Actors Who Play Their Parts in the Theater Called Life

Life is a pattern…A series of events which lead up to what a person is to become. Fate if you will. I believe that no matter what decision a writer makes, he somehow does it sequentially. He subconsciously predicts the outcome of his life. A writer creates a story through his own actions only he doesn’t realize that he’s doing so at the time. Therefore, the birth of a novel begins in the physical sense which in turn leads to the mental sense and then to the spiritual sense. Our inspiration for writing a particular story, poem or whatever the case may be derives from what we feel in our hearts. From here the emotional aspect within a written piece is born.

The story must come from the writer himself; therefore, he must look within his own soul in order to create in the outside world. For only then shall he find a voice for the story he wishes to tell. I give you an example. In June of 1994, I submitted my novel to a number of places and got turned down flat. They pointed out the different things that needed work, such as with my incorporation of structure and voice. Without structure, the story runs into dead ends. Through his own thought process, the writer becomes the teacher to his readers. Lack of voice brings about a flat character, because to the audience he doesn’t appear real.

Without a realistic approach to a story the reader feels no relation to the character, due to lack of emotion on the writer’s behalf. By taking care of my revisions, I soon realized that the series of events that transpired in my life happened for a reason. Somehow everything in life is connected. Symbolism exists not only in fiction, but also in reality. Only by taking the philosophical approach can a writer see symbolism that physically exists in life. He must figure out where his life has been, where it’s at right now, and where he’s going in the future to enable him to put it all down on paper. From there he brings symbolism to every story he writes.

Without structure and voice my character appeared flat; therefore, I failed to bring out the true potential of the story. Upon receiving my manuscript back, along with numerous suggestions, I set it aside for about a couple months and then returned to it later. At this time I realized that my novel wasn’t supposed to get published, because the story itself was incomplete. Aside from everything else, a writer must go through a series of failures in his life, a learning process if you will, because life becomes his teacher and his experiences become his classroom. He holds the key to life’s questions, because the answers about life lay within the heart of the writer. As a result, he becomes the tour guide for his readers, taking them on a magical journey. From this point, I conclude that a good writer writes what he knows by turning his experiences into a solid story…an award winning bestseller. In the words of Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts…”