Writer's Manifesto

How do I begin my story and avoid the typical melodramatic clichés and pratfalls? I mean, what's a story without sounding like a Lifetime movie? The tale would be half complete and missing that specific key ingredient in order for it to be finished. I'm honestly not sure that anything bad from my past, or my present, can be fully ignored. In my mind, that's not possible, but I'll try to not allow my story not to be too predictable.

My writing career began when I was twelve years old, and I have lived by the stroke of a pen ever since. If it was not for writing, I would have been swallowed up by the cannibalistic masses, and I would have been powerless to stop them. Even though I was not a teenager, I already lost my faith in humanity. I suffered through the death of one grandfather and the burning of a sacrificial lamb, better known to some as my innocence. After that, I was never the same.

I became a virtual zombie and went through the motions of life. I pretended to be happy to please my parents and as an attempt to make friends, which lead to the destruction of my innocence. I was such a miserable child that I allowed myself to be conned by a real trickster of a girl. She was nice on the outside and did not show her true venomous colors until she already had her claws in you. Once she had you, you might as well have signed your life away to her in blood. That heinous witch twisted and turned me inside out to find what was wrong with me, but I could never find anything. She was the one with the problems, and it took me two years to realize it. When I finally did, she was out my life forever, but not before she took a few embarrassing mementos that she broadcasted all over school. Thanks to that psycho, I lost everything and all of my shiny new friends. She did not take everything though. She inspired me to write a letter to her that expressed my anger about how she treated me. I never sent it, but I felt better afterwards. After that, story ideas came pouring into my once clogged brain.

It made sense to become a writer with my introverted nature, because the best way to express myself only worked on paper. The right words never came to me verbally unless I had a pen and paper in my hands. For me, writing was about the opportunity to tell a story in any style. Through the years, I worked hard to avoid the naivety of my age that hindered me when I first started out. I ignored subjects I did not know: love, marriage, popularity, and wealth. I was also scared to use profanity, because I did not want to get into trouble with my parents. As I got older, my inhibitions disappeared with the single stroke of an eraser. Risk was always my favorite game, even when the results were not successful. The biggest casualty in those games were the stories that had weak ideas based primarily on a lack of time to flesh them out further. Developing a main character was never important if a deadline loomed near, or if the ending had to be rushed for the assignment to be turned in on time.

Due to a vast exploration period in college, I allowed myself to explore other worlds through my writing, even if it scared me to death. Those experiments led me to explore some painful moments in my youth, and as a result forced me to face them. The directness of the subject matter, such as my mother's breast cancer, had to be toned down based on an adverse reaction from my peers. The story about a daughter learning to cope with the possibility her mother could die hit too close to home for some, which forced me to scale back the story in excessive fictional subterfuge. This experience made me realize that the truth hurts too much and needs to be disguised in flashy wrapping paper in order to be told properly.

The right amount of confidence would make a story go farther than ever imagined. A cocky personality made me overlook the fact that success would never be mine if my attitude was dreadful. The forgettable first compositions, numerous revisions, and thousands of rejection letters brought me back to earth. With those harsh lessons, I focused on journalism and the need to criticize the work of others. Being a critic helped me focus on my weaknesses as a writer and I developed ways to fix them.

Unfortunately, I don't think my writing will be able to reach the same level of excitement it did when I wrote my first play. It was a challenge of youthful boredom that turned into an epic family betrayal and survival. I liked the opportunity to jot my thoughts down and how they became fleshed out on the hundreds of Five Star notebook pages. Simplicity was never my strong suit. My tendency to make stories complicated forced me to abandon some later projects due to lack of patience and writer's block. This play was the only one I returned to multiple times. Since I started writing it, the play had gone through four severe revisions in story and character development. Names were changed and several supporting characters had gotten erased from the story to focus more on the central players.

My education as a writer allowed me to develop somewhat of a malleable shell around my ego. The anxiety of the one page letter and its gentle professional letdown had always been a sore subject. After years of struggle, I managed to become my own personal filtration system by picking and choosing my greatest hits and ignoring the duds. I created detailed outlines for my ideas, and if they cannot go beyond the first step they get thrown in the trash. If a story cannot work, forget about it and move on to something workable. You cannot manipulate fool's gold into infinite riches, unless you have the time and the patience. Sadly, I don't have either. Case closed. I'm not getting any younger, no matter how much I want to feel like a new writer. My days as an overeager twelve year old ended long ago. Time to finally act my age, not my shoe size. Reality was never as glamorous as I thought it would be. Time to change that. I feel a story coming on right now. Anyone got a pen?