose.  I want to know who you are.

My favorite boulangerie in Dijon has a good tagline: The taste of tradition

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I’m so far behind on telling you about great stuff I read on the internet.  I’ll keep it short and sweet this time:

Nadine Galinsky Feldman always has posts to make you think.  This week she told us all to “woman up. “Can you feel it?” she says.  “It feels as though there is a new wave of feminism rising.”  Read about what it means to “woman up” here.

On Brevity's Non-Fiction Blog Dinty Moore continues to protect the border in the skirmish between Fiction-Land and NonFiction-Land.  “To knowingly invent, in my view,” he argues, “is to cross that line entirely, and suddenly you are standing in Fiction-Land, even if only a few feet in.”  His argument could hold for crossing other kinds of borders in life.  Go here to read and think about it.

Author Samuel Park tells writers to take care of their emotional health on Anne R. Allen’s blog.  His 8 tips are good even for non-writers.  I especially like the one “Use Up Your Brain Cells.”  When we haven’t done the work we should be doing (e.g., writing every day) that allows worry and frustration to slide in.  When you do what you should be doing, “the world feels terrific.”

Happy reading!  Happy writing!