Writer's Manifesto - JDW

Writing is art. It is not a demonstration of how many poems, or essays, or novels, or plays, or epics, or magazines I have read. It is not an attempt to live up to or to surpass previous, usually deceased writers. That is not writing, Writing is free, confident, far-reaching, recondite. Writing is not a competition but a ceremony. It is numinous, transcendent, and ritualistic. There are ideas, then inspiration, a glaringly empty sheet of paper, a first draft, a second, failure, frustration, dark contemplations, breakthroughs, a third...and then there it is. It is not an exercise in elaborate flourishes or the needlessly ornate. Writing is limitless. Timeless. Genderless. Raceless. And yet all of these things and so much more are what gives what we write character, uniqueness, singularity, passion. Writing is the most personal and intimate means of self expression—this man from this time from this town from this family, saw, experienced, suffered, conquered THIS. It is not just a response, or a means of propaganda. Writers can write anything. ANYTHING. If they can feel it, imagine it, believe, and make it ring true—give it the skeleton, nerves, organs, respiration, and flesh to live and breath on its own, free and independent from its creator, then that is enough. Rules are set over time, upheld by academies, enforced by critics, accepted by other writers, but they are stultifying, myopic, tragic, and malignant. These rules are called conventions, and I explore the multiple meanings of that word and imagine a gathering of worn, austere, draconian governors of the art of writing and marvel at their shortsightedness. Writing is a collective, familial process, where the concepts, styles, motifs, and passions of every writer and everything that influenced their writing are refined into a solitary, cohesive piece of art that is both reflective and reflexive. I will not re-write what has been done—although I can write about an experience that has others have written about if I infuse it with the intense, naked truth of my own pulsating lifeblood. I will explore every individual and disparate thread of the human experience when I encounter it and when it fuels and inspires the pen of my mind. I will not write for critics but I will write for writers; and for children, whether or not they are ready or able to read it what I write will be waiting for them; it will be for them, because writing is always about the future. The past is merely a way of understanding and venerating what has occurred with the intent of enriching the present and the future. A writer should always be the ghost or the god lurking behind the letters. This is art. An assemblage of the rawest, most potent and frightening emotions into a structure that allows the poetry, the beauty, and the most unadulterated truth to coalesce into a new life that we can all experience, in that state of being that is the wondrous and isolated domain of the writer.