The Mellen Manifesto

As a writer, I am attempting to write outside of time. Time is restrictive. I want a story to be as valid and relevant tomorrow, ten years from now, thirty years ago, a hundred years ago, as it is today. That is not to say, however, that time is unimportant. The issues that arise within certain “historical moments” are crucial to the way I view the world, and cannot be ignored or written around. But I want to write timelessly.

I am extremely aware of the influences working on me as a writer. I don’t think there’s any way to get outside your influences. Just as the “historical moments” we live within govern our ways of seeing, our influences – those we have read, those that have come before – govern our ways of writing. I’m not talking of simple mimicry here, but a way of synthesizing what has been done before with my own unique human experience.

I am writing my own experience.

As a writer I am writing characters. And I have a responsibility to the characters I write, the characters I create. I have an enormous responsibility to my characters. We all do. They must be complex and real. They need not be smart, but they must be complex and real. If they are not, if they are not individual and unique and complex, then there is no point in the writing of them.

I am concerned with epiphanies and no-epiphanies, in keeping with character.

Sentences are enormously important to me as a writer. In writing a sentence, I look for the rhythm between words, the cadence and movement of the words piling upon themselves and building. Words are a writer’s tools, and the sentences that a writer builds out of those words are his most basic structures. So I am concerned with words and sentences. Rhythm is crucial, but my interest in sentences extends beyond the aesthetic into the ways in which meaning is created.

I am forever – we all are, or should be – looking for new forms, new avenues, new mediums, new methods. How best to capture the experience? What is available to us?

As a writer, I try to make the reader work. I do not like explaining too much. I’m wary of writers that over explain. And so in my own writing I attempt to provide whatever meaning is to be gleaned in realistic and subtle ways. I like for the reader to figure things out for himself. I don’t try to hide things, to cover them up, but I also won’t tell you what to do with a story. Make up your own mind from what’s on the page.

What I am not interested in is “tricks” or “gimmicks.” I am really turned off by little tricks in a story. If a writer can’t earn something fairly and honestly, then I’m not interested. I steer clear of gimmicks in my own writing.

In writing, there are no rules and the rules can be broken.

Above all, I am interested in telling “a good story.” Whatever that means and however you want to take it.